Linda Silver Dranoff is a precedent-setting lawyer, an empowering author about law, public policy and women’s rights, and a successful feminist activist for equality and family law reform. She is the author of Fairly Equal: Lawyering the Feminist Revolution. Linda has been honoured with the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario and Law Society Medal.
Her latest effort is Fairly Equal: Conversations Toward a Feminist Future – A new web series that looks at today’s threats to women’s equality rights and warns that we cannot take past advances for granted.
Linda begins the conversation by describing how women were viewed by the law well into the 20th century. Women were considered property – effectively owned by their husbands – under the law until the 1970s.
We talk about the many areas women’s rights have advanced in the intervening decades – including progress in bodily autonomy, family law, employment equity, and more. But equality between men and women is still a distant goal. Even though laws pay equity laws have been on the books for four decades with the infrastructure to enforce them, women’s wages have advanced from 64 cents for every dollar men earn to only 68 cents.
Linda concludes our conversation by providing some advice for those coming up in the world who want to continue working towards the goal of equality between the sexes.
Podcast for Inquiry is hosted by Leslie Rosenblood and brought to you by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. Join today! Produced by Zack Dumont, Martin Zielinski, and Leslie Rosenblood. Support Podcast for Inquiry on Patreon: https://patreon.com/PodcastforInquiry. Send your thoughts and feedback to podcast@centreforinquiry.ca.