what is the role played by women in social movements
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Movements are not themselves actors, move-ments are something that people create to press for social change. They are spaces that are made by people to allow relationships between them that can challenge power. Social movements are generally seen as phenomena of the modern era and industrialised society, whether located in the “First” world or not. Industrialisation and urbanisation, technological advancements, and ongoing democraticisation allowed people to push for change collectively from the margins of the polity, from outside of less-than-open institutions. Sociologists have tended to define and redefine “social movements” in response to the kind of protests they saw taking place around them. American sociologists define social movements as highly organised but non-routine entities where people interact to establish new meanings about politics (and other subjects), and where they challenge power based on the making of these new meanings.
The efforts by feminist scholars to think about women’s movements and women in movements make it clear that while self-consciously feminist movements are a relative rarity, women’s movements are numerous, and women’s participation in mixed-gender movements is and has been ever-present. Indeed, feminist sociologists do not seem to distinguish women’s movements theoretically from other kinds of social movements, using and contri-buting to existing theory in their research on women; what is seen as exceptional about women’s movements is that they are led by women and for women. However, this lack of theoretical distinction between women’s movements and other kinds of movements in the making of definitions masks very real differences in the experience of activism for women on the ground, especially (but not only) when they work together with men.
Women have made their own movements or have been part of mixed-gender social move-ments because women are never just women. They are members of social classes; they are workers; they belong to racial/ethnic/national/sexual communities seeking expression, seeking inclusion, and redress from authority. But it has also been the case that women have found both making their own movements and organising within mixed-gender groups to be difficult because of their gender. The first problem, and the one common to women in their own movements or in mixed-gender movements, is the construction of the public sphere, and therefore the political sphere, as male. While the possibilities for social movement activism were generated by the changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation, those two processes also fuelled the ideology of “separate spheres”—the identification of public life as the proper realm of the “male” and domestic life as the proper realm of the “female”. A woman in public political life transgressed her proper space, and transgressed her proper role. As such, separate spheres ideology raised the question of whether women could legitimately protest in public at all, instituting a burden on women’s political participation not shared by men, who were assumed to be acting properly as men in “doing” protest politics.