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The Politics of Women's Rights
Here Christina Wolbrecht boldly demonstrates how the Republican and Democratic parties have helped transform, and have been transformed by, American public debate and policy on women's rights. She begins by showing the evolution of the positions of both parties on women's rights over the past five decades. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Republicans were slightly more favorable than Democrats, but by the early 1980s, the parties had polarized sharply, with Democrats supporting, and Republicans opposing, such policies as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. Wolbrecht not only traces the development of this shift in the parties' relative positions--focusing on party platforms, the words and actions of presidents and presidential candidates, and the behavior of the parties' delegations in Congress--but also seeks to explain the realignment.
The author considers the politically charged developments that have contributed to a redefinition and expansion of the women's rights agenda since the 1960s--including legal changes, the emergence of the modern women's movement, and changes in patterns of employment, fertility, and marriage. Wolbrecht explores how party leaders reacted to these developments and adopted positions in ways that would help expand their party's coalition. Combined with changes in those coalitions--particularly the rise of social conservatism within the GOP and the affiliation of social movement groups with the Democratic party--the result was the polarization characterizing the parties' stances on women's rights today.
eBook
Should We Stay or Should We Go? Local and National Factionalism in the National Organization for Women
While the National Organization for Women (NOW) has endured over time, it has faced significant internal factionalism. In this article, I ask why some of these factions resulted in schisms, while other factions persisted in NOW over time. This is a critical question for understanding how organizational location and factional collective identities combine to produce different outcomes when internal conflict breaks out. My analysis of interview, archival, and secondary data indicates that organizational location influences factions’ independent collective identities, shaping what they want and their perceptions of opportunities to change their organization. Compared to national level factions, local factions also lack the ability to use NOW’s hierarchical structure to their advantage in their effort to stay. This sheds lights on the distinct patterns of factionalism and schism in formalized groups.
Journal Article
Social Movement Communities and Cycles of Protest: The Emergence and Maintenance of a Local Women's Movement
Social movement theorists have argued that multiple movements emerge during cycles of protest in response to political opportunities. This article develops the concept of a \"social movement community\" and contends that the culture and community of a protest cycle, rather than political opportunities, attract many participants and provide organizational and tactical opportunities for new movements. I examine historical changes in the local women's movement community in Bloomington, Indiana, to explain how some movements are able to endure, and even thrive, after the decline of a protest cycle; their individual movement communities sustain activists and sometimes partially recreate the atmosphere of a protest cycle.
Journal Article
Help Wanted NOW: Legal Resources, the Women's Movement, and the Battle Over Sex-Segregated Job Advertisements
This article further develops the “political process” model of social movements by analyzing historical transformations in the women's movement and equal employment policy in the mid-to-late 1960s. Confronting the model's tendency to treat social movements exclusively as a dependent variable, I outline an interactive political process framework. My framework considers not only how movements are enabled and constrained by the broader political environment, but also how challengers in turn actively reshape that environment. I also revisit the political process model's core concept of “political opportunity structure” by exploring legal rules and institutions as key elements of a movement's opportunity structure. I apply this framework specifically to initial legal battles over sex-segregated help-wanted ads and formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Historical evidence suggests that NOW was both the recipient and creator of political opportunities embedded in equal employment law, and that mobilization of legal resources isone wayin which social movements interact with and transform their broader political environment.
Journal Article
Producing Public Voice: Resource Mobilization and Media Access in the National Organization for Women
This paper investigates the resource mobilization and media access of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Using data from NOW's archive and from a content analysis of the New York Times, it tracks NOW's 1966–1980 media access. Two factors were key to NOW's media access. First, NOW mobilized the material resources—money, skills, technology, labor, and especially information—needed to serve as a news source for journalists. Second, NOW developed effective and reflexive media strategies by using its knowledge of the routines and discursive structures of news in its own media communications.
Journal Article
Organizational Dynamics and Construction of Multiple Feminist Identities in the National Organization for Women
Through an analysis of two National Organization for Women chapters, the author finds that members construct multiple feminist identities that vary in collective definitions of feminism, the overall strategies adopted, and organizational culture. To explain these variations, the author analyzes meso-level relations between the organization and the environment, issues of diversity, and leadership continuity. This study illustrates how organizational factors intertwine to shape how participants come to view themselves and the political and cultural environment surrounding them. With the current research focus either on the larger political environment or individual characteristics, meso-level factors are often overlooked in examinations of social movement dynamics. 36 References [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications, Inc.]
Journal Article
Civic Engagement and Voluntary Associations: Reconsidering the Role of the Governance Structures of Advocacy Groups
Despite the ubiquity of politically oriented voluntary associations, many scholars are unimpressed with the opportunities available for civic participation within the interest group sector. I argue that the dismissal of interest groups as insignificant contributors to civic life has been hasty. We lack data regarding the avenues available to group members to participate in ways other than check writing. Analyzing the political infrastructure of the National Organization for Women (NOW), I show that understanding the internal structure and political dynamics of advocacy groups can contribute to the debate about whether and how member-based political groups impact citizens' political engagement. Specifically, the governance structure of such groups reveals the extent to which members are, or could be, significant partners in decision-mailing processes. Finally, I note the contributions associations such as NOW make to the civic education of citizens as well as to the provision of \"free spaces\" for the exchange of ideas among them.
Journal Article
Inventing equal opportunity
Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.
Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take \"affirmative action\" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues.
Inventing Equal Opportunityreveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.
eBook