In the late 80's MacKinnon was a celebrated voice in the feminist movement, particularly insightful regarding legal aspects of feminism, such as jurisprudence and ethics regarding mistreatment of women in the workplace. Part of her public influence was due to her willingness to speak frequently, and in Feminism Unmodified, some of those speeches are collected in the form of a coherent treatise treating the cause of feminism from two points of view, the daily experience of life as a woman, and the legal ramifications of systemic injustice against women.
MacKinnon's expertise is in law and legal injustice, so she presents a history of sexual harassment and the development of today's legal response to harassment, especially in the work place. She then turns her attention to another central passion of her feminism, the injustice of pornography. Her position is that the law around pornography does not do enough to stop the porn market from mistreating women, and she is an advocate for abolishment of the legal protections around pornography. These subjects are related by MacKinnon's stance against sex inequality.
Then she turns to analyze the true extent of sex inequality, commenting on the feminist issues of rape, the mistreatment of women in organized sports and athletics, and the right of a woman to abort a pregnancy. Ultimately, she argues that what seems on the surface to be difference between the genders is actually the result of systemic oppression of females and the complicit acceptance of male supremacy.
