In a nation whose Con­sti­tu­tion pur­ports to speak for ​“We the Peo­ple,” too many of the sto­ries that pow­er­ful Amer­i­cans tell about law and soci­ety include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politi­cians, and oth­er influ­en­tial voic­es have ignored women’s strug­gles for equal­i­ty or dis­tort­ed them beyond recog­ni­tion by wild­ly exag­ger­at­ing Amer­i­can progress. Even as sex­ism con­tin­ues to warp con­sti­tu­tion­al law, polit­i­cal deci­sion-mak­ing, and every­day life, promi­nent Amer­i­cans have spent more than a cen­tu­ry pro­claim­ing that the Unit­ed States has already left sex dis­crim­i­na­tion behind.

Jill Elaine Hasday’s We the Men is the first book to explore how for­get­ting women’s strug­gles for equal­i­ty — and for­get­ting the work Amer­i­ca still has to do — per­pet­u­ates injus­tice, pro­motes com­pla­cen­cy, and denies how gen­er­a­tions of women have had to come togeth­er to fight for reform and against regres­sion. Has­day argues that remem­ber­ing women’s sto­ries more often and more accu­rate­ly can help the nation advance toward sex equality.