1. Feminist legal scholars on law not hearing women
Lucinda Finley is very close on legal reasoning itself. Her article Breaking Women’s Silence in Law: The Dilemma of the Gendered Nature of Legal Reasoning argues that legal concepts and reasoning often fail to fit women’s experiences, forcing women to translate their harms into male-shaped legal categories. This supports your point that law does not simply “listen badly”; it structures what can count as legally meaningful speech.
Carol Smart, especially in Feminism and the Power of Law, is also central. Her argument is that law does not merely resolve women’s claims; it produces authoritative meanings that can redefine women’s experiences. For your article, Smart helps you say: when women enter law, their account is not simply assessed — it is transformed.
Catharine MacKinnon is crucial for the claim that law often treats the male standpoint as neutral. Her work on sexual harassment, rape, and the state helps you argue that “objective” legal standards may already encode gendered assumptions about consent, resistance, reasonableness, and harm. The Stanford Encyclopedia summary of feminist rape scholarship identifies MacKinnon as central to the critique that rape law has often defined non-consent through force and women’s resistance.
2. Feminist rape law scholars on resistance, silence, and consent
This is the most obvious parallel literature for your argument.
Susan Estrich, Real Rape, is probably one of the closest. She challenged the legal image of “real rape” as stranger violence involving force, visible resistance, and immediate complaint. Her work helps you show how law historically demanded a particular performance of resistance from women before recognising violation.
Lois Pineau, “Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis,” is very useful for your “boyfriend/girlfriend” example. Pineau critiques assumptions about natural male sexual aggression and female reluctance, and argues for a communicative model of sexuality. This maps beautifully onto your point about unspoken pressure, expected politeness, and the difficulty of saying no inside intimate relations.
Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence, gives you the “continuum” framework. Rather than seeing sexual violence only as exceptional physical attack, Kelly shows how women experience coercion, intrusion, pressure, and fear across ordinary gendered life. This helps you bridge overt violence and subtler forms of pressure without collapsing them.
A recent legal reform debate also supports your direction: the European Parliament’s 2026 position on consent-based rape law explicitly states that consent should not be inferred from silence, lack of resistance, prior conduct, or relationship, and it recognises freeze and fawn trauma responses. That is not an academic source, but it shows the legal direction of travel and strongly supports your critique of “why didn’t she resist?” reasoning.
3. Epistemic injustice scholars: women are disbelieved, quieted, or smothered
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, gives you the established concept of testimonial injustice: someone receives less credibility because of prejudice. This is already widely used in healthcare and gender scholarship.
But your argument goes one step earlier. You are not only saying women are given a credibility deficit once they speak. You are saying the social world prevents or reshapes speech before it appears. For that, use Kristie Dotson. Her concepts of testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering are especially close. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker truncates or withholds testimony because she expects the audience cannot or will not receive it appropriately. A recent article on motherhood and epistemic injustice explicitly links Fricker and Dotson to “testimonial quieting” and “testimonial smothering.”
This is where your contribution can be sharp:
Fricker explains how women are not believed. Dotson helps explain why women may not speak fully. My argument applies this to childbirth: the birthing woman’s silence is not absence of knowledge, but a socially produced response to gendered and clinical power.
4. Sara Ahmed on complaint
Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! is essential. Ahmed argues that complaint is not a simple procedural act; when someone complains, institutions often treat the complainant as the problem. This is extremely useful for childbirth litigation and hospital complaints.
Ahmed helps you say: women do not necessarily stay silent because nothing happened. They may stay silent because complaint carries costs — being labelled difficult, unstable, ungrateful, obsessive, or hostile. This links strongly with your point about women being socialised into politeness and then blamed for not becoming confrontational.
5. Socialisation and gendered compliance
For the deeper feminist theory of how women are made compliant:
Simone de Beauvoir gives you the foundational line: one becomes a woman. This supports your claim that “woman’s voice” is not naturally quiet; it is socially produced.
Judith Butler helps you describe femininity as performance: politeness, smiling, yielding, softening, not making trouble, managing others’ discomfort.
Pierre Bourdieu, especially Masculine Domination, gives you symbolic violence: domination that is internalised, normalised, and misrecognised as natural. This is useful for arguing that women may experience compliance as “being good,” “being reasonable,” or “not making a fuss.”
John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness, is very relevant for your phrase “power-over.” His work on quiescence shows that power does not only defeat resistance; it can prevent resistance from emerging in the first place. This is one of the closest theoretical supports for your exact sentence.
6. Childbirth, obstetric violence, and epistemic injustice
This is where your article becomes original.
Camilla Pickles is very important. Her 2024 article on obstetric violence proposes that obstetric violence can be understood as a violation of integrity in antenatal, intrapartum, and postnatal care. This gives you a current legal/human-rights frame for childbirth harm.
Sara Cohen Shabot is also very close. Her article “You are Not Qualified—Leave it to Us” argues that women in labour suffer both systematic and incidental forms of testimonial injustice. That is directly relevant to your point about medical authority disqualifying women’s embodied knowledge.
There is also a 2026 article on “silencing obstetric violence” in Australia, which appears to address how obstetric violence is resisted or minimised through arguments about definition, medical benevolence, and the discomfort around calling obstetric practice “violence.” That sounds very close to your concern with institutional silencing.
Existing feminist legal scholarship has shown that law disbelieves women, misconstrues consent, demands resistance, and disciplines complaint. Existing obstetric violence scholarship has shown that women’s embodied knowledge is often dismissed in maternity care. This article brings these literatures together to argue that childbirth litigation often requires women to produce evidence of resistance in precisely the context where gendered socialisation, medical authority, maternal fear, and institutional dependency have trained them into compliance.