Book Review

Sex, Power and Justice aims to explore "the meanings law and legal changes have for women" (p. xix). The contributors to this collection of essays provide a historical perspective on Australian law, lawmaking, and legal practice that is shaped by feminist theory and a concern to place "colonialism at the heart of the study of law in Australian history (p. xvii)." The essays are grouped in four thematic sections: Sexuality; Punishment; Family; and Citizenship and the State. They deal with topics ranging from prostitution, rape, the treatment of nineteenth-century convict women, the definition of childhood, divorce, and family property, to Aboriginal families and the law, White Australia immigration and welfare policies, and state education and labor policies, and cover periods from the earliest convict settlements to the present day.	1
The collection is most successful in the broad terms Diane Kirkby's introduction employs to frame it: taken together, the essays offer a compelling picture of the way that the law and legal practices produce gender, race, and class differences, portraits that frequently demonstrate how the concerns and experiences of colonialism gave a particular shape to the law and its role in the production of difference and effectively demythologize the law's origins and development. Sex, Power and Justice is a valuable general map of the terrain; it succeeds in fulfilling its editor's and publisher's intention that it be an accessible legal studies text.	2
The essays are insufficiently elaborated and too uneven, however, to entirely satisfy the expectations of legal historians and other academic readers. As "historical" perspectives, the essays are a mix of pieces by historians concerned to excavate specific historical moments and legal and socio-legal scholars concerned with broad historical antecedents of contemporary legal issues; this combination does not always sit easily together. The contributors' "perspective" rarely extends to a discussion of the nature of the various sources on which they relied for their view of the law, obscuring many of their interpretive choices. Finally, the essays are a mix of narrowly focused arguments and attempts at synthetic overviews of specific issues; the latter in particular often fall victim to their brevity—the seventeen chapters are packed into 286 pages—and bury interpretation beneath catalogues of legal change and development.	3
Ruth Ford's "'Lady-friends' and 'Sexual Deviationists': Lesbians and Law in Australia, 1920s-1950s" and Cathy Coleborne's "Legislating Lunacy and the Female Lunatic Body in Nineteenth-Century Victoria," two essays by postgraduate students in the School of History at La Trobe University, are the most interesting of the narrowly focused chapters. Ford imaginatively moves beyond the lack of statutes concerned with lesbianism to explore how legal processes that put women's sexuality on trial worked to subject lesbians to legal scrutiny and punishment. She uses two examples, a divorce case and a case of domestic violence, to show how the law, as practice, shaped the meaning of women's friendships and lesbian desire as "perverse" even as the law formally erased lesbian practices. Coleborne employs a similar critical reading of the law to bring to light the role of an overlooked set of legal actors, the police, in shaping the meaning and medicalization of lunacy.	4
Jill Bavin-Mizzi's "Understandings of Justice: Australian Rape and Carnal Knowledge Cases, 1876-1924" clearly demonstrates that reduced penalties and an increased age of consent did little to alter how jurors and judges perceived rape cases or reduced the frequency with which jurors acquitted men. Judges and jurors continued to see a woman separated from her husband, alone on the street at night, or drinking alcohol as having a bad character and no credibility, to see girls who displayed sexual knowledge as unreliable, and to insist on the relevance of consent even in statutory rape cases. While Bavin-Mizzi successfully exposes the gap between formal law and legal practice, she makes no effort to interrogate the origins and cultural meaning of the new legal categories that frame her analysis, particularly the increased age of consent, and flesh out what was at issue in those statutory changes and jurors' failure to respond to them.	5
Hilary Golder and Diane Kirkby's "Marriage and Divorce Law before the Family Law Act 1975" and Peggy Brock's "Aboriginal Families and the Law in the Era of Assimilation and Segregation, 1890s-1950s" offer effective and compelling overviews. Golder and Kirkby elaborate the way colonial governments' concern to render their populations respectable and stable altered English precedents to produce more religious tolerance in marriage laws and less restrictive divorce laws. They also offer a thoughtful analysis of the comparatively low rate of divorce in twentieth-century Australia that focuses attention on the role of "gatekeepers" in producing Australian "cultures of divorce" (165): judges imposed demanding evidentiary standards on female petitioners and legal aid solicitors discouraged poor women from filing petitions. Brock powerfully illuminates the Australian state's extensive interference in Aboriginal lives, particularly the lives of women and those who fell within the unstable category of "half caste": officials removed children from their families, barred Aboriginals from towns, detained them in reserves or institutions, and restricted their ability to drink alcohol and consort with non-Aboriginals. Provisions allowing individuals to be exempted from these laws required individuals to cut all ties with their extended family and community and frequently failed to free them from government interference. Brock's essay is also frustrating: she relies heavily on rich records and correspondence from the South Australia Public Records Office that are never discussed in the text. Any analyses of subjects' relations with the legal system is weakened by putting to one side the question of how the nature of particular sources shapes the view of the processes, outcomes, and interests they offer.	6
Although many readers will wish that the contributors had been given more space and were encouraged to elaborate their arguments and interpretations further, they will find Sex, Power and Justice a rewarding place to begin an exploration of the Australian women's many faceted relationship with the law.	7
Stephen Robertson American Bar Foundation

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