[Paper for ECPR Gender and Politics Conference, Belfast, January 2009]
Premature obituaries: How can we tell if social movements are over?
Marian Sawer and Sarah Maddison
Australian National University and University of NSW
‘The women’s movement is over’
(cover story NY Times magazine, 1981)
In this paper we examine why it could be concluded as long as 30 years ago that the
women's movement was 'over' at a time when its influence in many countries was just
gathering speed. Since the 1980s there has been a steady increase in the presence of
women in parliaments, with the dip caused by the collapse of the communist world
compensated for by the global mobilisation for electoral quotas for women from the
1990s. The same period has seen the global spread of government machinery for the
advancement of women, aided by feminist officials in multilateral organizations and
feminist non-government networks. There has been the worldwide dissemination of
campaigns such as the White Ribbon (anti-violence) and Pink Ribbon (breast cancer)
campaigns, the multiplication of feminist websites, blogs and email lists. Feminist
vocational organisations have proliferated, including those within political science
and the law. On the other hand, the same period, has seen the disappearance of many
feminist presses and bookshops, the replacement of women’s studies sections in
university bookshops by ever-increasing shelf-space devoted to war and terrorism
studies and the disinclination of many young women to identify with feminism.
We begin with some background concerning the effects of women’s movements in
terms of the representation of women in public decision-making and of gender
machinery within government. We then develop an argument that propositions
concerning the death of the women’s movement emanate not just from the short
attention span of the media or the desire to neutralise gender claims but, more
fundamentally, from the terms in which social movements have been understood. We
build on the work of Verta Taylor and others who have pointed to the lack of fit
between propositions derived from male-dominated movements such as the anti-war
and student movements of the 1960s and the nature of the women’s movement. This
2
is where we introduce definitions of women’s movements which encompass the
continuity of organised gendered claims-making and women’s-centred discourses that
challenge the existing social order without necessarily involving disruptive collective
action or the kinds of repertoires often used to distinguish social movements from
other political actors.
Background
What could lead the mass media to include the women's movement was 'over'
when its influence in many countries was just beginning to be registered? For
example, if we look at the representation of women in parliament as an indicator of
women's movement influence, this takes a sharp upward turn in OECD countries in
the 1980s, as women's movement influence flows through into political parties (Fig
1). Increasingly in the 1990s the absence of women from public decision-making was
accepted as a sign of democratic deficit and the monitoring of the parliamentary
presence of women became routinised as a measure included in democratic
assessment (Sawer 2009). In some cases, increasing the parliamentary presence of
women became seen as a means towards achieving anti-corruption goals. However,
regardless of the mixed motives inspiring some actors, the parliamentary absence of
women became a rallying point for women’s non-government organizations (NGOs)
and a priority issue for the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action adopted by 189
countries.
One approach to increasing the parliamentary presence of women, the adoption of
electoral quotas, became an international movement that spread swiftly around the
globe, being adopted in over 100 countries by 2008 (Krook 2008). This movement
might be spearheaded by women’s NGOs but was greatly assisted by feminist
officials in donor agencies and in multilateral bodies including the United Nations
(UN), the European Union (EU), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the
International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The women’s
wing of the Socialist International was another significant player in promoting the
adoption of electoral quotas by social democratic parties. The presence of women was
being tied not just to the goal of equal citizenship but also to issues of substantive
representation of women. Parliaments were encouraged to have bodies mandated to
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focus on issues of gender equality and the gender effects of legislation, and the
number of such bodies also increased substantially – in 2008 the IPU found 93 such
parliamentary committees in 80 countries (IPU 2008: 65).
Another indicator of successful agenda-setting on the presence of women in public
decision-making is the presence of women in national Cabinets and the allocation of
portfolios. Between 1999 and 2007 the percentage of women in Cabinets worldwide
rose from 8.7 per cent to 15.2 per cent and by 2007 there were 22 countries where
women were 30 per cent or more of Cabinet members (WEDO 2008).
Women in Parliament (OECD)*
30
Percentage of
parliamentarians who are
women
25
Percent
20
* This data is drawn from the 20
OECD countries that have been
continuing democracies, with
universal suffrage, since 1949.
15
10
5
0
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
Decade
1990s
2000s
If we take a different indicator of women’s movement influence, the establishment of
women’s policy machinery within government, this also picks up speed at a time
when newspapers were proclaiming the death of feminism. At the international level,
the UN Decade for Women (1976–85) was a time when machinery of government
was being set up in many countries to implement the provisions of the World Plan of
Action agreed in 1975. By 1985 more than two-thirds of UN member states (127
countries) had adopted such machinery and by 2004 it was165 countries (UNDAW
2005). In other words there was increased adoption of specialised machinery within
government to promote gender equality and the creation of institutional space, both
with parliaments and the bureaucracy, mandated to focus on the gender effects of
policy.
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Women’s movement influence was also being enshrined in significant new
international instruments, such as UN Security Council Resolution 1325 adopted in
2000, which dealt specifically with the impact of war on women, including sexual
violence, and with women’s role in conflict resolution and peace building. It called on
all member States to increase the participation of women in decision-making and to
mainstream a gender perspective in peacekeeping operations. Also in 2000, the goal
of gender equality and the empowerment of women became Goal 3 of the UN
Millennium Development Goals.
In the face of such evidence of women’s movement influence it might seem odd to
believe that the women’s movement was ‘over’. In the next section we examine some
of the reasons that this conclusion could be reached.
Reasons for premature obituaries
One reason for premature obituaries is the media’s short attention span and constant
search for ‘news’. An on-going movement is not ‘news’ unless it can be depicted in
terms of violent contestation and, preferably, in terms of being at war with itself. If it
is not engaged in newsworthy contestation (even International Women’s Day marches
rarely receive news coverage today) then it must be ‘over’ and this may be worthy of
articles of ‘women’s movement ends with a whimper’ variety.
A more interesting reason for premature obituaries is the way in which the study of
social movements has been dominated by models developed on the basis of male-led
movements. For example, political process theory (PPT), with its origins in the USA,
made the employment of non-institutionalised disruptive action the defining feature of
social movements and what distinguished them from other political actors. Charles
Tilly, provided historical explanations of how such new repertoires of protest emerged
while Sidney Tarrow (1995) developed a life-cycle model of such movements,
arguing that by their nature, as non-institutionalised mass movements, they cannot be
sustained for long. Their adoption of more institutional forms, incorporation into
existing institutions, or their collapse altogether is seen as inevitable. The limited life
of movements relates to their inability to sustain the emotions that fuel them,
including rage at injustice (Goodwin et al 2001). This view of social movement life
cycles lends itself to proclamations of a movement’s death when the activities of
5
movement activists are no longer visible. Either the movement’s claims were
accommodated and institutionalised or else the movement failed, but either way the
movement was ‘over’.
However, as has been pointed out by many women’s movement scholars, the focus on
disruptive action does not fit the history or repertoires of the women’s movement.
Women’s movements have much less often been engaged in disruptive or violent
action than male-led movements and have characteristically relied on different
(although not necessarily less challenging) repertoires (Rucht 2003). In other words,
the popular assumption that the women's movement was 'over', relied on a definition
of a social movement tied to particular repertoires of action that were not necessarily
characteristic of women's movements. While the women’s movement has drawn
inspiration from ‘heroic’ moments of disruptive action, such as the militancy of the
English suffragettes, the absence of such actions in countries such as Australia and
New Zealand is insufficient to declare there was no women’s movement there in the
late 19th or early 20th centuries.
The idea that a social movement might be 'over' when it was no longer visibly
engaged in public contestation did not coincide with feminist views that there had
always been a women's movement over the past century (Spender 1983; Lake 1999).
In response to such dilemmas of how to define social movements and whether social
movements could still be said to exist when they became relatively unobtrusive social
theorists, most notably Verta Taylor, began instead to develop the concept of social
movement abeyance (Taylor 1989).
The term 'abeyance' refers to a holding process by which movements sustain
themselves in non-receptive political environments. The women's movement might no
longer be visible on the streets but still be working its way through institutions, and be
alive within submerged networks, cultural production and everyday living (Whittier
1995; Maddison 2004). Women’s may be involved in multilateral institutions and it is
claimed that feminist activism within cyberspace has become 'a new form of
consciousness-raising and one that has taken on a global perspective' (Rowe 2008).
6
Meanwhile women's organisations may become more specialised and
professionalised. They may turn away from direct policy engagement and public
contestation, when this has few returns, and focus more on commemorative activities
that validate collective identities and values (Sawer 2008). While this may result in
policy costs, it may also enable the ‘unobtrusive’ survival or submerged existence of
women’s movement challenges to dominant cultural codes. The key concept is that
abeyance periods are characterised by a retreat from contentious political action but
the sustaining of women-centred discourses.
This part of our argument may make it sound as though we are rejecting one form of
social movement theorizing (PPT) only to embrace another – the stress on meaning
construction and submerged networks found in the work of Alberto Melucci and other
new social movement (NSM) theorists. Melucci describes submerged networks as
‘small groups submerged in everyday life which require a personal involvement in
experiencing and practicing cultural innovation’ , which might seem a close fit for the
women’s movement (Melucci 1985:80). However, we suggest that there are also
problems with this approach, because of the focus on the ‘newness’ of the postmateralist movements and the overlooking of the genealogy of the women’s
movement.
There has been a continuity of gendered claims-making over the last century or so,
providing historical resonance to such claims, even if they are not on the nightly
news. Women have struggled for equal citizenship, for control of their bodies, for
recognition of their claims as mothers and workers. In doing so they have identified
with women’s past struggles and drawn upon them as inspiration for present action.
When we talk about women’s movement identity, this includes identifying with past
as well as present generations of women (Dahlerup 2004).
Defining women’s movements
Our definition of women’s movements has three aspects:

Mobilising collective identity as women

Sustaining the challenge of women-centred discourses
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•
Making claims on behalf of women
This brings our characterisation of women’s movements close to that offered by
Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, who in turn draw on Jane Mansbridge and Karen
Beckwith: ‘A women’s movement means collective action by women organized
explicitly as women presenting claims in public life based on gendered identities as
women’ (McBride & Mazur 2008). Like ours, this definition of women’s movement
does not make the use of disruptive repertoires a necessary element of the movement.
Hence the absence of such repertoires does not indicate that a movement is
necessarily in decline or is ‘over’. Gendered claims-making may become
institutionalized inside and outside the state, although it is always likely to be
precarious. Indeed the inclusion in our definition of the challenge of sustaining
women-centred discourses acknowledges the crucial role played by women’s
organisations in sustaining such discourses in the context of gender-blind discourses
such as those of neo-liberalism.
Women’s movements operate in different arenas, using a wide variety of repertoires,
which may include disruptive action but also many other forms of challenge. One of
the best known is that of consciousness-raising – working in small groups to raise the
awareness of women of the ways in which problems experienced as individuals are
shared by other women and socially produced rather than a consequence of personal
inadequacy. While this technique requires the trust established in small groups,
disruptive action may be used to get the message out via the media to broader groups
of women.
Women-centred discourses and claims-making may also be institutionalised in and
promulgated by non-government organizations, vocational bodies, women’s units in
government and women’s services. Women’s units established in Australian
governments in the 1970s institutionalised the feminist insight that no public policy
could be assumed to be gender-neutral in its effects given the different location of
men and women in the social division of labour. Women’s services may
institutionalise explanations of domestic violence as arising from systemic
inequalities between men and women rather than from family dysfunction.
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Women-centred discourses may also be sustained through cultural production, such as
films, books, music, art, theatre, websites or blogs. This form of expressive politics
has been crucial to maintaining a feminist political space during hostile or
unfavourable political periods. Challenges to gender norms may also take place in the
politics of everyday life and personalised resistance to gendered inequalities.
Not all these modes of operation will necessarily occur at the same time, although
they may be more simultaneous than allowed for in PPT, where institutionalisation is
expected to follow from a period of contentious action rather than to be engaged in
simultaneously, as has often occurred with the women’s movement.
Is the women’s movement over?
Kate Nash, in her interesting article exploring this question, cites Alberto Melucci to
the effect that a social movement requires both a common identity and a common
adversary. In the absence of these a movement is over and replaced by micropolitics.
Nash suggests that in the United Kingdom, or at least in the English part of it, the
mobilising of collective identity as women has been actively rejected, particularly by
young women. Gendered claims-making is seen as necessarily involving the
suppression of multiple identities as well as the construction of men as the enemy (the
image of the feminist as a ‘man-hater’). There may be a problem here in the idea that
a social movement requires a common adversary – gendered claims-making has come
up against a range of adversaries, particularly in recent years the neo-liberal push to
eliminate the labour market regulation required for equal opportunity. It is too simple
to suggest that the adversary of the women’s movement was men – over time the
women’s movement has been contesting cultural traditions and economic laissez-faire
as well the institutional conservatism of church and state.
The idea that the mobilising of gender identity required the suppression of competing
claims arising from social and racial diversity also tends to be a retrospective reading
of the nature of 1970s feminism (Henderson 2006). Gendered claims-making then as
now often involved demands for consultation with diverse communities of women as
a routine component of policy development. We would claim that there is sufficient
9
international evidence of such gendered claims-making to reject the suggestion that
the women’s movement is over. Nonetheless, it is clear that in Western democracies
the inroads of neo-liberalism have weakened many forms of collective identity,
including that of the women’s movement, offering in their place the chimera of
individual choice and consumerism. The lack of visibility of the women’s movement
and the cessation of disruptive action has weakened the political base for women’s
policy at the national level, even while important international gains are being made.
Hence we would suggest that on our definition the women’s movement is definitely
continuing, although in many places it may be characterised as in abeyance rather
than involved in active contestation with the state.
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