Introduction<br > "The Female equally with the Male I sing."<br > Walt Whitman， Leaves of Grass<br > IT SVILL NOT come as a surprise to anyone even cursorily<br > acquainted with the work of courts and legislatures to be told that<br > the law has often accorded markedly different treatment to men<br > and women solely because of sex. Voting rights， jury service， right<br > to a separate domicile， causes of action for loss of consortium， ca-<br > pacity to enter into binding agreements and to sue and be sued，<br > change in citizenship upon marriage to an alien， change of name<br > upon marriage， age of attaining majority-these are only a few of<br > the many areas in which a person s sex has at times made the sole<br > difference in the treatment he or she would receive under tile law<br > in .the United States and other countries.<br > What is more， sexually discriminatory rules of law are by no<br > means relics of the past， mere historical curiosities. Despite file re-<br > moval of legal barriers to the right to vote by American women in<br > 19zo， despite the passage of Married Women s Property Acts<br > throughout the United States in the latter half of the nineteentb<br > century， and despite the prohibition against sex discrimination<br > in employment contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964，1 sex-based<br > legal inequality continues to be a fact of life both here and abroad.<br > In most of the cantons of Switzerland and in Afghanistan， Iraq，<br >Jordan， and other countries， tile fundamental right to vote was，<br >as of 1964， still withheld from women.2 In France， as recently as<br > 1965， jurists and nonjurists alike were heatedly debating govern-<br >client proposals aimed at eliminating major instances of le，~，<br > lSCrlrumation affainst French .-，，~.， s a.~A ~ .t ，. . ~ -"<br > ~... ~，~u m the united States，<br >as a result of piecemeal legislative enactments， the interpretive<br >role of judges reared in tile tradition of "natural male dominance，"4<br >and the existence of other complex factors to be examined here-<br >after， separate rules of law for men and women continue to reg-<br >