Feminist Perspective on Maternity Benefits: Disparities in Legal Jurisprudence

Abstract

The specter of interpersonal conflict envisages conflict harm and violence as separate sequential categories. All three forms envisage a powerlessness resulting in imbalance of power. Violence can often be institutional too. This happens, when social and legal structures exist to justify violence. (Galtung: 1969) Gender-based violence includes physical, psychological, sexual and property aggressions, either resulting in death due to suicide or homicide. This is a polysemic phenomenon that affects all social classes and is, above all, a matter of hierarchical cultural and gender values socially produced, corresponding to the male population and its exercise of domination by use of physical and psychological force. The imagination of legal jurisprudence seeks to aggregate experience and this is why gender theorists have always been critical of legal reality.  Because, when law defines an individual category it does not necessarily always, take into account the social compulsions over it. For a long time the word ‘person’ did not include within its ambit both the sexes. At stake in the feminist debate of those days were the benefits that were pursuant to a state of being. Women were unrecognized as beings or as persons until 1929 and were thus not entitled to any of the benefits forming part of the major laws.