Informed in 1944 that she was not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School, African American activist Pauli Murray confronted the injustice she called Jane Crow. In the 1960s and 1970s, the analogies between sex and race discrimination pioneered by Murray became potent weapons in the battle for women s rights, as feminists borrowed rhetoric and legal arguments from the civil rights movement. Serena Mayeri s "Reasoning from Race" is the first book to explore the development and consequences of this key feminist strategy.

Mayeri uncovers the history of an often...