What Does Evolution Have To Do with Legal Enclaves?

While we applaud Hudson, Bowen, and Nielson (2011) for demonstrating the correlation between two modes of contemporary sexist oppression (inequality in family law and violence against women), we are concerned about how they embed a contested narrative of human evolution into otherwise straightforward findings. We argue that claims about human evolution are unnecessary to their argument, and, more importantly, that the version of feminist evolutionary analysis they describe is less feminist than it could be. Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2013.