Women's Movements

Flourishing or in abeyance?

Sandra Grey, Marian Sawer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134042388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Written by leading women's movement scholars, this book is the first to systematically apply the idea of social movement abeyance to differing national and international contexts. Its starting point is the idea that the women's movement is over, an idea promoted in the media and encouraged by scholarship that regards disruptive action as a defining element of social movements. It goes on to compare the trajectories over the past 40 years of women's movements in Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Finally, it looks at the extension of feminist activism into supranational and subnational institutions—the global and the local—and into cyberspace.

Comparing these diverse sites of political and social action illuminates some of the major opportunities and constraints that have impacted upon women's movements. It advances our understanding of the lifecycles of social movements by examining the differing ways in which women's movements operate and sustain themselves over time and space, ways that often differ from those of male-led movements. The book also engages with the question of whether there is an on-going women's movement—with sufficient continuity to warrant description as such—by presenting the voices of young activists East and West.

Filling an important gap in social movement research, this book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists and gender studies scholars and researchers.

1 Introduction

Marian Sawer and Sandra Grey

The public face of the women’s movement across developed democracies has changed profoundly over the past 40 years. The types and levels of activism found today bear only a minor resemblance to the consciousness raising and direct action of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This book explores the trajectories of ‘second-wave’ women’s movements in a range of democracies to understand what has happened to these movements since they were making headlines.

We use the common term ‘second-wave’ to refer to the upsurge of activism by women in the 1960s and 1970s, while acknowledging that there may have been several waves in the long history of women’s activism. Implicit in the wave metaphor is the notion that there has always been and always will be a women’s movement, it is just its strength and visibility that varies.¹ Following Drude Dahlerup, we argue that there is sufficient continuity (or connection) between women’s movements past and present to view them as part of an ongoing struggle for equality and autonomy.²

This was not necessarily how second-wave women’s movements saw themselves when they burst upon the scene in the late 1960s. Women’s liberation activists were often distancing themselves from the ‘polite’ methods of their mothers’ generation when they adopted and adapted the repertoire of the antiwar and student movements. Consciousness raising and radical collectivism seemed to belong to a different world to the club rooms and deputations of the previous generation of feminist advocates. Continuities between women’s movements over the last century are often more evident now, with the flourishing of feminist history, than they were when the second wave first arrived. An important part of this continuity is recognition of the work of earlier feminists, something acknowledged by the ‘new voices’ in this collection.

While continuities over time may be evident, as the name social movement suggests the subjects of this book are not static. We need to understand how the activism of groups seeking greater autonomy for women changes in terms of repertoires of action and modes of organising. Many of the chapters here review four decades of action by women’s movements, enabling us to examine the commonalities and differences in the way movements in seven nations have evolved over time. The comparative case-study approach allows for grounded comparison of the seizing of political opportunities and the nature of discursive strategies, as well as external influences on movement trajectories. Relations with the state shift over this period, as do relations with political actors beyond the state. Political identities also change in response to the new configurations of politics and public discourse.

There have been a number of different approaches to explaining the changes occurring in women’s movements. Verta Taylor has developed the concept of abeyance to indicate a shift into a holding pattern;³ there is also the suggestion that women’s movements have shifted into different arenas, for example, from the political to the cultural arena;⁴ or that they have disappeared altogether in a ‘post-feminist’ era⁵. Unlike many scholars who lose interest when movements disappear from the streets, this book tracks the institutionalising of movements through the creation of professionalised or vocational advocacy groups and distinctive forms of service provision, through embedding within state and multilateral institutions, or outside in educational curriculum and the cultural sphere. This means not only examining movements when they are most visible, public and widespread, but also looking at continuing activity and lasting legacies, be they discursive or institutional. And while much focus in feminist and social movement literature is turning to the role of movements in transitional democracies, our authors feel there is still much to learn from examining the trajectories of women’s movements in established democracies, particularly when they have been the subject of so many premature epitaphs.

Theorising social movements

The rise of new forms of political action in the 1960s as students and other middle-class radicals took to the streets led to social scientists’ increasing interest in non-institutional politics and social mobilisation. Two major bodies of social movement literature emerged, that stemming primarily from Europe that focused on the creation of new collective meanings and identities, and that stemming primarily from North America that focused on resource mobilisation by new collective actors and the opportunity structures that enable this to take place.

Authors in this collection combine insights from both sides of the Atlantic to help understand the ever-changing and highly adaptive women’s movements. For example, authors examine the impact of changing political opportunities, including conservative backlashes, on the repertoires of action used by women’s movements; they look at the role of cultural activism and unobtrusive mobilisation in maintaining gendered claims; they use both cultural and institutional lenses to explain the trajectories of women’s movements; and seek to understand how movements adapt as one of the core resources—members—falls away.

This is not a claim that authors in this collection are bridging the gap between the theories emanating from the United States and Europe, but that they utilise insights from both to examine women’s movements. In typical feminist style, the authors pick and choose from the vast theoretical and methodological toolkit provided by social movement and feminist scholarship. But they do so critically.

In particular the authors in this collection are critical of the artificial divide between political process theory (resource mobilisation) and theories that centre on the construction of social meaning.⁶ The chapters by Sarah Maddison and Kyunga Jung and by Fiona MacKay use both approaches to evaluate the trajectories of national women’s movements. The desire to incorporate both the institutional and cultural lenses of social movement research is also taken into consideration here when defining the characteristics that distinguish social movements from other political and cultural actors. Any discussion of the trajectories and ‘death’ of women’s movements, whether within nation-states or internationally, requires some boundaries to be drawn around the object of research.

The most common (and least contentious) assertion found in literature on mass mobilisations is that a social movement is not a single actor but made up of individuals and groups who are linked by a common identity, a shared set of values, or a collective grievance. A wide variety of actors may be involved, including individuals, groups, networks, and protest committees. These actors are brought together by a common message of, and desire for, social, cultural and political change. Movements introduce new ways of looking at the world⁷ and challenge the rationale and operation of existing political and social systems. And while they may be ‘relatively unified entities’,⁸ they are also fluid collectivities that move and change.

More controversial are propositions concerning the modes of operation that set social movements apart from other political actors. In much of the North American literature the primary conceptual difference between participation in traditional political institutions and protest movements is the contentious and disruptive nature of protests.⁹ Sidney Tarrow acknowledges that movements engage in a variety of actions, but:

[T]he most characteristic actions of social movements are collective challenges. This is not because movement leaders are psychologically prone to violence, but because, in seeking to appeal to new constituencies and assert their claim, they lack the stable resources—money, organisation, access to the state—that interest groups and political parties control.¹⁰

Collective challenges or ‘dissent events’ have been important for women’s movements (as for other social movements) in attracting media attention and getting a message out to a broader public.¹¹ The demonstration against the Miss America beauty contest in 1968 and the ‘freedom trash can’ that gave rise to the ever-persistent myth of bra-burning, was one such event. However, disruptive protests are not the primary defining feature of women’s movements. The examination of women’s movements in Part I suggests that the definition of social movements should rest more on the mobilising of collective identity and the sustaining of challenging discourses than on the use of disruptive repertoires of action. In the case of women’s movements the mobilisation of identity has involved both the institutionalising of women-centred discourses and their articulation in everyday life, as well as the more formal process of claims-making.¹²

Existing typologies of social movements, which emphasise the use of mass rallies, ‘dissent events’ and at times violence, have been based on movements led by men rather than on women’s movements. Women’s movement activists have used street protests as part of their repertoire of contention, but have also given evidence to inquiries and lobbied political elites. They have created feminist structures within government and other institutions and developed democratically delivered women’s services as well as engaging in feminist cultural production and the politics of everyday life. Gender differences in repertoire are rarely noted in the social movement literature. One exception is Dieter Rucht, whose careful study of social movements in West Germany showed that the women’s movement had the lowest proportion of protest events of five movements, despite the existence of large numbers of women’s groups. His finding was that the women’s movement focused on interaction in settings other than the streets and the media.¹³

The preoccupation of social movement research with disruptive protest has meant that relatively little attention is given to the periods in the life of social movements between the peaks of activism. What little research does exist on moments between the waves is often centred on the capacity of the state to accommodate social movement challenges. As has been noted, the women’s movements that are central to this book engage in diverse forms of activism in a range of political venues. Even the most institutionally focused chapter, that by Sandra Grey, draws attention to the ways that activists have challenged the status quo through contentious action and unconventional organisations.

Women’s movements have been distinctive for their creation of ‘women-only’ spaces in which women-centred perspectives are debated, developed, and maintained. In countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and even the United Kingdom (UK) up until 1905, the ‘first wave’ of the women’s movement did not engage in disruptive collective action, although it was involved in separate institution-building. These institutions enabled women-centred discourses to develop free of male supervision, but they largely mimicked male institutions in the formality and hierarchy of their structure. This was most definitely the case with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the UK, where disruptive action became part of the repertoire from 1905 but the organisational structure was hierarchical if not quasi-military. Nonetheless, few would deny that the WSPU played an important role in mobilising collective political identity. The historic memory of sisterhood and heroic actions that was carefully preserved through subsequent decades became an important resource for the second wave of the women’s movement, sometimes in countries far away from the original sites of action.¹⁴

Unlike these earlier women’s movements, recent movements have consciously striven to avoid the disempowering effects of male hierarchies, including those found in supposedly radical movements such as the anti-Vietnam War movement. The emphasis within women’s movements was towards more empowering forms of organisation. This did not just mean structurelessness because, as American feminist Jo Freeman has said, structures are inevitable in group life and dominance within informal structures may be just as disempowering as within traditional hierarchies—the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’.¹⁵

There is, however, organisational diversity within women’s movements. Alternative women’s spaces are not always based on non-hierarchical collectivist structures. To take but one example, rural women’s groups may be more likely to adopt traditional hierarchical structures, even for seemingly radical purposes such as organising Reclaim the Night events.¹⁶

The eclectic approach to social movements represented by the contributors to this book can be summed up by defining movements as sustained efforts to bring about social change by individuals and groups who share a collective identity developed on the basis of a common opposition to dominant norms, and who may use unconventional tactics and/or forms as part of their mode of operation. This definition can be further particularised following American political scientist Karen Beckwith: women’s movements are those where women mobilise around a collective identity as women, develop women-centred discourses and engage in gendered claims-making.¹⁷ Hence women’s movements include women-focused structures and claims-making, regardless of whether the actions involved are ‘disruptive’ in the sense social movement theorists frequently imply.

The definition is intentionally broad so as to encompass a whole variety of women’s collective and individual actions, from organisations seeking political and civil rights for women, to feminist reformers in the interstices of national and transnational institutions, to cultural feminism and liberationist and separatist movements. It provides a base for comparison of movements despite their changing repertoires and modes of operation over the last four decades.

Indeed, diverse modes of organising, from pots and pans protests to parliamentary petitions, have generally been a feature of women’s attempts to bring about social and political change. Different modes tend to be salient at different points in the life of movements but will also be found simultaneously. Even at times when ‘routine’ political activities are dominant, there might also be a cultural intervention such as writing a play to publicise an issue. The evidence of our book confirms the trend in the social movement literature to dethrone disruptive contention as the key defining element of social movements.¹⁸ What is interesting is the timing and the circumstances in which activists have selected a particular repertoire of contention.

Adaptation and change in women’s movement activism

Authors in Part I of this collection contest the idea that where there is less overt public policy contestation at the national level women’s movements must be over, or at best in abeyance. They show that women’s movements have increasingly relied on institutionalised activity from the mid-1970s. As a consequence of the UN Decade for Women (1976–85), as well as domestic pressure, new state agencies were created in many countries, including women’s policy and equality agencies. Women’s advocacy groups gained access to policy-making processes, often for the first time.

Public funding was also achi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I In abeyance?
• PART II New spaces
• PART III New feminist activists
• Bibliography