A Taxing Feminism

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. Even though feminist tax jurisprudence has a rich history, mainstream tax academics, legislators, and the public have not been persuaded until recently to treat tax law as something more than a type of applied economics with no relation to feminist (or any other “noneconomic”) concerns. Since Grace Blumberg published “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers” in the early 1970s, numerous other contributions to the tax literature have identified ways that feminist perspectives might influence tax debates. After exploring why feminist perspectives historically have had little purchase in the tax arena, the chapter shines a light on recent attention to the relation between gender and tax law, providing some evidence that feminist tax perspectives may finally be taking hold in, and may eventually exert some influence over, the general tax policy discourse in the United States.