After Misogyny

February 20, 2023
In this intriguing scholarly treatise, Fordham University law professor Suk (We the Women) documents how the law protects men’s “overentitlement” and “overempowerment” and examines efforts to correct the problem through constitutional reform. In the book’s most engrossing chapters, she revisits the legal strategies of the late-19th-century temperance movement, showing how the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol in the U.S. “reduced the power of men in relation to women in the home by abolishing spaces of toxic masculinity like the saloon and by reducing the political power of the corporate liquor industry.” Suk also surveys feminist constitutional movements in other parts of the world, including Iceland’s 2008–9 “Pots and Pans Revolution,” which blamed the country’s financial collapse on a “masculine ‘Viking’ mindset” that promoted “risk-taking economic behavior.” Explaining how the Equal Rights Amendment got stalled by an arbitrary deadline imposed by its opponents, Suk outlines potential reforms (citizens’ assemblies, an advisory council) to make the constitutional amendment process in the U.S. easier. Though dense with obscure legal cases, this is a well-informed and actionable diagnosis of one of society’s most persistent ills.