{"product_id":"gender-equality-in-law-uncovering-the-legacies-of-czech-state-socialism-9781509933037","title":"Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGender equality law in Czechia, as in other parts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, is facing serious challenges. When obliged to adopt, interpret and apply anti-discrimination law as a condition of membership of the EU, Czech legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of key ideas underpinning it. This important new study explores this scepticism to gender equality law, examining it with reference to legal and socio-legal developments that started in the state-socialist past and that remain relevant today.    The book examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in equality and anti-discrimination law. But it goes further, shedding light on the underlying understandings of key concepts such as women, gender, equality, discrimination and rights. In so doing, it shows the fundamental intellectual and conceptual difficulties faced by gender equality law in Czechia. These include an essentialist understanding of differences between men and women, a notion that equality and anti-discrimination law is incompatible with freedom, and a perception that existing laws are objective and neutral, while any new gender-progressive regulation of social relations is an unacceptable interference with the ‘natural social order’. Timely and provocative, this book will be required reading for all scholars of equality and gender and the law.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is the first book since 1989 to apply a feminist and critical studies methodology to the legal system of a CEE country. It is therefore indispensable to any scholar writing about gender and equality in CEE and a must–read for anyone with an interest in understanding the CEE legal culture(s) and societies. -- Elena Brodeala * European Journal of Legal Studies *\u003cbr\u003eThis book is an excellent work of feminist legal genealogy, bringing a useful contribution towards our understanding of the relationship of equality, gender and the law, as well as discrimination and rights. It also shows the limited impact of anti-discrimination law if it is not underpinned by general social acceptance of the need for gender equality in all spheres, something that the current #MeToo campaign has made relevant also in the West. -- Jana Nahodilová * BASEES Newsletter *\u003cbr\u003eWhat Havelková sets in train ... is a thorough engagement with feminist legal materials to trouble conventional accounts of EU implementation in recent accession states. Her book is methodologically distinctive, offering a fluid blend of archival analysis, doctrinal excavation (both domestic and EU), and socio-political theory. Her resulting contribution to scholarly literature through this monograph is undoubtedly fascinating and remarkably broad. -- Lydia Hayes, Cardiff University * Journal of Law and Society *\u003cbr\u003eSince the fall of the Berlin wall there has been a surprising  dearth of  high quality of scholarship on legal culture in the communist  successor  states of East Central Europe. In this excellent book  Barbara Havelkova  engages with the reversal of many of the advances the  socialist period  made in gender relations, examining the historical  roots of the current  failure of Czech law to engage with the  discriminatory practices that  have negatively affected the lives of  women. She does this by a forensic  excavation of law, discourses and  practices of the socialist era  revealing the patriarchal assumptions  underpinning them that became  deeply embedded in Czech legal culture,  and that have been carried  forward to the present day. The book is a  compelling read. It provides  answers to many of the questions that have  perplexed feminists about the  post-soviet transition and at the same  time speaks more generally to  the debates surrounding the troubling  rightward shift in the politics of  the communist successor states of  Europe. -- Professor Judith Pallot, President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eGender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism\u003c\/i\u003e,  Barbara Havelková offers a sober and sophisticated socio-legal account  of gender equality law in Czechia. Tracing gender equality norms from  their origins under state socialism, Havelková shows how the dominant  understanding of the differences between women and men as natural and  innate combined with a post-socialist understanding of rights as freedom  to shape the views of key Czech legal actors and to thwart the  transformative potential of EU sex discrimination law. Havelková’s  compelling feminist legal genealogy of gender equality in Czechia  illuminates the path dependency of gender norms and the antipathy to  substantive gender equality that is common among the formerly  state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Her deft  analysis of the relationship between gender and legal norms is  especially relevant today as the legitimacy of gender equality laws is  increasingly precarious -- Professor Judy Fudge, Kent Law School\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e1. Introduction \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart I: State Socialism\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e2. The Three Stages of Regulation of Women and Gender \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e3. State-Socialist Law and Rights \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e4. Equality as Socio-Economic Levelling \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e5. Blindness to Gender and Patriarchy \u003c\/b\u003e   \u003cb\u003ePart II: Post-Socialism\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e6. Women and Gender After 1989 \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e7. Post-Socialist Law and Rights \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e8. Equality and Anti-Discrimination after 1989: Resisting the Ideas and the Legal Concepts \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e9. Wanted: Gender and Feminism \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e10. Conclusions \u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Publishing PLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51019976769879,"sku":"9781509933037","price":39.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781509933037.jpg?v=1750781942","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/gender-equality-in-law-uncovering-the-legacies-of-czech-state-socialism-9781509933037","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}