[In the following review, Hart compliments Feminism Unmodified as a “tightly-argued, consistent and provoking work of social theory.”]

MacKinnon is a feminist lawyer, first known (and widely applauded) for her role in winning recognition by American courts of sexual harassment as a legal claim. That principle was detailed and derived from her version of feminism in her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, published by Yale in 1979. Since then she has been known, or perhaps notorious, above all for her collaboration with Andrea Dworkin to find a new legal route to the banning of pornography.

The present volume [Feminism Unmodified] is a collection of academic lectures and public speeches in which MacKinnon updates earlier causes, reports upon and justifies her recent activities and spells out the philosophy which inspires her. Topics include the Equal Rights Amendments, the law on rape and abortion and the rights of Native American women, as well as an analysis of judgements on sexual harassment and a separate section of six speeches on pornography. In that section, MacKinnon makes her case that pornography is a form of action against women and hence a violation of their civil rights, not a form of speech protected under the First Amendment as the currently dominant “obscenity approach” has it. To date, however, her argument has failed to convince a great many liberals, who find reasons for tolerating pornography—or fear censorship as a greater evil—and the Supreme Court, which summarily struck down the Indianapolis ordinance embodying the MacKinnon principle. This book demonstrates why this is such a fraught debate for feminists and civil libertarians. It is easy to see how MacKinnon herself has attracted much personal hostility: her denunciation of liberal feminists, whose opposition she believes betrays the interests of women, is angry and uninhibited. But it is not easy, whatever, one's persuasion, lightly to reject her positions on pornography and other issues of sexual politics discussed in this book. Her legal and legislative strategies are deduced from a complex, important analysis of gender as a political, rather than social or biological, status (set out most clearly in the essay on “Difference and Dominance”). These collected speeches add up to more than an insulated feminist dialogue. Despite the variety of topics and of styles from the popular to the expert, MacKinnon gives us a tightly-argued, consistent and provoking work of social theory and of analysis of the role of law in American society.