feminist activism excludes many, especially in the legal sphere – our methods are the only ones that are inclusive towards ALL women

Women find themselves at the top and at the bottom of the social ladder. Those at the top are as interested in preserving the status quo as the men next to them are. 2 Women at the bottom of the social ladder and living in the slums, like Cheryl Green - the fourteen-year-old Los Angeles gang violence victim - and her mother 3 - continue their quest for basic survival. Legal feminism has no long-lasting answers for them, except perhaps to start a lawsuit against some perpetrator, because if legal feminism wants to help gendered subjects with specific gendered wants, quite often it ignores their slums.

Internationally, American legal feminism faces similar problems. Women who live in the Third World, 4 who either migrate to toil in our kitchens, backyards, nurseries, and nursing homes, or die quietly in their homeland, find even fewer answers in this theory. They are even more connected to their families and neighborhoods, and thus their demands are even more complex and more intertwined with those basic ones. 5 Those demands require deconstructing reality and bringing out the essence of poverty to find long-lasting solutions. So far, American legal feminism has been successful when it offers incremental answers to most non-economic middle-class problems. When it offers economic and social solutions (to employment, motherhood, etc.) it has opened itself to questions about the solutions current feminism seeks. The lack of solutions threatens the fabric of our meek social support of have-nots. 6 Can we decide who is more deserving? Shall we decide between men and women equally in distress? The time for new answers has come.