Ferree Mueller2004

Feminism and the Women’s Movement: A Global Perspective

The women's movement is not new, not only Western, and not always feminist.
Since the early 1800s, women have been organizing as women to confront inequalities of class, status, and power.
These organizations, campaigns, and events have had an enormous impact on societies worldwide.
Understanding feminism in relation to contemporary women’s specific local activism requires a comparative, historical, and transnational perspective.
Women’s movements are among the most enduring and successful of all social movements of the modern period and have shaped modernity itself.
Contemporary collective actions taken by women are rooted in structures of opportunity that are products of women’s past organizing efforts and present-day social relations.
Definitions of women and women’s interests are produced by women and men, together and in opposition, and serve as a discursive framework for making appeals to women to organize collectively.
Both organizational and discursive resources available to women are used to challenge gender inequalities and to mobilize women as a constituency to work for and against various changes in the political and economic status quo.
The macrosociological basis of women’s movements and their historical success will be examined, defining what women’s movements are, what they do, and how they relate to other social movements.
General typologies will be offered, dynamic elements in women’s mobilizations will be highlighted, and what contemporary movements owe to their predecessors will be shown.
Instances of and processes in specific women’s movement mobilizations will be examined to challenge and extend current theories of social movements.
Bringing women’s movements, feminist and otherwise, into the formulation of basic concepts poses new theoretical challenges.
Social movement theories that account for gender relations will provide a more dynamic, long-term, and less state-centered approach to power, protest, and change.

Movements of Women and Feminism

Definitions

The women’s movement is often equated with organized feminism, defined as efforts to challenge gender relations that subordinate women to men.
However, women organize as women to contest or support other social relations as well.
All organizing of women explicitly as women to make any sort of social change is referred to as ‘‘women’s movements,’’ regardless of the specific targets of their change efforts.
Many mobilizations of women as women start with a non-gender-directed goal (e.g., peace, antiracism, social justice) and gradually acquire feminist components, while others expand to challenge racism, colonialism, and other oppressions.
Restricting analysis to phases in which women’s movements focus exclusively on changing gender relations would remove an important dynamic element.
Women’s movements are defined as mobilizations based on appeals to women as a constituency and thus as an organizational strategy.
They address their constituents as women, mothers, sisters, daughters, and bring women into political activities, empower them to challenge limitations, and create networks that enhance their ability to recognize existing gender relations as oppressive.
Feminism is defined as the goal of challenging and changing women’s subordination to men.
Feminist mobilizations are informed by feminist theory, beliefs, and practices, and often encourage women to adopt other social change goals.
Autonomous forms of feminist mobilization are based on organizations and campaigns directed by and to women, taking the form of feminist women’s movements.
Defining feminism has never been simple.
For some feminists, it means combating other forms of political and social subordination, recognizing that equality with men of their class, race, or nation would mean accepting a still-oppressed status.
For others, it means recognizing ways in which male-dominated institutions have promoted destructive values and associating alternative values and social relations with women and women-led groups.
Focusing exclusively on challenging women’s subordination to men would exclude these types of feminism.
Analysts who limit their focus to challenging women’s subordination to men tend to focus on mobilizations of relatively privileged women seeking access to existing social, political, and economic institutions.
Acknowledging the diversity of women’s movements that address feminist goals makes the intersectionality of social movements central to the analysis.
Intersectionality means that oppressions, and movements to combat them, are not apportioned singularly; organizations and individuals are multiply positioned in regard to social relations of power and injustice.
Scholars have tended to construct ideal-typical movements with ideal-typical constituents (e.g., worker’s movements as of and for white men, nationalist movements as of and for indigenous men, feminist movements as of and for white middle-class women).
Organizations might appear feminist or not depending on the immediate focus of their efforts.

The Scope and Range of Women’s Movements

Women’s movements are ubiquitous in contemporary societies.
Women mobilize as women to demand equal rights, confront authoritarian rule, demand peace, call for handgun control, and address various social problems.
Examples include Mothers of East Los Angeles (fighting drug abuse and environmental contamination) and Women’s Light in Tver, Russia (fighting alcohol abuse and fostering women’s political participation).
Addressing women as women can focus attention on problems that women face distinctively or to a greater degree than men do.
Mobilizing women as women may be a response to gendered political opportunity structures for addressing problems that affect the entire community.
The political opportunity for mobilizing women may be distinctively advantageous.
In Chile and East Germany, women’s domestic networks offered them greater protection and moral leverage in challenging dictatorships.
Opportunities to mobilize women may be limited by restrictive laws or by a political culture that makes gender-specific claims problematic.
All women’s movements are rooted in gendered structures of oppression and opportunity and have some actual or potential relation to feminism.
Maxine Molyneux extends the concept of feminism to encompass all women’s organizing, using the term ‘‘pragmatic gender interests’’ for groups whose objectives arise from the concrete conditions of women’s positioning within the gender division of labor and are formulated by the women themselves.
‘‘Strategic gender interests’’ designate those that reflect an ‘‘extra-local,’’ theoretically based ‘‘deductive’’ approach to challenging gender relations.
Molyneux sees only the strategic approach as feminist but argues for politicizing the former demands as contributing to the level of consciousness required to take this more advanced position.
This pragmatic/strategic distinction is frequently cited in the literature and has become widespread within women’s own political organizations.
The strategic/pragmatic model is problematic because it assumes an external theoretical model will permit judging the ‘‘correctness’’ of the analysis that guides the movement, replacing Marxist social analysis with claims for objective feminist truth.
It establishes a hierarchy between the strategic and the pragmatic, in which knowledge from theory is better than experience, and extra-local experts lead local activists.
This is troubling for feminists who found locally situated direct experience to be a potent source of criticism of established theoretical paradigms.
It suggests a single direction of change, in which ‘‘pragmatic’’ movements grow more ‘‘strategic’’ over time, disallowing the alternative dynamic where feminist women’s movements learn to address gender issues in more locally specific ways or adopt a more intersectional and less exclusively gendered analysis over time.
Distinguishing women’s movements (a constituency and organizational strategy) from feminism (a belief system and political goal) opens up the question of how women’s movements relate to feminism as an empirical issue.
The relationship between feminism and women’s movements may vary over time and place, making historical/comparative approaches important.
The diversity of women’s movements globally offers a rich field for developing empirical generalizations about women’s organizing and how such organizing uses feminist concepts.
Women’s movements currently exist in virtually every country and in multiple forms.
The role of feminist goals in these mobilizations should be systematically investigated, as well as the routes by which feminist ideas ‘‘travel’’ between them.
How feminist theories are constructed and spread is important to understanding the relationships among women’s movements transnationally and over time.
Women’s interests are examined as social constructions discursively produced by political struggles.
‘‘Need definition’’ is often the prior stage of politics to struggles over the satisfaction of needs and the focus of social movement mobilization.
Bringing issues of women’s oppression into the realm of politics is a key aspect of women’s self-definition of their needs.
The rhetoric that defines women as a distinctive constituency is critical to creating women’s movements.
Defining who ‘‘women’’ are is a political process, and the inclusions and exclusions created in these definitional struggles are important for understanding the course of specific movements over time.
Women of color in the United States have pointed out the ways in which ‘‘women’’ is often equated with ‘‘white women,’’ where whiteness is treated as an ‘‘unmarked category.’’
Who ‘‘women’’ are understood to be will always be central in defining what ‘‘women’’ need.
This approach brings women’s movement organizations with diverse goals into the center of the analysis, where their work as ‘‘bridge-builders’’ figures in coalition formation, and their focus on multiple, concrete needs makes them central in grass-roots mobilizations.
The practical work of organizing concrete women and the obstacles and opportunities encountered in this process become a basis for theory.
Movement analysts need to explore and explain the reciprocal contributions of grass-roots women’s groups and feminism.
Many local women’s movements adopt a ‘‘strategic essentialism’’ that allows them to focus on politically recognizing women’s differences without claiming any fundamental gender differences in character or rights.
Specific women’s movements may be in a more or less explicit struggle with abstract liberal individualist definitions of ‘‘rights.’’
A model of women’s movements that treats them as contingently and variably related to feminism, and women’s interests as the objects of definitional struggle, opens up such relationships for empirical examination.
Changes over time both toward and away from a primary emphasis on challenging gender relations as a goal need to be explained, as well as differences among women’s movements in their definitions of who ‘‘women’’ are, the exclusivity of the racial/national/ethnic communities to which ‘‘women’’ are loyal, and the relative priority they give to feminist goals in meeting their needs.
Making a women’s movement feminist (or not) is always going to reflect struggle on the part of participants.
Active struggles over defining needs, constituencies, and politics itself become more prominent as elements of all social movement agendas.
What has sometimes been described as ‘‘spillover’’ of ideas from one movement to another looks more like a tug-of-war within necessarily heterogeneous movement groups.

The Historical Context for Feminism and Women’s Movement Mobilization

Contemporary collective actions taken by women are rooted in structures of opportunity that are products of women’s past organizing efforts.
It would be problematic to describe feminist women’s movements as ‘‘new social movements.’’
Autonomous feminist mobilization in the early 1970s received impetus from anti-authoritarian student movements of Europe in the 1960s, the civil rights movement in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, movements for social justice in Latin America, and movements of national liberation in Asia and Africa, but these were not the only sources of their identities, organizations, or political analyses.
Contemporary feminist movements draw on rich lodes of organization and political theory.
Some organizations were embedded within states and international bodies, while others existed within civil society.
In the US, many were organized on racial/ethnic lines, including those that maintained an exclusionary white-only identity.
In Europe, socialist politics from the late nineteenth century on made class rather than race the dividing line for organizing women and defining women’s interests.
A wider historical lens is necessary to understand contemporary groups.

Feminist Women’s Movements are not New Social Movements

Feminism emerged forcefully in the eighteenth century in the writings of political theorists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges.
By the nineteenth century, this was a framework for actual mobilizations of women.
Campaigns for women’s education, the right to vote, to retain their identity and property in marriage, and to participate more fairly and equally in the emerging wage economy animated the mobilization of women in Europe and the United States.
These campaigns were contemporary with and often connected to the emergence of socialism, liberalism, nationalism, and democratization, mobilizations that brought women into the sphere defined as ‘‘political’’ (and thus as male by nature and right).
Feminism provided a rationale for women to mobilize as women in relation to the emergent social relations being constructed in and through markets, educational institutions, political parties, and civic associations.
Women asserted a variety of social and political objectives that extended beyond challenging gender relations.
Women mobilized to end slavery and the slave trade, to obtain more just and humane relations of paid employment, to spread Christian doctrine and European social values, and to protect the weak and marginalized.
The close association between feminism and all sorts of women’s mobilization in the nineteenth century makes it tempting to bring all women’s organizations together under the rubric of ‘‘social justice feminism,’’ but this obscures debates about the relative priority to be given to women’s rights demands and advocacy of other social changes.
American feminists after the Civil War were divided over whether this was ‘‘the Negro’s hour.’’
In the 1880s and 1890s, German feminists divided between those who supported class-based voting rights for women and those who advocated universal suffrage.
From the French Revolution to World War I, debates arose over whether women were ‘‘first patriots and then women’’ or whether ‘‘as a woman, I have no country. . . As a woman, my country is the whole world.’’
The division between ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ social movements is misleading.
The ‘‘old’’ distributive, class-based politics that became institutionally established in Europe in the form of socialist and social democratic parties was energetically involved in active ‘‘needs definition’’ work.
Public debate over economic relations, class interests, and redistributive politics included claims about the gender identities and gendered interests of ‘‘workers’’ and ‘‘citizens.’’
‘‘Old’’ social movements had to construct a sense of shared fate among workers and appeals to their common manhood (and in the US to whiteness) created exclusionary forms of solidarity that still have consequences in specific organizing campaigns among women workers.
A politics of gender, asserting men’s interests as men as well as women’s interests as women, is therefore just as ‘‘old’’ as class politics and is institutionalized in male-led groups and ‘‘women’s auxiliaries’’ within class, race, and other movements.
The emergence of the workplace, the mobilization of men in workplace-based politics, and the organization of political parties centered on unions and class relations are also forms of institutionalizing gender-based repertoires of contentious politics for men that marginalize women.
The struggle between class-based and gender-based priorities remains visible today in the different gender mobilizations and issues emphasized in places where socialist party politics have shaped the political field and those where the political field follows other lines of conflict.
International feminism has also been long enmeshed in struggles over nationalism, racism, colonialism, and popular self-determination, sometimes in conjunction with international socialism and sometimes not.
Women’s gains in insurrectionary periods were often pushed back by the newly institutionalized states, albeit not without resistance.
Defining ‘‘proper’’ gender relations is often an explicit part of the national project because women are charged with the reproduction of peoples.
National women’s movements have long histories of both collaborating with the subordination of other racial/ethnic groups at home and abroad, and of organizing antiracist and anti-imperialist efforts.
The effort to define feminism as ‘‘foreign’’ or ‘‘Western’’ is an act of political resistance to women’s claims that attempts to deny local women’s movements national legitimacy.
The history of feminist claims and women’s movement mobilizations stretches back into the earliest formation of nation-states, political parties, and democratic institutions.
Attacks on the naturalness of patriarchy, as well as defenses of men’s ‘‘traditional’’ right to govern, animate the earliest theorists of the state.
Gender politics continue to be centrally involved in all efforts to think about nature, the person and the citizen, not only in debates over veiling or genital surgery, but also in Western debates over issues such as abortion, prostitution, and women’s military service.

Feminist Women’s Movements Have Long Been Transnational

Feminist women’s movements are also not newly transnational.
The current tendency to define globalization as a new process and transnational organizations as creating unprecedented linkages among previously separate movements is misleading.
The historical trajectory for many contemporary developments might better be understood as a pendulum swing rather than a monotonic line of development.
The already existing international women’s movement was part of the institutional structure that contributed to the creation and revitalization of local and national movements.
Transnational groups and conferences created regional interests in mobilization and pushed the development of national and local movements in certain directions, particularly in embracing a transnational discourse of citizenship, equality, and rights.
In the late nineteenth century, the predominant form of women’s autonomous feminist mobilization was the suffrage organization.
Individual national organizations pressing for the right to vote were already widespread when they came together in the International Women Suffrage Alliance in 1902.
From the 1890s to the 1930s, women’s mobilizations were deeply concerned with issues of citizenship and nationhood, partly expressed in their focus on the vote, but also evident in women’s involvement in nation-building and democratization struggles around the world.
Ruling elites in countries such as Iran, Turkey, and China also saw the demands of ‘‘modernity’’ as including increasing individual rights for women.
Suffrage organizations pressed their case for women’s citizenship so effectively that virtually all states extended women the right to vote by 1950.
No newly independent state after 1950 failed to include women in the franchise.
The value of modernity, its equation with classical liberal values of individualism, independence, and democracy, and the extension of such values to include women, continues to be debated.
Often a ‘‘fundamentalist’’ form of religion stands in active opposition to women’s rights.
The International Council of Women, the Inter-American Commission of Women, the International Women Suffrage Alliance, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom formed an organizational infrastructure for national mobilizations of women in the early part of the century and provided a bridge to the remobilization of women in the 1970s.
Women in the early decades of the twentieth century formed international organizations that had hundreds of thousands of members.
Colonial relationships fostered travel and trade relations in which women also became internationally knowledgeable and experienced actors.
The disruptions of two world wars and the subsequent division of the world into two hostile blocs brought internationalism to an atypical low point by the 1950s and marked the low ebb of women’s activism in Europe and the United States.
The 1950s are the bottom of a curvilinear path taken by many diverse social indicators in the twentieth century: Women’s age at marriage, likelihood of not marrying at all, participation in higher education, formation of women’s social organizations, and explicitly feminist activism are all higher in the 1920s and 1980s than in the 1950s and rates of international trade, formation of international organizations, and immigration also hit bottom in the 1950s.
The current globalization of women’s movements is the resumption of a temporarily suppressed process rather than a wholly new development.
The linkages and legacies of the transnational women’s movement of the early twentieth century demand particular attention.
One direct connection runs through the United Nations, which established its own internal offices to deal with women’s affairs.
The International Women’s Year, celebrated by a worldwide conference in Mexico City in 1975, gave rise to the declaration of the UN’s 1976–85 ‘‘Decade for Women.’’
Women’s movement representatives at the NGO Tribunes and Forums that paralleled the UN assemblies had quite varied interpretations of women’s interests.
Sharp debates about the gender dimensions of issues such as development, poverty, colonialism, and wars of independence characterized the meetings.
Delegates from more affluent countries listened and responded to the critiques raised by women from the global South and began reevaluating their exclusive focus on narrowly defined gender interests.
Women from the global South also found the conference an impetus to challenge their own governments on gender equality and to mobilize in their own national and regional organizations.
Subsequent UN conferences in Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing drew ever-widening circles of women’s NGO participation and continued to foster debate and spur mobilization.
A strong effect of women’s mobilization on the agenda of other transnational organizations became evident.
Population groups took up a discourse of gender, in which women’s education was seen as the key to birth control giving recognition to women as agents and individuals with rights.
Other feminist issues, such as objections to clitoridectomy, revulsion at the use of rape in war, and questions of coercion in prostitution and the international trafficking in women for sex also came increasingly onto the agenda of other UN conferences.
Women in the global South found this use of a human rights frame for feminist demands to be empowering and useful for local and regional mobilization.
The strong current of support for rights talk in the transnational arena reflected an increasing willingness to include women in the definitions of citizenship grounded in classical liberal political theory.
Mobilizations of women in and around international labor organizations pushed a redefinition of women and their needs, redefining ‘‘mothers’’ as ‘‘citizens.’’
Women were represented as a resource for economic development that should not be wasted, and whose progress toward equality was an indicator of modernity.
Nation-states had a growing obligation to produce measures of ‘‘women’s status’’ in education and in the economy, for which they were held internationally accountable.
The women’s movement helped produce the demand from international organizations for such statistics and continues to use such statistical data to push for changes in women’s opportunities in specific nation-states, a classic example of what Keck and Sikkink call a ‘‘boomerang’’ effect.
The connection between feminist women’s mobilizations of the early twentieth century and those of the latter part of the century is direct and organizationally based.
Women’s movements institutionalized in civil society in a variety of formal organizations that survived and spanned ‘‘the doldrums’’ of the middle of the century.
Women’s movements also created direct access into government through winning the suffrage and the right to hold public office.
Women continued to be active internationally in civic organizations and movements.
Local and transnational women’s movements have spurred on each other’s mobilization, and feminist discourses circulate through them.
Women’s movement demands challenged gender relations in expanding the concepts of citizenship and human rights, but also brought gendered analyses into national and international forums on development, poverty, race, urbanization, aging, and other issues.

Women’s Movements and Social Movement Theory

Most ‘‘general’’ movement theory has developed with primary reference to movements led by and directed toward men.
Social movement theory can learn from studies of women’s movements.

Women’s Movements and Social Movement Theory

The ‘‘classic social movement agenda’’ since the early 1970s involves social changes initiating new political opportunities and threats, shifts in mobilizing structures, and reframing of claims, identities, and culturally resonant meanings.
Activities encompassed by these three clusters of concepts influence each other and create integrated repertoires of contention.
Concrete women’s movements will be examined in terms of these three clusters of concepts, integrating all three into the overall idea of gendered repertoires of contention in movements that address gendered opportunities through gendered structures of mobilization with gendered rhetorics of meaning.
Social/political structures, opportunities, organizations, and frames are gendered.
Analysts need to study women’s movements with attention to gender and make all social movement theory attentive to the gender dynamics that shape mobilization.
Not all feminist mobilization is autonomous, but all social movements in a gendered society use gendered repertoires of contention.
A long-term view of history and social change is essential for understanding the origins, outcomes, and dynamics of women’s movements, and most social movement theories have taken an approach that is too short term.

Political Opportunity Structures

Political opportunity structures were initially conceptualized as the given alignments of potential allies and opponents faced by a potential social movement within a single nation.
Current social movement theorists define opportunity structures as comprising temporally stable elements, formal institutional arrangements and cultural patterns and expectations, in addition to dynamic elements.
This view of politics and opportunities is helpful in considering which elements support and undercut the emergence and effects of women’s movements.
Political opportunity structures are specifically gendered.
Political opportunity is not gender neutral for individuals or groups.
Women under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile had opportunities not open to men to demand protection and support for their families because their needs and protests were defined as less ‘‘political.’’
Women have long drawn on a political tradition of gendered opportunity that connects women’s responsibility to feed and protect their families to women’s rights to make claims on state and society.
The women’s march to Versailles in 1789 demanding bread was one of the opening salvos of the French Revolution.
Mobilizations of women have drawn on similar imagery of maternal care to legitimize challenging political actions.
Studies of Black women in the American civil rights movement emphasize their role as early innovators of resistance strategies and point to the significance of their own gender-specific organizations.
Some understand this sort of gendered mobilization as inherent in the position of women as the universal caregivers.
Women are apparently overrepresented in both early and informal forms of resistance and rebellion because women’s movements respond to a long-term organization of political opportunity by gender that is part of the organization of state and nonstate forms of authority.
The factors that privilege access to modern state and party systems are strongly gendered in their social organization, institutionally disadvantaging women in contests waged on ‘‘men’s’’ terrain.
Women are more likely to organize outside the formal polity, in community and grass-roots contexts that are gendered female, which may provide protective coloration in a wide variety of dictatorships and other conditions of marginal opportunity for male mobilization.
Women will mobilize as women, and frequently in the absence of men, when the risks are exceedingly high and when women’s maternal role and existing networks render their political roles invisible.
Women peace activists used the separation of public and private in state socialism to pursue dissident ‘‘politics around the kitchen table.’’
Women have lost their former leadership roles in recently unified Germany, where ‘‘politics’’ now means reliance on political parties in which women are organizationally disadvantaged.
Women activists may be slow to define grass-roots community organizing and ‘‘bridge leadership’’ as being really ‘‘politics.’’
Women construct nonfamilial but also nonpolitical community work, quintessentially bridging these domains.
A rhetoric of male-dominated politics as untrustworthy, corrupt, self-serving, unresponsive may create the space for women to do such ‘‘antipolitics.’’
This gender division of labor flows from the definition of formal politics as male and that women are responsible for the home, obscuring the essential political labor being done by women in their local communities.
Grass-roots organizing faces a structure of opportunity that differs from ephemeral forms of street-level protest and the creation of more formal social movement organizations, particularly on gender lines.
Women more readily serve as activists in long-term organizing.
As opportunities arise for community groups to gain public recognition and become more ‘‘conventionally political,’’ women and women’s groups tend to lose or withdraw from public leadership roles.
Because gender segregation leaves an alternative geography of opportunity open to women more than to men, women’s political openings and allies are more to be found in the institutional domains defined as ‘‘apolitical’’: communities, grass-roots civic organizations, social work, and social services.
Maternalist mobilizations are organized efforts to mobilize the power of civil society against ‘‘politics as usual,’’ which is still defined as male.
Issues that can be defined as ‘‘women’s’’ can offer an entre´ for women’s groups and networks to make inroads in formal politics.
Defining building democratic community groups as something at which women excel has given women’s groups a means to appeal for support from international donors.
At the World Bank, women have achieved their greatest success in bringing gendered concerns to bear on bank policies where they support conventional understandings of women’s reproductive responsibilities for health, population, and education, and less success with arguments based on gender equality.
Studies of women’s movements point to the analytic usefulness of acknowledging a relationship between gender and political opportunity, linking gendered leadership to opportunities for long-term organizing, and finding out how change in gendered opportunity arises out of and affects the actions of women and men throughout the entire cycle of protest.

Forms of Mobilization

Women’s movements respond to opportunity through mobilizing structures and strategies that may differ systematically from men’s, although the differences may be because of differences in emphasis among scholars of women’s and men’s movements.
Emotion has only recently come to be studied in nonfeminist movements but was previously recognized in women’s movement mobilizations.
Women’s movements rarely attempt to organize political parties, seize direct control of the state, or use political violence.
The interplay between opportunity and mobilization strategy affects the organizations that movements develop, with specific studies of women’s movements suggesting general ideas about the interplay between more and less formal organizational strategies.
Movement organizations are not preexistent collective actors.
Social movements in the later part of the twentieth century sought to move collectively into institutional structures and change them from the inside out, different from establishing alternative institutions or the revolutionary impulse to conquer, destroy, and replace states and institutions.
When social movements move into institutions, they move as organized collective entities trying to change the institution’s goals, decision-making, or modes of operation.
Feminist mobilizations within the Catholic Church and the US military adopt different strategies for social change, each reflecting different contexts of opportunity and resources.
Catholic feminists, lacking outside leverage, have adopted a strategy of discursive politics.
Women in the US military can use rights discourse as a resource in the courts and in administrative rule-setting.
Feminist adaptation to institutionalized opportunities has led to differences in mobilization strategies and types of success.
The interweaving of strategic choice and perceived opportunity is not accidental, and mobilization practices institutionalize opportunity.
Institutional contexts provide incentives to movements to choose certain types of strategies, and women’s movements adopt different strategies from time to time and place to place.
The contrast between a discursive politics about values and a politics of rights and access is a common strategic distinction.
Naming women as women, a constituency with distinctive experiences and interests, frequently vies with strategies that focus on downplaying differences of gender.
Among feminists, strategies that adapt to institutions are often in conflict with strategies that entail staying ‘‘outside and casting blame.’’
Debates within feminist organizations may focus on practical work, such as racial inclusivity in staffing and services.
Women’s choices of mobilization strategies and tactics are deeply embedded in institutional practices.
The resource mobilization approach initially took the language of corporate organization as its dominant metaphor for thinking about movement organizations, guiding toward theorizing the hierarchical, centralized, formalized organization as the normative social movement organization.
Juxtaposed to this were the nonhierarchical, decentralized, branching networks that were more typical of some women’s movements and some ‘‘new social movements’’ in Europe as well as the ‘‘participatory democracy’’ mode of organizing among a younger generation on the Left.
The synthesis into a comparative political process model seems to have resolved the tension at the cost of not considering historical transformations in strategy as something to be explained.
Network-like informal groups have remained more common for longer among feminists in Europe, while American feminist groups shifted to more conventional lobby-like structures.
The new social movement groups emphasized a style of decentralized organizing that was not in the corporate model and focused on identitization and ‘‘lifestyle’’ politics in daily life.
Using lifestyle to challenge social exclusion and subordination is not a new strategy, but it competes with strategies that are more adapted to gaining access and influence within formal, state-centered politics.
Working-class organizations have moved far away from a politics of daily life, making the new (nonclass-based) movements appear more radical by contrast.
Feminist politics become more anchored in party caucuses and electoral systems in Europe, one could predict a shift away from discursive and toward more access-oriented strategies.
Formal-bureaucratic and collectivist-lifestyle organizational types do not necessarily conflict within a movement but may offer synergistic advantages.
The least advantaged subgroups in the movement have the most to gain by not narrowing the repertoire of contention to more formally political strategies.
When the analysis of oppressive relations focuses on institutions other than the state, discursive and informal repertoires of contention may be especially suitable.
Strategic choices of organizational form as necessarily dichotomous or exclusionary would be a mistake.
Networks were a particularly valued and useful organizational structure in their own right in women's movement organizations.
Students of women’s movements have looked critically at the use of the advocacy network as a form of taking movements inside institutions, contrasting this with the model of mass movements on the streets and the more lifestyle approaches.
The differences between and transitions among these three broad types of organizational forms may be clearest when one looks at women’s movements, since all three types of mobilizing strategies have been commonly found there since the nineteenth century.
Women’s movement campaigns based on conferences were a significant part of organizational basis of first-wave feminist mobilization and conferences are a resource for building networks regionally around the globe and as a melting pot of advocacy and lifestyle politics.
Because conferences are both organizational and interpersonal, they offer a particularly useful melding of advocacy network and lifestyle politics as well as being a tool that women’s movements rely on disproportionately more than men.
Organizational repertoires may be broader, more strategic, and more interconnected than dominant ways of conceptualizing social movements suggest.
The long time span of feminist movements and the variety of their organizational forms has encouraged women’s studies scholars to pay more attention to the transitions between types of organization and the strategic implications of organizational form.
Taking full account of scholarship on women’s movements would tend to direct the social movement research agenda toward acknowledging a more diverse and varying organizational repertoire.

Ideologies and Frames for Women’s Movements

The ‘‘cultural turn’’ in social movement theory has placed increasing emphasis on discourses, making distinctions between terms such as ideologies, beliefs, frames, and grievances.
Giving attention to ideas helps consider both micro (social psychological) and macro (institutional cultural) dynamics that the meso-level organizational emphasis of the 1980s had neglected.
At the cultural level of institutions, the organization of public and private as gendered spheres in modern societies creates specific contradictions that are often the locus of movement debates.
Notions of a world polity with norms negotiated in transnational venues challenge ‘‘realist’’ visions and value structures are important to what movements do and claim.
Liberal democracy, while it defined the rights of man also premised the exercise of these formal rights on a social position as a head of a household, one who was autonomously able to enter into contracts, participate in labor markets, and exercise free choice, making it unconceivable to some that women could or should be included as appropriate political actors.
If women are free citizens on these terms, the family and morality seem to be at risk, and resistance to feminism has been framed as the ‘‘decline of the family,’’ ‘‘women’s selfishness,’’ and the ‘‘natural’’ demands of eugenics/sociobiology.
Gender politics is therefore misunderstood by focusing only on feminist women’s movements, and not recognizing those men’s movements that raise reactionary claims.
Despite the expansion of the franchise and women’s political participation around the globe, discourses of familial domesticity and religious fundamentalism continue to cast women as the preservers of ‘‘tradition’’ and reservoirs of moral values on whose subordination the good of the nation depends.
Gender ideologies are core arguments that movements develop and depend on for frames that will resonate with socially institutionalized values.
Antifeminist and antimodernist goals can be used to mobilize reactionary women’s movements, too because current events drive social movement analysts