In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Seventy-two years later, in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton revised this passage with the Declaration of Sentiments, writing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Women have been attempting to amend, rewrite, and redress their rights based on legal language written for and about men ever since.
The following four cases involve women’s rights and the narrative and legal struggles to compel the law to recognize them. The case of Hester Vaughn in 1868 was the original cause célèbre, about a poor woman convicted of infanticide, sentenced to death without as a single woman involved at any phase of the prosecution: judge, jury, or attorneys. Next, the early-20th-century pregnancy and labor case Muller v. Oregon questioned whether women were allowed to work longer hours than men, since, as the case determined, their primary job in life was to make babies. Then, in the not-so-distant 1975 case of Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, one of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s earliest cases as an attorney, the narrative perspective flipped, using a man as a plaintiff in a gender equity case in order to argue for women’s rights. And finally, Depp v. Heard (2022), the latest celebrity case broadcast around the world, again reframed the narrative perspective, making the law itself almost superfluous to the story that underscored it.
But how much do we know about the stories behind the cases, and how much does the background really matter? So much of our language of law is created, interpreted, and impacted by, well, origin stories. These four cases, in fact, required the rhetorical tools of narrative storytelling, both in and out of the courtroom, in order to be heard and for change to be made. While each case is indeed different, they share a common DNA: a double helix of storytelling and law, which, when bound together, reveal America.