A Survey Of The Female Rights In Divorce Proceedings

Louis Henkin, an American jurist, once said "our age is the age of rights". Since1960s, with the development of western feminist movements and feminist studies, females’social status has been significantly increased in the world and the protection of their rights has received wide attention. However, compared with males, females are still disadvantaged in all sectors of society and countries. For historical reasons, institutions in both domestic or international laws or common laws were written in male language based on male perspective. The claim for female rights and voices is marginalized by historical inertia.In our country, although the development of modern legal system has improved females’status significantly, females’rights are still seriously violated in less-developed areas and rural areas. In those areas, the traditional "female subordination" and "men responsible for external affairs while women responsible for internal affairs" gender divisions of labor are still playing important roles. Females’rights empowered by laws are ignored by social norms and customs, and the situation is more obvious in the field of marriage and family. The studies of female rights protection in divorce poceedingshas has practical significance and important values.This paper selects100divorce cases in the basic people’s court of Wanning, Hainan as research objects. The introduction part tells the research background, research significance, topic ideas and research methods of this article, indicating that the article has studied the feminist rights protection in divorce proceedings with the form of survey report from female perspective. The second part introduces the basic situation of divorce proceedings in Wanning through descriptions and analysis of statistical variables, and describes current situations of female rights protection from two aspects of personal rights and property rights. In the third part, according to the above analysis, the author explains the adverse reasons in divorce proceedings from three aspects of laws, custom, and female’s ability for litigation. Besides, the author even puts forward some suggestions for female rights protection in the last part of the article, mainly concrete safeguard mechanism and feasible measures from the improvement of legal system and female’s ability for litigation. Moreover, it provides advices for related departments to solve problems concerning female rights protection in divorce proceedings, so as to realize gender equality, avoid bad folk habits and promote socialist modernization construction of the rule of law.