What Are Social Movements and What Is Gendered About Women's Participation in Social Movements?

[seabeyond]

It was a little difficult to describe the participants of 1950s and 1960s American social movements as alienated and atomistic; the largely middle class social base of those movements--the Black Civil Rights movement, the student movement, the peace and anti-Vietnam war movement, other racial/ethnic liberation movements, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, and remobilized feminist movements--precluded scholars from seeing protestors as only malcontents. Instead, American sociologists analyzed movement participation as rational expressions of politics by other than institutional means. Influenced by organizational studies and economics, what came to be known as the “resource mobilization” paradigm arose, where, as the name suggests, questions of how movements came into being through the mobilization of resources were central. And resource mobilization paradigms coexisted with analyses of the political opportunity structure within which movements arose, seeing collective action not as a symptom of abnormal politics, but as the reasonable response of actors who took advantage of new institutional situations--elite splits, the formation of commissions and departments, new institutions, etc.--to push forward from outside when the time was right.

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How were questions about women’s movements, and women’s participation in mixed-gender movements dealt with in all these theoretical shifts? We know that women’s movements, and women in movements, have changed history, but we have second wave feminism’s academic arm, women’s studies, to thank for uncovering women’s participation in movements and establishing that women’s movements changed political landscapes. The remobilized feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s generated scholars who looked for evidence of women’s agency in the past, inspired by the present. And the remobilized second wave feminist movement itself was pivotal to new thinking about movements in sociology, as feminist sociologists contributed to new paradigms based on their research of women’s movements and women in movements (see, for example, Freeman’s 1975 resource mobilization assessment of second wave white feminism). In a very real way, theorizing about women in movements--particularly but not solely in feminist movements --contributed to new understandings about how movements came about. Feminist social movement scholars have continued to make sure that they make new theory with women’s activism in mind, and their work has remained central to the sociology of social movements.

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Other feminist scholars established typologies to help understand women’s protest and resistance. Chafetz and Dworkin (1986; see Chapter One), made distinctions between pre-modern forms of women’s resistance--“individual-level revolt” and witchcraft--and women’s participation in different kinds of modern-era social movements, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s movements, of which feminist movements were a subset. For Chaftetz and Dworkin, feminist movements were the women’s movements that manifested themselves only in the most highly industrialized and highly urbanized societies; other kinds of women’s protest action could be understood as driven by the structural lack of opportunity to create feminist movements. In a less teleological fashion, West and Blumberg (1990) made distinctions between the kinds of issues that drew women into social movement activism. In their introduction to Women and Social Protest, they worked from the assumption that women have always been present in protest, defined as “rational attempts to achieve desired ends,” and took the standpoint that women’s work on behalf of historically specific definitions of “women’s rights” was only the most visible of these attempts (1990:4). West and Blumberg argued that women’s rights movements could be defined succinctly as ones where “claims are based on the rights of women as women and citizens of society” (1990:19), but they clearly organized their typology of women’s social movement participation around "issues" in order to capture the ubiquity, complexity and variety of women’s agency in movements. The efforts by feminist scholars to think about women’s movements and women in movements make clear that while self-consciously feminist movements are a relative rarity, women’s movements are numerous, and women’s participation in mixed-gender movements is and has been ever-present. Indeed, feminist sociologists do not seem to distinguish women’s movements theoretically from other kinds of social movements, using and contributing to existing theory in their research on women; what is seen as exceptional about women’s movements is that they are led by women and for women. However, this lack of theoretical distinction between women’s movements and other kinds of movements in the making of definitions masks very real differences in the experience of activism for women on the ground, especially (but not only) when they work together with men.

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Women have made their own movements or have been part of mixed-gender social movements because women are never just women. They are members of social classes; they are workers; they belong to racial/ethnic/national/sexual communities seeking expression, seeking inclusion, and redress from authority. But it has also been the case that women have found both making their own movements and organizing within mixed-gender groups to be difficult because of their gender. The first problem, and the one common to women in their own movements or in mixed-gender movements, is the construction of the public sphere, and therefore the political sphere, as male. While the possibilities for social movement activism were generated by the changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization, those two processes also fueled the ideology of “separate spheres”--the identification of public life as the proper realm of the “male” and domestic life as the proper realm of the “female.” A woman in public political life transgressed her proper space, and transgressed her proper role. As such, separate spheres ideology raised the question of whether women could legitimately protest in public at all, instituting a burden on women’s political participation not shared by men, who were assumed to be acting properly as men in “doing” protest politics. The ideology of separate spheres, and the identification of public political space as male certainly still exists, even if it has less force with each female incursion into that space, and with each challenge to the ideology. One of the recurring and most moving themes that one sees in the stories of women’s public protest is how their very participation in movements changes their conception of themselves and their role in their communities, even when their protest is in defense of traditional values (Kaplan 1982; Kingsolver 1996 [1983]; Naples 1998). Social space is remade and women’s lives are remade by protest action, sometimes at great personal cost. Of course, participation in social activism by men can be life-changing--but such participation is a qualitatively different enterprise for women, who trangress not just the rules of politics as usual but the rules of gender as usual. And in many ways, it is women’s movements, women in autonomous organizations, who constitute the greatest threat to order, as they disrupt the political field, and societal expectations of how women should act in that field through men.

http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/socm/intro.htm