Rewriting a Male Constitution: Constitutional Mobilization by the Women’s Movement from the Gender Equality Clause and Women’s Charter to the Constitutional Litigation Movement
Author: Chao-ju Chen
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Abstract
The Republic of China constitution has two gender equality clauses, whose existence is well-known but whose history remains largely unstudied. This paper is an investigation into the feminist legal history of the constitution, focusing on the making and of the two gender equality clauses so as to explore the relationship between the women’s movement and the constitution as well as the contested meanings of gender equality. I consider the text of the constitution as a site of contestation and examine how feminists have made interpretive and amendatory claims on the constitution’s text, especially through constitutional litigation and advocacy for a constitutional amendment. Employing the concepts of the legal opportunity structure and the feminist constitutional agenda, my study reveals how the women’s movement in China in the early twentieth century advocated the inclusion of gender equality clause in the new constitution, how feminists in Taiwan had mobilized for constitutional change in the early 1990s, advocating a constitutional amendment for substantive equality, and how these feminists went on to mobilize for constitutional litigation as part of the feminist legal reform movement that targeted laws that impose different treatment on women. Their campaign to change and interpret the text of the constitution is both an attempt to declare women’s membership to the constitutional community and an effort to reshape the meaning of equality in the constitution. I argue that the feminist constitutional mobilization has produced significant change, and suggest that feminists continue to raise claims about the constitution so as to transform the constitution into a living document in people’s lives and to make women participatory members of the constitutional community