Dinner explores legal history and feminist vision of sex equality in the workplace
Litigation and legislative reforms have achieved formal rights to equal treatment for women in employment. But women continue to perform disproportionate amounts of caregiving in the home, to suffer economic penalties for childbearing and to face discrimination on account of motherhood in the workplace. “The disconnect between formal equality and the deepening work-family conflict is no accident,” says Deborah Dinner, JD, legal historian and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
40 years later, most Americans focus on MLK’s ‘dream,’ not the reality
Forty years ago this month, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.Most Americans are familiar with the “I have a dream” passage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous public address. But most have forgotten his admonishments, his criticism of America and the pressures he brought to bear through his message delivered on that sweltering August day 40 years ago, says a civil rights historian at Washington University in St. Louis. “Too often, that part of his speech is ignored, subsumed to the tranquil tones of ‘I have a dream …,'” says Leslie Brown, Ph.D., assistant professor of history and of African and Afro-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences. For that reason, Brown says, four decades after the March on Washington and King’s renowned “I Have a Dream” speech, that dream is still not realized.