Feminist theories emerged out of the revolutionary enthusiasm that swept the Western world during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Based on the assumption that all persons have "inalienable or natural" rights upon which governments may not intrude, feminists in Europe and America advocated that equal rights should be extended to women who up to this point were not considered legal beings separate and deserving of these rights. Most African writers and feminists have argued that since most of the theories of feminist jurisprudence have their roots in this Euro-centric context, they cannot be applicable to African women and should therefore be discarded. The thesis acknowledges that to a certain extent their assertions are true. For years feminist jurisprudence has been restricted to an academic engagement with the law failing to take into account the practices and customs of different communities. It has largely been the realm of the middle class bourgeois white female and therefore has been inaccessible to the African woman. The thesis aims, however, to prove that these theories of feminist jurisprudence although Euro-centric have a place in the understanding and advancement of African women's rights in South Africa. In Chapter One the writer traces the history of South African women's rights and the laws that affect African women. Chapter Two presents the emergence of feminist theories and categories of feminism. The writer then seeks to identify the misunderstandings and tensions that exist between the two. The narrow conception of Euro-centric feminism has been that its sole purpose has been the eradication of gender discrimination, however, for African women in South Africa they have had to deal with a multiplicity of oppressions that include but are not restricted to gender, race, economic and social disempowerment. This is dealt with in Chapter Three. It is the opinion of the writer that despite these differences feminism does play a critical role in the advancement of women's rights in South Africa. Taking the South African governments commitment to the advancement of universal rights, the writer is of the opinion that African women can look to the example set by Western feminists, and broaden these theories to suit and be adaptable to the South African context. The answer is not to totally discard feminist theories but to extract commonalities that exist between African and European women, by so doing acknowledging that women's oppression is a global phenomenon. This is the focus of Chapter Four. To avoid making this work a mere academic endeavour, the writer in Chapter Five also aims, through interviews, to include the voices of African women and to indicate areas that still need attention from both the lawmakers and women's rights movements (Feminists). Finally, the writer aims to present a way forward, one that is not merely formal but also substantively attainable.

This thesis questions why young female and aboriginal plaintiffs consistently receive lower damage awards for loss of future earning capacity than young white male plaintiffs. I argue that due to the social construction of law, and specifically tort law, the dividing line between public and private law should be challenged. The effect of tort is partially "public" in nature due to the broad impact tort has on valuing the potential of individual plaintiffs. When damages for female and aboriginal plaintiffs are assessed on a reduced scale due to gender and race, a message is sent that the potential of these plaintiffs, and the potential of the groups to which they belong, is somehow less. Due to the "public" impacts of damages quantification, principles of equality derived from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be considered in the quantification process. I argue further, that the current practice of damages quantification has been the result of the court's over-reliance on "formalist" notions of tort law which has insulated the area from the social context of law. In addition, I suggest that the acceptance by courts of economic evidence, which is often reflective of discriminatory norms in the labour market and our society generally, has had the effect of de-valuing certain members of Canadian society; in particular women and aboriginal plaintiffs. I demonstrate this analysis through an examination of cases dealing with young, catastrophically injured, female and aboriginal plaintiffs. Finally, I suggest that, though an imperfect solution, currently the only equitable method of quantifying damages for loss of future earning capacity is to adopt white male earning tables for all young plaintiffs with no demonstrated earning history. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

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No description available.

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The legal rights of the women of ancient Egypt are discussed in this dissertation. All the different aspects of the legal system were examined in order to conclude whether the ancient Egyptian women indeed had legal rights. An inquiry was therefore conducted into the Egyptian Family Law, the Law of Succession, Property Law, Law of Contract and Criminal Law. The modern classification of the law was used, seeing that no evidence exists to provide us with the ancient Egyptians' classification method. / Ancient Languages and cultures / M.A.

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Rural women‘s land rights in South Africa remain secondary in spite of laws founded on a constitution that promotes gender equality. Patriarchal customary laws prevail and women‘s land rights and use security are inextricably linked to their relationships with their male relatives. Rural women are key producers of agricultural products due to historical and continued male outward migration, which has led to a feminisation of agriculture. Although women farm the land, their land use security is poor and can be further threatened by divorce or widowhood. Given that most vulnerable women are based in rural communal South Africa, how can their land rights be secured under the customary law framework? While the statutory law framework seems to provide a solution, it is less applicable in rural areas where customary law and traditional practices prevail. If statutory law cannot be superimposed on the existing customary law framework, how can women‘s land use be further secured to support their household food security efforts? What kind of framework can be introduced to strengthen women‘s land use security? A study was conducted in rural Limpopo Province to explore this complex and yet important question. A mixed methods approach comprising interview style questionnaires with a mixture of closed and open-ended questions, coupled with focus group discussions and observation was employed. Qualitative data from the focus group discussions and open-ended questions was analysed for common themes using content analysis. Quantitative data was analysed using SPSS to establish descriptive data, frequencies and establish the relationships between variables. Results of the analyses were used for building blocks to develop a land rights framework that is more gender sensitive and secures the rights of the actual land users. Women‘s land rights were largely confirmed to be secondary and land use security was linked to the continued relationship to male relatives through marriage and natural blood lines. From these findings, a gender sensitive framework that enables and improves land-based food security efforts has been proposed. / Thesis (M.Sc.Agric.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis examines the social and legal dynamics of support as it operated around women charged before the criminal courts in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century metropolis. It considers the nature and implications of the support made available to, or withheld from, female defendants by individuals to whom they were in some way connected. To this end, it explores the nuances of testimony offered by witnesses and defendants in an attempt to better understand the extent and effect of the support that could be negotiated by and from a range of groups, including family members, fellow household residents, neighbours and wider community members. How narratives were framed in either sympathetic or condemnatory terms was indicative of broader social attitudes and expectations regarding women and crime as well as of women's own relationships to households and neighbourhood. To the extent that this thesis aims to interrogate negotiations of support, it adopts legal narratives as a window through which to gain an insight into the social interactions and mediation of interpersonal relationships by eighteenth-century London women. The printed accounts of trials conducted at the Old Bailey and legal documents from the London and Middlesex Sessions records form the basis of the source material that contributed towards this study. These records provide contemporary narratives in which participants described their involvement in the legal system and articulated their relationships to events and to each other. As a result, they are invaluable for the wealth of qualitative detail they contain. These legal documents have also been complemented by other contemporary sources including newspaper reports and printed pamphlet literature. ... This thesis concludes first that neighbours and fellow household residents were usually in the strongest position to affect the outcome of criminal cases, either by offering assistance or disclosing incriminating information. The importance of household and neighbours rather than kin was closely tied to the domestic context in which many female crimes took place, and the 'insider knowledge' that was gained by living in close proximity to one another. However, if and when women retained links to family and kin who lived within travelling distance, they remained an important source of support. Secondly, the thesis identifies the detection and prosecution of crime as a gendered experience; contemporary social expectations about gender influenced both legal processes and the shaping of witness accounts. Thirdly, in its examination of local responses to female crime, the thesis supports the theory that a notable shift in sentiment towards female nature and legal culpability occurred during this period, which in turn affected the support offered to female defendants. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the paramount importance of witness testimony in articulating the circumstances surrounding female crimes, and the complex negotiations of interpersonal relationships which influenced how this evidence would be contextualised as supportive or not when it was delivered.