Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives About Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
It is the aim of Telling Stories out of Court to reach readers on both an intellectual and an emotional level, helping them think, feel, and share the experiences of women who have faced sexism and discrimination at work. It focuses on how the federal courts interpreted Title VII – the seventh chapter – of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To do so, this book uses fiction. Short stories offer readers insight in a way that a pedantic law text cannot. These stories help us concentrate on the emotional content of the experience with less of an emphasis on the particulars of the law. But this is not to say the fiction is free-floating. Grouped into thematic clusters, the narratives are combined with interpretative commentary and legal analysis that anchors the book. It is the commentary and legal analysis that reveals the impact this revolutionary law had on women in the workplace. See below for a brief history of legal storytelling...
Traditional Legal Storytellng Genre
It was Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams who, among others, created the legal storytelling genre to underscore the moral reasoning underlying civil rights and to help understand and explain the persistence of racism in the 1980s despite legal protections. They condemned racism along moral grounds. They illustrated how despite being well-known law professors anyone and everyone African American experienced racism. See Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Also see Richard Delgado, "Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative," 87 Michigan Law Review 2411 (1989); Laura Gardner Webster, "Telling Stories: The Spoken Narrative Tradition in Criminal Defense Discourse," 42 Mercer Law Review 553 (1991)
Feminist Legal Narratives
Law professors noticed women's voices have not been heard. Nowwhere is this more the case than with those the supposedly sensitive, emotionally-loaded topics like rape, domestic violence, and abortion. It was not a dearth of material or evidence that kept these issues off the scholarship screen for decades. Rather, it was their "uncomfortable" nature. Some powerfully written books about these topics relying wholly or partially on narrative, however, broke through, finding readers. Kathryn Abrams offers an excellent comprehensive history of feminist legal narration in "Hearing the Call of Stories," 79 California Law Review 971 (1991), 976. As she explians, one of the more important pieces was written by Susan Estrich, whose article on rape, Abrams calls "courageous and controvercial" though her autobiographical narrative is short and only introduces the argument. Matha Mahoney's, "Legal Images of Battered Women: Redefining the Issue of Separation," on battered women uses stories that "inspire and punctuate." Like Estrich, mahoney does not make the fiction construct her argument. Abrams lauds the work of Patricia Williams, who does rely on the narratives to come up with a new conceptualization about civil rights. And finally, Marie Ashe's work on reproduction, which she views as too radical since it is not representative of most women's experiences or choices.
Narratology in Literature
Critical race and feminist legal storytelling are not the only methodologies that inform this book. Additionally, narrative theory within the field of law and literature as well as moral philosophy undegirds it. Narrative knowledge, as Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth argue, provides "moral reasoning." "That is to say, the telling of narratives itself becomes a moral action that has the potential to shape the lives of both the teller and the listener, leading to a form of culture-wide knowledge that ultimately determines how human beings rediscover and recreate their individual selves over a lifetime." See Rita Charon, "What Narrative Competence is for," ajob 1 (2001), 63; Marthat Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, (Oxford University Press, 1990); and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago: University of Cicago Press, 1983, second edition). James Phelan, "Narrative Theory 1966-2006: A Narrative," Manuscript used with permission from the author offers and excellent overview.
Feminist Narratology
Narrative theory underscores that people have subjective experiences, and therby bring their own bias into writing and reading. This theory puts the writer and the reader in a position of knowing their roles in history, embracing the idea that "literature is political." See Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, (Purdue: Indiana University Press Midland Books: no. 247, 1981) Another genre has been created by Nan Maglin-Bauer, "Introduction" in Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women Talk About the End of (Mostly) Long-Term Relationships, Nan Maglin-Bauer, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 4.