Perm do both -- Feminists need to obtain justice by involving the states and plights cannot be changed without legal action Neacsu 8 Dana holds three jobs: one is full-time, Head of Public Services at Columbia Law School Library, and two are seasonal: Adjunct Professor at Barnard College, and Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. (“ARTICLE: THE RED BOOKLET ON FEMINIST EQUALITY. INSTEAD OF A MANIFESTO”., 30 Women's Rights L. Rep. 106, Fall 2008, NexisUni via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 7/13/24)//LFS – LMH

I believe that legal feminism can become more than a middle-class theory if it becomes a feminist critique of equality. Few women live alone. Most are integral parts of societies and societies are more intertwined every day. Legal feminism needs to address the fact that women's plights cannot be substantively changed for better unless the societies around them are better places to live. It needs to become a feminist critique of equality. Equality for women cannot be obtained without raising the issue of substantive equality for all and without involving the state as a guarantor of those rights.

This approach is more easily said than done because under the guise of postmodern politics, the role of the state has been systematically under  [*176]  attack and, for many, the rise of the market and eclipse of the state "has become one of the defining conditions of contemporary social change." 347 Postmodernism used language that demanded well-defined social justice. The state was left out and people have begun to expect that the state is unable to secure greater equality and welfare for its citizens, but that the market can take care of their needs.

The idea animating the current framework is by now almost too familiar: the market is the best, if not the only, institution for furthering a host of social goods and objectives. Pundits, 348 analysts, politicians, and even many progressive social reformers intoned that the era of the state, the brief Golden Age, which lasted from the end of the World War II until about the mid-1970s, is now decisively over. Those insiders usually forget to explain to their public that the market itself is an institution created and subsidized by each state through its rule of legal fictions. 349

Such an attitude is only useful if one expects the demise of humankind. Postmodern thinkers seemed bemused at the idea: man will soon be erased; wrote Foucault, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." 350 Perhaps it is an amusing thought, but is this a legacy we want to leave as feminists?