Temporality and the Construction of Women’s Structural Inequality

The relationship between legal advocacy for women’s equality and temporality is under-theorised and under-researched. Conceptions of time as rigid and linear, as what counts as valuable or productive time and ideas that time is a commodity that individuals can control, operate to structurally oppress women. Beliefs about how time should function, a steady march towards a better future, fail to account for how gendered harms are not confined to the past but ripple forward across time. Time itself is a structure that can conceal or uncover women’s inequality and time interacts with other systems and institutions to either oppress or transform gender power hierarchies. Flexible approaches that break free from these understandings of time are needed as they can account for the myriad ways women experience temporality and breaches of their equality rights. This article examines how time shapes legal understandings of women’s inequality in the jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court and the US Supreme Court. This analysis reveals that attention to temporality can immensely enrich a substantive equality analysis and how flexible approaches to time protect against equality law requiring women to conform to dominant temporal structures.