Title: Gender and Social Movements - Sociology of Gender - iResearchNet
Headings: Gender and Social Movements
Gender and Social Movements
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Content: 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. Because gender is a central feature of social structure, culture, and daily life, all movements are gendered. The major elements of social movements are their emergence and recruitment, collective identities, frames or discourses, organizations, tactics or actions, and external contexts or political opportunities. Each of these elements is gendered. First, movements’ emergence and processes of recruitment are gendered because the status of women and men shapes their differential ability and willingness to organize on their own behalf. Gendered factors such as family structures and responsibilities, access to higher education, paid employment, and fertility rate all affect recruitment and participation in activism.