ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Texas Mothers Jailed Five Days in Louisiana over Two Hot Dogs

By Bill Quigley.  Bill teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and can be reached at [email protected]

Two Texas mothers, who police said had no criminal record, spent five days in a notorious Louisiana jail over charges they ate two hot dogs, milkshakes and an icee at a convenience store.  The women were ordered held on $1500 dollar bond each despite the fact they had just voluntarily driven over 400 miles from Dallas to show up in court to contest the charges against them.

On January 15, 2016, Ms. Walnetta Reid and Ms. Tristan Ellis, mothers from Dallas, were stopped by a police officer in New Iberia, Louisiana.  The police told the women they had been accused of eating two hot dogs and drinking milkshakes and an icee in a gas station convenience store without paying.  The police officer handcuffed the two women and placed them in the back of the patrol car.  The women told the police officer they had not taken anything from the store.  They pleaded with the officer to look at the store surveillance videotape which would prove their innocence.  They told the officer they did go into the store but only to use the store microwave to heat up some soup they had bought at another store and for which they had a receipt.  The officer ran their names through his computer and found out they had no criminal records.  He released the women with a summons to appear in New Iberia City Court on March 14, 2016.   

Both Ms. Reid and Ms. Ellis are active in volunteer work in Dallas helping young people.  They told a friend who does volunteer work with them, C.J. Bible, they had to return to Louisiana to clear their names.

Ms. Reid and Ms. Ellis drove the 400 miles to appear in New Iberia City Court on Monday March 14, 2016.  They expected their case to go to trial.  They planned to show the court their receipt for the soup and explain to the judge that Ms. Ellis is a vegan and never eats meat of any kind, much less a hot dog.  Though they could not afford an attorney, they expected to be found innocent once the judge looked at the store videotape. 

But when their case came up, they were told there was not going to be a trial.  Court was only for them to plead not guilty or guilty.  They plead not guilty and the court set the trial for May 25.  They thought it was all over for the day until the Prosecutor asked the Judge to set cash bail on them since they had showed up on a summons and were from out of state.  Despite that they had voluntarily driven 400 miles one way to appear in court, and they had no criminal record, the judge ordered each women to put up a $1500 bail, plus $240 in court fees. 

They were told to follow a deputy into the back.  The deputy then asked them if they were ready to bail out.  They said could not afford $1740 each for bail.  The deputy asked if some of their family could come and put up the money.  They explained they had no family around and no way to raise the money.  Their cash and valuables were taken from them and they were placed in the Iberia Parish jail. 

Iberia Parish Jail is a scary place.   Recently six Iberia Parish deputies pled guilty to federal charges in the beating, choking and sexual intimidation of inmates inside the chapel in the jail, the only room where there is not a camera.  Other videos have surfaced showing a deputy using attack dogs to repeatedly bite an inmate on the ground with the deputy joining in stomping and kicking the prone inmate. 

The women were told that unless the bonded out they would stay until their trial on May 25!

They started calling family and friends in Dallas but no one had $3400 to bond them out. 

As Monday turned into Tuesday, their Dallas friend, C.J. Bible, called several local bond companies but none would write commercial bonds for them since they were from out of state.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Bible started calling the prosecutor’s office to ask if she could do something to release them or reduce their bond so they could return home to their children.  But there was no reduction.

Bible said “These women are beloved in our community.  For years, they have been helping young people out.  Why put loving mothers in jail when they came to court voluntarily?  Especially over some hot dogs!  I am sure they did not take anyone’s hot dogs but even if the court believes they did it, they are still innocent till proven guilty.  They were being punished before their trial and I think it was all because they are poor.”

 Finally, on Friday March 18, Bible started reaching out to TV and newspapers in the area.  Television station KATC talked with Bible and ran a story Friday afternoon titled “Dallas Mothers Jailed for Five Days in Iberia Parish over Icees, Hot Dogs.”

New Iberia attorney Michael Moity saw the women’s story and decided to help out.  He immediately put up his own money to bond the women out of jail and volunteered to defend them for free even without meeting them.   Moity told KATC, “Nobody should spend five days in jail over a misdemeanor just because they're from out of town.”

The women were finally released from Iberia jail late Friday evening and arrived back in Dallas about 4am Saturday.

Ms. Reid said she jail was very hard.  “I was praying and praying because I could not figure out why God put me in this situation.  I finally decided God put me here to help other people and to tell what happened so it doesn’t happen again.”

Without the Good Samaritans C.J. Bible and attorney Michael Moity both women would still be in Iberia Parish Jail awaiting their May 25 trial date.

The prosecutor, when asked if she had any second thoughts about how the way Iberia City Court behaved towards the women, said no.  “There is nothing out of the ordinary in the way these women were treated.”  

Unfortunately that is likely true.  According to The Marshall Project, more than 450,000 people are in jail awaiting trial every day, five out of six of whom are there because they could not make bond.

This despite the fact that US law is clear that people awaiting trial are presumed innocent.  The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits excessive bail.  The US Supreme Court has also made it clear that “liberty is the norm and detention prior to trial is the carefully limited exception” when people are flight risks or a danger to the community.  The American Bar Association says putting people in jail before trial should only be done in the most limited conditions when there has been a hearing showing the person is a flight risk or a danger to the community.   Louisiana bonding practices have already been successfully challenged in federal court.  Lawsuits have been won across the nation against local governments which hold people in jail awaiting trial just because they are poor.

Both women plan to return to New Iberia for their trial and expect to be found innocent of the charges.

What Difference Would It Make If Liberals Controlled the Supreme Court?

With the passing of Justice Scalia, and with the nomination of a centrist judge who probably will not be confirmed, we should ask what difference it would make a newly elected Democratic President appointed a liberal judge creating a liberal majority on the Court. Most recognize that the general trend of decisions by the Court in which Justice Scalia played an important role would be quite different than they are now. That Court undermined health, safety, and environmental regulations and otherwise acted in ways celebrated by the Chamber of Commerce. It overturned the Voting Rights Act, and it upheld state regulations designed to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote. It used the First Amendment to overturn campaign finance regulations and was on the verge of using the same amendment to weaken unions. The Court smothered dissent: upholding bureaucrats who sought to censor the speech of public employees, students, and prisoners. The Court weakened affirmative action programs and upheld attempts to burden the process of securing an abortion. The Court supported gun rights in the home and to some extent outside the home. And it gave stingy interpretations of our Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights.

I would expect a liberal Court to reverse these trends, overruling cases or reading them narrowly. But there is more. It takes four justices to vote to hear a case. Liberal Justices on a conservative Court will not vote to hear a case that would permit the conservatives to create a bad precedent. If the liberals controlled the Court, the agenda of the Court would look very different.

In particular, I would expect the Court once again to confront discrimination against the poor. For example, in the 1973 by a five to four margin, the Court affirmed a system of allocating funds to education based on the wealth of the neighborhood in which the schools were located. The result was that wealthy school districts had more money for education than poor school districts. A liberal Court would decide that education is too important to shortchange poor children just because they live in poor neighborhoods. It would rule, as California once did, that educational resources should be distributed to meet educational needs, regardless of property tax contributions. Indeed, one could expect concerns of this type to extend to police protection, fire protection, even to garbage collection. In addition, the obscene system of fines and penalties imposed upon indigent defendants regarding traffic offenses and petty crimes would be reined in. So too, the Court could be expected to make it more difficult for states to cut people off welfare and more difficult for states to arbitrarily set limits on the number of children in a family the state could support.

This is not to say that the Court would rule that minimum welfare is a general constitutional requirement. But it would take seriously considerations of due process and equality in evaluating systems of regulation that are insensitive to the needs of the poor. This is no small thing. The Republican Party has done little to disguise contempt for the poor. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s record has been far short of satisfactory ever since Bill Clinton “changed welfare as we know it,” to the detriment of the poor.       

Our Supreme Court functions at its best when it stands as a counter majoritarian force preserving democracy and dissent while protecting the vulnerable. We could expect that from a liberal Court and for the first time in more than forty years we have a chance of realizing that promise.

Reading: Toward Enlightenment & Emancipation

Reading a salvage book by one of the Salvage men on the truck of the A.T.S. salvage office. St. Nazaire. c1919. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

 

Yes, I know, that is a rather pretentious title, but I believe it to be true (or at least could be true). Here is a list of the bibliographies available at my Academia page. (If you can’t access any of these let me know and I will send a PDF copy or copies to you.) Some, if not many of these will be occasionally updated. I also have published and unpublished writings on motley topics (and some teaching material) there as well if you are interested.

1. Africana & African American Philosophy
   2. B.R. Ambedkar
   3. American Indian Law
   4. Analogy & Metaphor
   5. Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
   6. The Arab World: Modern & Post-Modern
   7. The Bedouin
   8. Bioethics
   9. Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
   10. The Black Panther Party
   11. After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
   12. On Boxing — Sweet Science & Brutal Agon
   13. Buddhism
   14. Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
   15. Capital Punishment
   16. César Chávez & the United Farm Workers
   17. Christianity
   18. Classical Chinese Worldviews
   19. Comparative Law
   20. Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
   21. Constitutionalism
   22. The Corporatization of Higher Education
   23. Criminal Law
   24. Death & Dying
   25. Democratic Theory
   26. Dreams and Dreaming
   27. Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
   28. Emotions
   29. Ethical Perspectives on Science & Technology
   30. Freudian Psychology
   31. The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
   32. Global Distributive Justice
   33. The Great Depression & The New Deal
   34. Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
   35. Hinduism
   36. Human Rights
   37. Indic (or Indian) Philosophy
   38. International Criminal Law
   39. International Law
   40. Modern Iran
   41. Islamic Studies
   42. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
   43. Judaism
   44. Law and Literature
   45. Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
   46. Marxism
   47. Mass Media
   48. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle)
   49. Nuclear Weapons
   50. Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
   51. Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
   52. Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences
   53. Philosophy & Racism
   54. Punishment and Prison
   55. Science and Religion
   56. Science and Technology
   57. Slavery
   58. Social Security & the Welfare State
   59. The Sullied Science & Political Economy of Hyper-Industrial Agriculture (Or: ‘Toward Agroecology & Food Justice’)
   60. Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences
   61. Terrorism
   62. Torture: moral, legal, and political dimensions
   63. Transitional Justice
   64. Utopian Imagination, Thought & Praxis
   65. The Varna & Caste System in India
   66. Vietnam War
   67. Violent Conflict & the Laws of War
   68. Women as Intellectuals in the European Enlightenment
   69. The World of Work and Labor Law
   70. Zionist Ideologies

 

Human Rights and International Law

 

I think the philosophical enterprise of developing a “moral theory” of human rights is important, one fine example of which (and there are others) is James Griffin’s On Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2008). And our own Michael J. Perry argues, in turn, for a religious ground of the morality of human rights (owing to the fundamental nature of the notion of inherent human dignity), which I do not believe is necessary to a liberal democratic polity’s constitutional commitment to a sound and persuasive conception of human dignity, as well as the corresponding moral theory of human rights. However, I do think it is important, in the spirit if not letter of Rawls’s notion of an “overlapping consensus,” that members of religious traditions be capable of endorsing this constitutionally entrenched notion of human dignity and the theory of human rights with (more or less) arguments generated from within their respective (theistic and non-theistic) worldviews, so Perry’s book is centrally important to that endeavor (if they cannot, that speaks more to the problematic nature of their religious beliefs than it does to the indispensable value of dignity and human rights). Which brings us back to the question of the relative role of a moral theory of human rights: in which case it may be equally true and perhaps more urgent and significant in consequence that, with Allen Buchanan, we “take into account a crucial fact:”

“International human rights law is central to human rights practice. Therefore, any assessment of the moral status of human rights practice must acknowledge the importance of international human rights law in the practice.”

Of course to do this one must first appreciate the skeptical if not “eliminativist” nonsense incarnate in arguments like that of Jack Goldsmith and Richard Posner in which international human rights law is not law but merely moral exhortation or aspiration, or simply a kind of politics. Posner’s recent book is apropos: The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2014). *

And thus our book of the day: Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2013).

* See, for example, Robert Hockett’s critique of such arguments in “Promise against Peril: Of Power, Principle, and Purpose in International Law” as well as his review essay, “The Limits of Their World.”

My bibliography for international law is here. And the compilation for human rights, here.

Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism: A Bibliography

 

 Claudia Jones leading a demonstration in London against the 1962 Immigration Act

As today is International Women’s Day, I thought I would post these two photos of Claudia Jones (née Claudia Vera Cumberbatch: 21 February 1915 - 24 December 1964) in conjunction with notice of my latest bibliography on Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism.

Reverse Robin Hood: Six Billion Dollar Businesses Preying on Poor People

Reverse Robin Hood: Six Billion Dollar Businesses Preying on Poor People

By Bill Quigley.  Bill teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans.

Many see families in poverty and seek to help.  Others see families in poverty and see opportunities for profit. 

Here are six examples of billion dollar industries which are built on separating poor people, especially people of color, from their money, the reverse Robin Hood. 

Check Cashing Businesses

Check cashing businesses.   Cash a $100 check?  At Walmart that will be $3.  At TD bank non-customers pay $5 to cash a check from their bank. 

Nearly 10 million households containing 25 million people do not have any bank account according to the FDIC.  Most because they did not have enough money to keep a minimum balance in their account. 

Check cashing business are part of a $100 billion industry of more than 6,500 check cashing businesses in the US, many which also provide money orders, utility bill payments and the like, according to testimony provided to Congress by the industry.  

Pawn Shops

More than 30 million people use pawn shop lending services for an average loan of $150.  One company, Cash America, has 84 check cashing centers and 859 lending locations in the US, over 260 in Texas alone, extending over $1 billion in pawn loans.  In their 2014 annual report they disclose that 30 percent of people never return to redeem the item they pawned and the sale of those items makes up over half of the company revenues.  The company paid millions in penalties in 2013 for overcharging members of the armed services and filing inaccurate court pleadings in thousands of cases.  The CEO was given $6 million in 2014.

Overdraft Fees

Overdraft fees, when there is not enough money in the checking account or credit card to cover all purchases, is an $11 billion industry for banks, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  A recent New York Times article explains how banks sometimes charge overdraft fees even when the customer has enough money in their accounts to cover the purchase and were forced to pay more than a billion dollars for manipulating the order of purchases to maximize the chances that their customers will have to pay extra fees.

Payday Loans

Payday loans are used by people over 15 million times a year and can lead to deep debt problems and usually involve incredible percentages of up to 391 percent according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Pew Charitable Trusts reported pay day loans are a $7 billion dollar a year industry. The Federal Trade Commission won a $300 million case against two payday lenders who were deceiving borrowers, who, for example, took out a $300 loan thinking it could be repaid for $390 when in fact the lender was charging $975 to pay off the $300 loan.  The US Department of Justice indicted former race car driver Scott Tucker on criminal charges for operating a $2 billion nationwide payday loan operation which routinely charged interest on loans for over 4.5 million people of 400 to 700 % per year.  The nation’s largest pay day loan company, Advance America, charged nearly 140,000 people in North Carolina annual percentage rates exceeding 450 percent until it was stopped by the state. 

Car Title Loans

More than 2 million people use auto title loans every year, paying about $3 billion in fees each year, with typical annual percentage rates of 300 percent, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.   The Center for Responsible Lending estimates there are over 7000 businesses which loan money to people based on holding the title to their cars, usually charging up to 300 percent annual interest, which they advertise as 25 percent per month.  The average borrower gets a loan of $951 and pays off $3,093.

Debt collection. 

Debt collection is a $13 billion dollar a year industry employing more than 140,000 workers in 6,000 companies, according to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Debt collectors make more than 1 billion (yes with a b!) contacts with consumers each year, according to their own industry newsletter.  Twelve million people (5.3 percent of consumers) are at least 30 days behind on their payments, according to the Urban Institute.  Thirty-five percent of all adults with credit files, 77 million people, have debt in collection reported in their files.  Pro Publica reviewed five years of court judgments and found the rate of judgements was twice as high in mostly black neighborhoods as it was in white ones.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has over 74,000 complaints about improper debt collection, its number one complaint, according to a recent report of the Alliance for A Just Society.

These are not just small companies but big names like Citigroup, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, in fact the Alliance for Just Society reported the big companies in debt collections have made nearly $100 million in contributions to federal candidates and parties since 2001 and another $280 million on federal lobbyists. 

Citibank was sued twice by the federal CFPB over falsified documents and providing inaccurate information in debt collections and agreed to settle the case. 

The debt collector with the largest number of complaints, Encore Capital Group, specializes in buying up debts from other creditors and then filing hundreds of thousands of lawsuits was forced to cancel more than 4,500 court judgments against borrowers in New York after it was charged with filing shoddy lawsuits.  

JPMorgan Chase paid over $130 million to settle a case against it brought by attorney generals from 47 states for improperly collecting debts under what is called robo-signing, where legal documents are approved and filed without proper review.  JPMorgan earlier paid $389 million in fines and refunds to credit-card consumers for problems with debt collections.

Conclusion

These businesses target families with incomes below $35,000 and people of color are three times more likely to receive abusive loans than whites.   People with blemished credit are often passed over when seeking jobs.

There is some good news.   Democrats created and passed into law the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which is now beginning to gain some traction in monitoring and regulating these predatory practices.  Bad news is that Republicans like Ted Cruz are trying to kill it and some Democrats are trying to hobble it.  There are also good groups like the Center for Responsible Lending which provide excellent information on the abuses.  But in the meantime making money off poor people remains a booming business.

Nadia Urbinati on J.S. Mill’s pamphlet, The Subjection of Women (1869)

There is an absolutely exquisite and powerfully compelling analysis of J.S. Mill’s political pamphlet, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869) by Nadia Urbinati near the end of her book, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002): 175-189. I happen to have a “new impression” of Mill’s text published in 1909 by Longmans, Green and Co. (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta!) that I bought many years ago for $2.00 (hence the image from a book that was printed three years prior to mine but is otherwise the same). It has an introduction with a detailed outline of the argument not found in the first edition.

In any case, Urbinati describes it as a political work that goes beyond “liberal politics.” She notes that “since the 1980s,” scholars have in several important respects corrected earlier liberal readings, thereby recovering a “radicalized” feminism, although these later interpretations transformed The Subjection of Women into a “moral text that was a target of his contemporaries.” According to Urbinati, however, while it is indeed a “radical text,” this is “not because it translates gender inequality into a moral issue, but rather because it uses political categories to analyze interpersonal relations that are not intrinsically political. The radicalism of Mill’s feminism is normative because it stems from an analysis of human relations as power relations.”

Urbinati reminds us that Mill’s “political-rhetorical text” “was conceived, written, and published as a pamphlet that addressed a specific audience, not a hypothetical humanity, and not even the république des lettres or a neutral or impartial reader.” Moreover, “[a]lthough he was convinced of the urgency of women’s emancipation, [Mill] waited eight years to publish The Subjection of Women because he thought in 1861, when he wrote it, the political and cultural climate was not ready for his ideas about emancipation. [….] Mill was not an academic, nor was his feminism academic: ‘It is necessary on such subject [women’s equality] to be as far as possible invulnerable.’” Urbinati details Mill’s rhetorical “strategies,” the style being “forensic for deliberative purposes.” And while he “set up his adversarial strategy by stating the liberal principles of equality and liberty up front, he did not limit himself to liberal arguments.” Mill displays a mastery of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, invoking liberal principles as self-evident or a priori and widely shared by way of “ground[ing] [his] ‘demonstration of the actual conditions of injustice women suffer, allowing him to challenge his adversaries to justify their biased views publicly and daring them to oppose them with reasoned arguments, rather than ‘preferences’ or dogmatic assumptions. So from the very beginning, Mill presented The Subjection of Women as a text of advocacy.”

Mill’s evidentiary “proofs” were sundry: “psychological, historical, logical, and moral.”

“He vividly described the oppressive character of Victorian marriage laws, and the mental and physical violence women suffered as a consequence of male domination. Drawing on historical examples of women’s excellence, and employing the empirical rule that forbids any evaluation of women’s capabilities until they have been given the chance and instruments to express themselves freely, he refuted the common view of women’s intellectual inferiority. He claimed, finally, that women’s emancipation will lead to moral progress and the general improvement of the whole society, and that such progress is consistent with the institution of representative government which actually assume the existence of and requires independent citizens.”

The rhetorical strategies employed are essential to proper appreciation of the political context and corresponding arguments employed in Mill’s “book,” which have often been insufficiently grasped or ill-understood. Urbinati elaborates:

“It is interesting that the two elements that make The Subjection of Women a rhetorical text—the eclecticism of its arguments and the kind of demonstrations it adduces—have been the main targets of criticism. On the one hand, critics complain that Mill’s book is a ‘mixture’ of different approaches and, as such, a betrayal of theoretical consistency. On the other, they question the evidence he used to justify his claim, that is, the demonstrations he used to capture his audience’s attention and sympathy. Indeed, the most common objection concentrates on the final pages of the second chapter, where Mill tried to assure his Victorian readers that giving women freedom of choice would not necessarily imply destroying the family since, presumably, women would choose to raise children instead of looking for a job.

I believe, though, that it is inappropriate to analyze this argument in terms of its theoretical consistency with the a priori principles of equality and liberty. Clearly, Mill was not trying to build a general theory of justice, but to make a radical principle palatable to an audience that was not radical at all, as the furious reactions to his book show. Like other feminists of his time, he had to be prudent in order to be radical.”

In fine Aristotelian fashion, Mill’s rhetoric is keenly sensitive to “the passions, habits, and tastes of its audience.” Mill had to reassure his readers that the means and ends of the emancipation of women would not tear asunder the social fabric (to stick with the metaphor: it should rather, in time, strengthen its warp and weft). In fairness to Mill,

“to point out that some of Mill’s opinions are weak and moderated is simply to say that, as a political pamphlet, his text is the product of a specific time and place. Nevertheless, its theoretical value does not lie in the kinds of demonstration he uses, but in the core argument of his vindication. It is this argument that makes The Subjection of Women a radical and still powerful text.”

Mill characterizes the institution of marriage in his time and place as one of “despotism,” and thus freedom from subjection and movement toward a society conspicuous for the cooperation of self-dependent citizens (as in the Athenian polis) would not be attained by simply calling upon “arguments for individual free choice,” or invoking the model of “marriage as a contractual relation” [in which case the terms would meet the conditions of an unconscionable adhesion contract*], or merely proposing a “policy of opportunity.” Rather, legal reform would have to be complemented and reinforced by reformation of education, profound changes in social norms and opinions, in the manner and substance of habits and social inculcation generally, and of course in the nature of family life itself. As Urbinati explains, Mill conceived of the ideal marriage alone the lines of a “miniaturized polis,” which implies

“a form of freedom wherein each participates according to competence and character. In the polis, the rule of law allows equal enjoyment of liberty and therefore the expression of individual variety. Whereas despotism generates and requires atomistic homogenous subjects devoid of individuality, the polis is based on individual specificity and voluntary commitment, and fosters civic friendship. Here, equality refers to a condition of reciprocity in power relations, to a plurality of roles and ways to contribute to the common good.”

Finally, it was Mill’s notion of despotism that “allowed [him] to politicize all facets of women’s lives within the family, and gave his feminism a radical twist.” And the lens of radicalism can be said to permit us a vision beyond the social and political geography of liberalism proper (or at least its often dominant libertarian topography):

“The cause of women’s freedom became a cause of freedom for the entire society, just like the cause of the slaves in abolitionist writings and of the working class in Marx’s theory. This represented a decisive break with the normative principle of the directly responsible individual agent that underpins the theory of negative liberty. The marital system, like slavery in America and the capitalist system of production, constituted an objective system of relations that operated independently of the will and the intention of the actors. The husband in Mill’s theory, like the capitalist in Marx’s, was driven, as it were, to act according to the logic of domination. Patriarchal relations shaped and determined his identity just as they did his wife’s. So just as a ‘good’ capitalist could not change the exploitative nature of capitalism, a few ‘good’ and humane husbands couldn’t change the patriarchal nature of marriage. By the same token, a husband’s respect for his wife’s negative freedom could not in itself guarantee her security or recognition as an equal. Mill used the same argument to support women’s enfranchisement.”

* Urbinati proceeds to point out that William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) “castigated the existing marital ‘contract’ as a ‘fraud,’ and the worst of all monopolies, since it institutionalized a relation of slavery,” an argument “anticipated” by the woman he married, Mary Wollstonecraft. It was this English writer, philosopher, and pioneering feminist who “made equality a prerequisite for the dignity of man as well as women: the subjection of women precludes men themselves from achieving recognition as the bearers of the highest human qualities, such as virtue and intelligence.”