She’ll get exactly the same sentence as I would have given a man.” The answer was that one wasn’t asking for simple equality in that way, one was seeking to have treatment as equals that meant having to understand the context of women’s lives. What was interesting to me was that I began to see that calling for equal treatment was misunderstood judges would say to you “We’ll give you equality for your client. Equality was the name of the game, and if you called yourself a feminist you were still a pretty rare person you were often seen as a bra-burning harridan. During the ’70s we got the legislation we all pushed for, which was the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act. What do you mean by this?Īs a feminist, I began to see the ways in which the law did not work for women, and I became a champion for equality.
In your book Eve was Framed, which was published in 1992, you write this: “Our call for gender equality has led to a hamfisted, literal interpretation of equality with no consideration of the context of the women’s lives”. For her work for women, she received the Times Newspaper’s Lifetime Achievement award in 1999. In 1992 she wrote ‘Eve was Framed’, which focussed specifically on how women are affected differently by the law, and how they were treated unequally because of this. As a barrister, she has acted in many prominent cases, such as the Brighton Bombing, the Michael Bettany espionage trial and the Guildford Four appeal. She also chaired the Power Inquiry and helped to produce the Power Report in 2006 which reported on the state of British democracy. She is currently Chair of Justice (the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists), was Chair of Charter 88 from 1992-1997, and Chair of the British Council from 1998-2004. She became a life peer in 1997 and her opposition to encroachments on the right to jury trial has awarded her the Spectator’s Parliamentary Campaigner of the Year Award 2000. Baroness Kennedy is a leading barrister and expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues.
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