The women's experiences and persistence to fight for equal access led to low rates of retention and mental health issues, including anxiety disorders.
[5] It was crucial to allowing women to become their own people through becoming financially independent and having the ability to find real jobs that were not available to them before due to discrimination in employment.
However, feminist legal theorists today extend their work beyond overt discrimination by employing a variety of approaches to understand and address how the law contributes to gender inequality.
The liberal equality model applies Kimberlé Crenshaw's theoretical framework of intersectionality in relation to a person's lived experience.
Understanding that access must be equal, but difference must still be recognized to diffract fairness and power struggle including unpaid societal standards like caring for children and the home, rather than feminine characteristics.
This theory focuses on how male dominate females, but it also talks about other groups being oppressed such as how legal aid is not often offered to the transgender population.
[15] Additionally, MacKinnon further applies her dominance model of feminist legal theory to transgender sex equality.
She asserts that only by adopting the Substantive Approach, inspired by her dominance model and focusing on the gender hierarchy driven by sexualized misogyny, can intersectionality be properly addressed, ultimately benefiting all women.
The anti-essentialist and intersectionalist project has been to explore the ways in which race, class, sexual orientation, and other axes of subordination interplay with gender and to uncover the implicit, detrimental assumptions that have often been employed in feminist theory.
[19] While race is an important factor in feminist legal theory, it can also be misconstrued in a way that silences women of color, furthering racism in a system created to build more access.
For this reason, Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color"[20] should remain a canonical to this topic to continue to support and challenge the gender essentialism within feminism culture and ideology the marginalized women of color by protection them further in legal implications through support.
[20] Mari Matsuda created the term "multiple consciousness" to explain a person's ability to take on the perspective of an oppressed group.
[21] Feminist legal theory is still evolving to diminish gender and race essentialism to recognize how oppression and privilege work together to create a person's life experiences.
[4] Feminist legal theory produced a new idea of using hedonic jurisprudence to show that women's experiences of assault and rape was a product of laws that treated them as less human and gave them fewer rights than men.
With this feminist legal theorists argued that given examples were not only a description of possible scenarios but also a sign of events that have actually occurred, relying on them to support statements that the law ignores the interests and disrespects the existence of women.
[22]: 18 Judges also considered the impact of judgments on disadvantaged groups, challenged gendered bias, and commented on historic injustice.