It is by now de riguer in feminist theory circles to repudiate what is called dichotomous reasoning. But I must begin with a stark dichotomy, for these two volumes [Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England] differ as the night to the day. Where Shanley's is an exercise in meticulous scholarship, moderation, and an openness to dialogue, MacKinnon's is a torrent of proclamatory certainties.

Shanley moves in on concrete problems, seeking to unravel the complexities of changing laws governing divorce, married women's property, infanticide, protective labor legislation, child custody, wife-abuse, marital rape, and the like. MacKinnon casts her project in far more grandiose terms. Rich and complex bodies of feminist theorizing, which caution against assuming an abstract and universal point of departure, are of little interest to her. She routinely deploys, but never unpacks, such terms as idealist, materialist, justice, and equality. Each of these complex categories means precisely what MacKinnon declares it to mean, no more and no less.

In MacKinnon's world, men are oppressors and women are victims. Her treatment of the history of political thought, the philosophy of political inquiry, including Marxism and feminism, is terribly polemical. Her fixations are so obsessive the reader begins to feel bludgeoned. Her standards of evidence are dubious. She cites works that have been tellingly criticized as if they constituted, unproblematically, the fact of the matter and a secondary critical literature did not exist. She seems unfamiliar with much of the by now vast women's studies literature in cultural anthropology, social history, and philosophy.

MacKinnon's problems begin at the very beginning with her preface. She assumes the feminist approach, her own, and a Marxist methodology. Similarly, she writes of “power as such” but it is unclear what this is supposed to mean. At best this is an essentialist claim, odd for a theorist who purports to be exposing the depredations of “idealism.” MacKinnon poses questions in a way designed to provide a delimited, cut-and-dried set of responses. Although the text is peppered with references to “materialism” (p. 13) and to “many attempts at unified theory” (p. 11), we are not let in on what attempts she has in mind, or on what constitutes a compelling explanatory theory by contrast to a weaker effort.

MacKinnon assumes that Marxist theory and liberal theory are “unified” theories and that, in the ways that are most important for looking at gender, “Engels and liberal theory are indistinguishable” (p. 20). It takes a good bit of sleight-of-hand to pull this one off. But the argument is pushed through analogy by fiat; for example, “Engels' analysis … precisely tracks liberal theory” (p. 28) and “Engels presupposes … as liberal theorists do” (p. 35). Given the mountains of work devoted to comparing and contrasting Marxism and liberalism, surely one must be a bit more modest in casting absolutist claims about either theory. But care in such matters is conspicuous by its absence in MacKinnon's work.

To be feminist, she claims, one must accept that all women everywhere have been victims of a continuing tradition of injustice. But it is difficult to evaluate this claim, having been offered no serious discussion of either justice or equality, two of the most essentially contested concepts in political discourse. MacKinnon would forge feminism into a single collectivity, itself synonymous with the entire class or category “woman.” Although she acknowledges, at points, that there is no single feminist perspective, much of her discussion makes sense only if the reader recognizes that MacKinnon consistently equates her feminism with feminism tout court. Typical locutions are: “Feminists charge” or “feminists argue” (p. 5) or “in the feminist view” (p. 10) or “feminism sees,” “feminists believe,” and “feminism's search” (p. 38). She insists that feminism places a priority on women's point of view, but she ignores other women's points of view if they fail to jibe with her own. For example, in her preface, MacKinnon construes disagreement with her arguments only, and necessarily, as distortion on the part of the reader: “As the work progressed, publication of earlier versions of parts of this book … gave me the benefit of the misunderstandings, distortions, and misreadings of a wide readership” (p. xi). Despite occasional caveats to the contrary, apparently no reader has ever understood, or read accurately, unless she concurs with MacKinnon one hundred percent. Men, too, are regularly reduced to a unified standpoint: “The perspective from the male standpoint,” “the male perspective,” “thus the perspective from the male standpoint” (p. 114). Surely this will not do. The male perspective of an Adolf Hitler and a Mahatma Gandhi are scarcely identical. (MacKinnon also gets certain thinkers, Michel Foucault in particular, entirely wrong. She turns Foucault into a kind of quasi-Marxist, even though he problematizes all the categories Marx assumes as law-like. Foucault is in vogue, so MacKinnon clearly wants to draw him to her side even if it means doing violence to his work.)

MacKinnon also thrashes positivism, but she seems to have little depth understanding of what is at stake for her own discussion is riddled with many of the features of a particularly dogmatic positivism: stipulative definitions, proclamations of causal propositions, the use of limited empirical evidence to substantiate strong normative claims. The simplicities of MacKinnon's discourse are further evident in her discussion of sexual violence and pornography. Any and all defenders of the liberal state come in for a bashing as apologists hiding behind such niceties as the First Amendment. Those who distinguish the rule of law from force are especially visible in her rogue's gallery. She makes no distinction between being forced to comply at gunpoint in a dark alley and confronting ambiguous evidentiary rules. The law, too, is violence against women. For MacKinnon, “women are raped by guns, age, white supremacy, the state—only derivatively by the penis” (p. 173). This would be interesting news to rape victims. But MacKinnon is not concerned with the specific victims of specific assaults. For her, rape is both metaphor and metonymy, it is both typical and prototypical, and concerns with evidentiary rules and protection are little more than acquiescence to a rape culture.

Shanley, by contrast, is a scholar who takes great pains to be thorough and to eschew claims that cannot be sustained by the evidence at hand. She gives credit where credit is due, specifically to “the Victorian feminists,” who “took it as their task to expose the falsity of the idealization of marriage and to show how oppressive marriage and family life could be for women. This was no small undertaking; in order to modify popular views of marriage and liberal theory's distinction between the private world of family life and the public world of politics feminists had to gain acceptance for their contention family was the locus of male power sustained by the judicial authority of the state” (p. 4). In her discussion, Shanley examines “both the theory that motivated these remarkable feminists and the practical successes and failures of their efforts to translate the ideal of spousal equality into law” (p. 4).

Using the Victorian feminist condemnation “of their society's sentimentalization of patriarchal power in the family” as her beginning point, Shanley examines both their hopes for “a new egalitarian marriage” (p. 20) as well as the tension that their efforts exposed in a liberal society. Shanley demonstrates just how complex is a relationship between contractarian liberalism and those sets of social traditions and customs that do not readily lend themselves to contractual construals.

A great strength of this work is the concreteness, specificity, and historic acuity Shanley brings to bear, whether she is examining the Divorce Act of 1857, the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, or the Infant Custody Act of 1886. Shanley insists that “principles of justice must govern relations in the family as well as in the public realm” (p. 195) and this claim is far more problematic than she allows. But by permitting us to enter the worlds of those who operated from such a stance, she enriches our understanding of both the past and the present. Her book can be read profitably by all students of history and political and legal thought. It provides much grist for the mill. Shanley invites her readers into a debate and a dialogue with her rather than lining them up either to be dismissed, coerced, or turned into troops mobilized for some all encompassing struggle.