Title: Gender and Social Movements - Sociology of Gender - iResearchNet
Headings: Gender and Social Movements
Gender and Social Movements
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Content: Sociological work on gender and social movements thus reflects the influence of the feminist movement on the academy. Many social movements have targeted the social structures, culture, and interactional norms around gender. These include feminist movements, which in many countries focused first on gaining basic political rights such as the vote and the right to own property, and then progressed in later waves to addressing other forms of inequality between women and men ranging from responsibility for child raising and household labor, discrimination in paid employment, sexuality, reproductive rights, health care, stereotyping in the arts and popular culture, election to public office, and so on. Parallel to these movements are anti-feminist movements, which tend to emerge in response to feminist movements and also target gender directly in an attempt to forestall or roll back changes. Other movements have been organized around gender, without taking gender as a central or explicit target. For example, women’s temperance and social reform movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the United States organized women based on their social responsibilities for morality, childrearing, and the promulgation of religious values. Women have organized in ‘‘mothers’ movements’’ to challenge governmental killings and disappearances of their children (such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina), or to fight against environmental degradation or for better public education. Such ‘‘maternalist politics’’ can uphold traditional definitions of women’s place while simultaneously expanding those definitions, bringing women into the public sphere and often changing activists’ own family relations and identities. Men’s movements, such as the mythopoetic movement, also organize men around some traditional definitions of masculinity while simultaneously stretching those definitions by, for example, encouraging men to express emotions more freely (Schwalbe 1996). Further, movements do not have to be oriented around gender to be shaped by it.