Title: Gender and Social Movements - Sociology of Gender - iResearchNet
Headings: Gender and Social Movements
Gender and Social Movements
References:

Content: Often they may do both, as in the case of maternalist movements that draw on women’s special place as mothers to argue for a greater influence by women on national affairs. Fourth, social movements’ organizational structures are gendered. For example, the American Civil Rights Movement assigned formal leadership to men while assigning women to more informal leadership roles (Robnett 1997). Recognizing these differences entails not only recognizing discrimination within the movement and bringing to light the previously unacknowledged role of women, but also redefining theories of leadership to include the ways that women exercise influence outside of official leadership positions. Beyond leadership, women and men may take on different tasks within movement organizations, with women taking more responsibility for activities such as providing food for events or monitoring the emotional climate at meetings, and men under taking more public speaking, drafting of position papers, or providing ‘‘peacekeeping’’ at public demonstrations. Gendered divisions of labor within movements vary considerably across time, space, and among movements, of course. In movements that explicitly challenge the gendered status quo, such differences may be much less marked or even at times inverted; while in movements that seek to restore traditional gender roles, they may be exaggerated. Fifth, tactics and strategies are affected by gender. Women and men may draw on established social activities in order to work for change, as in men’s use of violent intimidation compared with women’s reliance on boycotts and vicious gossip in the US racist movement of the 1920s (Blee 1991).