The Women's Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet

Australia in transnational perspective

Sarah Maddison, Marian Sawer, Sarah Maddison, Marian Sawer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415830904
• eBook ISBN: 9781134441099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The death of feminism is regularly proclaimed in the West. Yet at the same time feminism has never had such an extensive presence, whether in international norms and institutions, or online in blogs and social networking campaigns. This book argues that the women's movement is not over; but rather social movement theory has led us to look in the wrong places.

This book offers both methodological and theoretical innovations in the study of social movements, and analyses how the trajectories of protest activity and institution-building fit together. The rich empirical study, together with focused research on discursive activism, blogging, popular culture and advocacy networks, provides an extraordinary resource, showing how the women's movements can survive the highs and lows and adapt in unexpected ways. Expert contributors explore the ways in which the movement is continuing to work its way through institutions, and persists within submerged networks, cultural production and in everyday living, sustaining itself in non-receptive political environments and maintaining a discursive feminist space for generations to come. Set in a transnational perspective, this book trace the legacies of the Australian women's movement to the present day in protest, non-government organisations, government organisations, popular culture, the Internet and the Slut Walk.

The Women's Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet will be of interest to international students and scholars of gender politics, gender studies, social movement studies and comparative politics.

1 Finding the women's movement

Marian Sawer

For more than 30 years obituaries have been appearing for the second-wave women's movement, in what has been called ‘false feminist death syndrome’. By 1998 Time magazine is said to have run 119 death of feminism stories.¹ The grounds for pronouncing death are rarely clear. Some believe that feminism is no longer relevant because equality has already been ‘done’. There is often thinly disguised irritation that feminist claims-making is still happening, at least in Western democracies. Or else there is a lack of knowledge that such claims are still being made, perhaps because of lack of media interest. The women's movement is no longer ‘new’ and therefore is no longer ‘news’. The women's movement has outlived the attention span of the media.

Some suggest that generational change has taken place and that the women's movement is no longer relevant to young women, just as happened in the aftermath of suffrage mobilisation when ‘flappers’ supposedly became more interested in exploring their new social freedoms than in changing the world. Others argue that gender identity is now so unstable and intersects with so many other identities that it can no longer provide a basis for political action. We believe that this potential for political action still exists, even if it is absent from our television screens. This book contests the obituaries, setting out to find the women's movement in one country and to show how it has sustained itself over time, even when the times have not suited it.

As stated in the Preface and in greater detail in the Appendix, our findings are based on large-scale quantitative data relating to institutions and protest events in Australia as well as focused research on the mapping of discursive and advocacy communities. This is the first time that institutions arising from a women's movement have been so comprehensively mapped, enabling their trajectories to be examined in relation to protest event activity. We believe the findings are relevant not only to the study of women's movements in other Western democracies but also to the study of other social movements.

It is true that the Australian women's movement, like other Western feminist movements, is less visible than when it was receiving headline media treatment in the 1970s. As Sylvia Walby suggests, this is partly because:

New forms of feminism have emerged that no longer take the form of a ‘traditional’ social movement, being institutionalised instead in civil society and the state. These new institutional forms are less recognisable as feminist by those who are accustomed to thinking of feminism as merely visible protest.²

But beyond the question of social movement form and visibility, we also contend that the way in which social movements themselves have been theorised has proven inadequate for understanding women's movements. As shown in the Preface, one influential approach developed in the United States made the employment of non-institutionalised action the defining feature of social movements, the thing that distinguished them from other political actors. On this reading, movements lacked institutional resources and hence engaged in a distinctive repertoire of contestation.³ Identifying movements with a particular repertoire based on protest events meant in turn that the activity or life cycle of movements could be measured quantitatively, through protest event databases. While such measurement can tell us interesting things, and indeed is used in this book, it focuses on only one of the multiple ways in which social movements operate and tells us little about the meaning of these events for participants. It also privileges this mode of operating over others that may be more characteristic of women's movements.⁴

Another influential approach to theorising social movements came from Europe and is particularly identified with the work of Alberto Melucci.⁵ It appears more relevant to our purposes than early resource mobilisation or political process theory, having an emphasis on identity-creation and meaning-making and on movements as submerged social networks. However it ties the appearance of new social movements to a particular point in history when there was scope for the appearance of movements based on postmaterialist values.

Yet as Drude Dahlerup argues in the next chapter, the women's movement has been a continuous movement for more than a century, so cannot be tied to a particular post-industrial moment. Our approach builds on the work of others who have pointed to the lack of fit between propositions derived from male-dominated movements and the nature of the women's movement.⁶ We see women's movements as challenging the existing social order through gendered claims-making and women-centred discourses, without this necessarily involving disruptive collective action. In other words, we argue that institutionalisation is part of how the women's movement has always operated. This has brought us to define women's movements in the following terms:

• mobilising collective identity as women;

• sustaining women-centred discourses;

• making claims that challenge the existing gender order.

This combination of characteristics brings us close to the definition offered by Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, who understand women's movements as comprising of ‘collective action by women organized explicitly as women presenting claims in public life based on gendered identities as women’.⁷ We don't bring the word ‘feminist’ into our definition because, as we shall discuss below, there have been times when women's movements were doing all the things in our definition but distanced themselves from word ‘feminism’ – the early years of Women's Liberation are but one example of this.

If we no longer rely on disruptive action as a defining element of a social movement, then this has implications for the kind of longevity we can attribute to a movement. Social movement theorist Sidney Tarrow developed a life-cycle model of such movements, arguing that by their nature, as non-institutionalised mass movements, they could not be sustained for long.⁸ A movement's adoption of more institutional forms, incorporation into existing institutions, or collapse altogether, was seen as inevitable. This view of social movement life cycles lends itself to proclamations of the death of a movement when the activities of movement activists are no longer visible. Either the movement's claims are accommodated and institutionalised or else the movement fails, but either way the movement is ‘over’. In such life cycle theories of social movements, institutionalisation means ‘the substitution of the routines of organised politics for the disorder of life in the streets’.⁹ There is a general assumption that institutionalisation is something that comes after, replaces or usurps the role of social movements and signals the end of the potentially transformative phase of political action.

As we have seen in the Preface, social movement theorists themselves increasingly acknowledge that the original dichotomy between contentious and conventional politics was too sharply drawn. Nonetheless, there is still a strong tendency to see institutionalisation as a strategy mistakenly adopted by social movements, which leads to co-option and displacement of goals. This negative perception of institutionalisation precludes asking how social movement agendas can be sustained over time, even as the form of engagement changes.

In contrast, a definition such as ours opens the way for greater understanding of the ways in which movement goals can be pursued through creating institutions, as well as through non-institutional action. As we shall see from the quantitative data presented in subsequent chapters of this book, institution-building can take place at the same time as non-institutional contentious action, rather than following from a period of contentious action as sometimes suggested by social movement theory. The inclusion in our definition of a discursive element acknowledges the significance of cultural production as well as the role of women's organisations in sustaining women-centred discourses through difficult times. Thanks to the Internet such organisations now use social networking and blogs to affirm values and maintain feminist rage, often through feminist humour, as do the feminist on-line communities discussed by Frances Shaw in Chapter 8.

This chapter looks at how, in terms of our definition, the women's movement has had a continuous existence since the nineteenth century, even as it has diversified and as its repertoire and agenda have changed. We find that despite such changes, activists continue to identify with previous struggles. This justifies our argument that this is the same movement manifesting itself in ways that are both the same and different.

Women's movement repertoires

As we argue above, the idea that the women's movement is ‘over’ is tied both to negative perceptions of institutionalisation and to the definition of social movements in terms of disruptive or contentious repertoires of action. Our own rejection of this approach comes partly from its lack of fit with the history of women's movements in Australia and its close neighbour, New Zealand. If we consistently applied the definition of social movements as based on non-institutionalised protest activity we would have to conclude that successful campaigns for the vote in Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth century did not involve women's movements, which is clearly wrong.

Nonetheless the repertoire of direct action used by the militant wings of the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom was a source of inspiration to later generations and was appropriated by movements that lacked a similar history of militancy. For example, ‘chaining’ and making public speeches while chained to the railings of important buildings in London was part of the repertoire of both the Women's Social and Political Union and the Women's Freedom League at a time when women had already won political rights in Australia. In 1908, Australian elocution teacher Muriel Matters, a WFL member, became famous as the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons – while chained to the grille of the Ladies Gallery. A year later she again received headlines when she sought to drop han...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge research in gender and politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Finding the women's movement
• 2 Disruption, continuity and waves in the feminist movement
• 3 Discursive politics: changing the talk and raising expectations
• 4 Taking to the streets
• 5 Hiding in plain sight: Australian women's advocacy organisations
• 6 The institutional harvest: women's services and women's policy agencies
• 7 Role models and Roller Derby: feminism and popular culture
• 8 Blogging and the women's movement: new feminist networks
• 9 SlutWalking: where is the next generation of Australian feminists?
• 10 Global feminist organising: identifying patterns of activism
• Appendix: how, what and why
• References
• Index