Structural Tensions in The Nineteenth Century Women's Movement

Based on the theoretical framework of organizational ecology, it is suggested that social movement organizations are inert structures that rarely exceed their initial size. The ecological concept of organizational growth is tested using membership data for Sweden from 1881 to 1940 for virtually all local social movement organizations (29,193 organizations) in three major social movements: the temperance, free church, and trade union movements. Findings show that the organizations in two of the movements have average growth trajectories approximating zero. The ecological argument is then expanded to include information on the movements' organizational niches and intra- and intermovement density development. After controlling for the local organization's initial size, findings reveal that the remaining variation in aggregate membership is more likely to depend on population and niche dynamics (which organizational ecologists focus on) than on the capacity of the movement's local organizations to expand. These findings are consistent for all three Swedish movements. The ecological argument and the findings presented here are contrary to almost all research on social movements, which takes for granted that social movement organizations are necessarily capable of individual growth

Contemporary feminist scholars and activists often criticize the women's movement for focusing on a narrow agenda that does not represent the true needs of American women.Yet a review of the agendas of women's movement organizations reveals a broad concern for many of the issues that they are criticized for ignoring. What explains this disconnect? The authors argue that the news media plays a crucial role in shaping the perceptions of social movements by choosing to cover some agendas and not others.Analyzing coverage of women's movement organizations in television and print news media, the authors find that reporters have exercised a great deal of discretion over which women's movement issues they have chosen to report on during the past three decades. In particular, this has led to overrepresentation of the abortion issue in news coverage of women's movement organizations and an underrepresentation of issues that women believe should be more of a priority for the movement. The authors’ findings underscore the importance of the news media not only for bringing attention to social movements, but also for how they portray the issue agendas of these movements.

Realizing a Constitutional Social Right - Cultural Transformation, Deep Institutional Reform, and the Roles of Advocacy and Adjudication

The postauthoritarian democratisation process in the Philippines saw the rise of ‘state feminism’, which emphasised gender mainstreaming in government development planning. Various international development agencies, particularly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played an important role in harnessing the social capital of women's movements and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for gender and development (GAD) programs in the post‐Marcos era (1986–2002). This period was marked by a decline in the CIDA's direct assistance to women's NGOs in the Philippines and its shift to institutional capability‐building of government agencies, particularly the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). The article examines how local women's organisations have interpreted, engaged and negotiated transnational discursive practices on ‘development’, ‘social capital’, ‘capacity‐building’ and ‘gender mainstreaming.’ The CIDA‐funded Women NGOs Umbrella Project and Canadian aid to the Negros Occidental province are used as case studies to illustrate issues and problems in transnational linkages between Philippine women NGOs, national and local governments and Canadian development agencies. Such transnational linkages, embodied in the interesting mix of ‘gender mainstreaming’ and ‘critical engagement’ between states, donor agencies and women NGOs, show the interpenetration of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ and the blurring of boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘civil’ societies in the course of gender advocacy. At the same time, transnational processes and demands may concurrently create better understanding, as well as conflicts and tensions between state machinery, NGOs and social movements, thus defeating the original intentions of development projects sponsored by international donor agencies.

For students of the dialectic between human condition and response, nineteenth-century American women represent a special problem. Because we still live in the shadow of their world, we are often tempted to take what we share with them as a reliable guide to their experience. But in doing so, we risk oversimplifying and thereby misunderstanding both the conditions faced by nineteenth-century women and their responses. Women reformers are a case in point. During the nineteenth century, women organized for change in a variety of movements besides suffrage-most notably temperance, antislavery, and moral reform. Yet no matter what goal they sought, analysis of their actions usually beginsand too often ends-with the question, Were they feminists? Because their world contained, sometimes in exaggerated form, many of the elements against which late twentieth-century feminists struggle, the question is a natural one. But because their world contained other elements as well, a focus on feminism's presence or absence in women's reform activities can be misleading. Of nineteenth-century women's reform movements, temperance was by far the largest. From the beginning of their organized activity in the 1820s, women evidently contributed between one-third and one-half of the temperance movement's mass support. But until 1873 they worked

Canton (present-day Guangzhou) has long flourished as a port city. As the city expanded in the nineteenth century, the risks of conflagrations increased; streets became more crowded, buildings were more often made of wood, and there was more use of open fires. The reconstruction of Canton after conflagrations provides an excellent way to observe the resilience of urban space, understood here as the result of interactions among different stakeholders. This paper explores how authorities, local communities, foreigners, and Hong merchants addressed fires and rebuilt through laws, regulations, technologies and cooperation, and how responses to fire destruction shaped urban space. Divers stakeholders affected the reconstruction of buildings and streets. The government made laws to widen streets, communities built watchtowers, and foreigners made new plans for Thirteen Factories, a neigbhorhood along the Pearl River. At the same time, conflicts between communities and foreigners obstructed plans for urban transformation and maintained the stability of urban structures. The communities kept the traditional local community organizations the ‘Kaifong’ (local organization in street) who opposed the widening streets and fought against proposed fire zones around Thirteen Factories, thus pitching local interests against those of the foreigners in a complex social, political, and cultural context.

This chapter takes a theoretical look at the rise and fall of labor activism. Chinese labor studies literature focuses on the role of authoritarian state and its impact on the decline of labor, particularly by its censoring the use of class rhetoric. However, cases from developed and developing countries demonstrate that workers can use collective resistance to significantly lift labor’s political status, despite repressive state policy. That raises a puzzle—why has the contemporary Chinese labor activism failed to engender transformative social and political change? This chapter introduces some social movement theories highlighting the main drivers behind successful social movements. It suggests that using a subjective and psychic approach helps crack the code of complex processes of social movement formation. It argues that a state of cognitive liberation is necessary to break through the ‘psychic trap’ that hinders individual labor activism from developing into social movements with a much bigger impact.

The article examines why many foreign‐funded, resource‐ rich movements in developing countries have been unable to produce the massive mobilization found in other successful social movements with access to fewer resources. While foreign ties have brought substantial benefits to local movements, many such social movements have limited grass‐roots support. The issue of external aid is at the core of an emerging research agenda in the fields of international relations, social movements, and development studies that focuses on the relationship between participatory development, democratization, and the process of transnationalization. Drawing on research work from these different fields, the article argues that by making constituency support irrelevant, internationalization through financial assistance has transformed conflict movements into consensus movements that follow an institutional, resource‐dependent, non‐conflictual strategy with no deep roots in the community. The article specifies the mechanisms by which foreign funding affects grass‐roots mobilization. These arguments are examined with respect to evidence from around the world.

Scholars of contentious politics have argued that social movements are likely to fare best where “parliamentary politics, democratic institutions, and durable political competition” have already taken root. In places where those conditions do not hold, such as the post-Soviet states, we can fully expect social movements to look and behave differently from their Western counterparts. But whatever their appearance and characteristics, all social movements – in any country – are engaged in attempts to serve essentially the same purpose: to work toward social change that will rectify a situation perceived as unjust. In other words, social movements strive to alter the status quo of the power distribution in society – whether at the level of material resources or the more intangible level of status and “identity.” Most often, social movements, including the women's movement in Russia, entail struggle over a combination of these material and intangible interests.

Social media is being employed to build support for social, economic, and political justice (Selander et al. 2016; Vaast et al. 2014) in movements such as occupy Wall Street, violence against women's movement and global sustainability movement. These movements have used social media in ways that goes beyond simple communications. As social media allows people to produce and share user generated content, they enable a certain set of affordances of these technologies (Bharati et al 2015; Bharati et al 2014). The social media affordances, available to both collective and individual actors, translate into capabilities afforded to social movements (Tufecki 2014). Research on connective action has examined the effects of digital action repertoires on interaction and engagement such as in the Tea Party and Occupy movements (Agarwal et al. 2014; Selander et al. 2016). Social media can also facilitate mobilization of movement and participation by new volunteers and oftentimes provides a transnational character by diffusing actions beyond the virtual (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Conversation, an essential part of social movements, shapes “social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants&x201D; (Tilly 2002, p. 122). In a personal interaction that involves repeated organized interactions between individuals, typically, leads to shared values and trust. The role of social media technologies in furthering this conversation has to be studied and its' influence on social movement ascertained. A few scholars have started to investigate social media affordances and capabilities, especially focused on discourse, during contentious collective action. Still the research has been limited to studying mechanisms of participation, development of a sense of collective identity, creation of community, and framing of political discourse (Farrell 2012; Garrett 2006). Social media data on social movements can involve impersonal “like&x201D; and “share&x201D; to more engaged conversations. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube offer a wide communicative and discourse reach in networks with text, image, audio, and video data. This social media based big data, consisting mostly of unstructured data, comes in the form of social media posts, digital pictures and videos. The symposium will discuss how formal organizational structures and practices might be integrated with social media capabilities to reinforce and enhance social movement organizations as leaders in social change movements. It will explore the characteristics of social media discourse and assess the dynamics of social movements and, subsequent, impact on real-world protests. The symposium will also demonstrate how discourse analysis can be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns. The panel symposium will focus on theoretical and methodological challenges of social media analytics, big data and social movements. Panelists will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on: 1) Theoretical challenges: a. How and why are social movement recruitment and engagement mechanisms being impacted as a result of social media? b. How do we advance theory on social media and social movements when we are overwhelmed with social media based big data? c. What approach should we undertake if big data analysis contradicts most theories on social media and social movements? d. How do we address the issue of generalizability of social media and social movement research when data collection was limited to one social media platform, albeit involving big data? 2) Methodological challenges: a. What methodological approaches have worked in the analysis of social media, big data and social movements? b. How can discourse analysis be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns evident in social media-based big data? c. How can we employ social media analytics to investigate image and video data? d. What combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies be employed for big data and social media analytics in the context of social movements? e. What are the limitations of quantitative data analysis techniques, such as structural equation modeling, because of an extremely large sample size? f. What are the limitations of qualitative data analysis techniques as they become extremely labor intensive and, maybe even, impractical because of big data?

What drives engagement with civic organizations addressing women's issues? While past work suggests that individuals' preferences regarding civic engagement are influenced by geographic proximity, it remains unclear whether proximity or other organizational attributes shape civic engagement with organizations focused on women's issues. Drawing on interviews of volunteers with women's civic organizations, this study develops an inductive theory about how proximity – both geographic and in terms of the intervention or approach to advocacy – shapes engagement with women's organizations. More specifically, it argues that individuals are more likely to engage with organizations that are local and that provide direct interventions that target individual needs. We test the implications of this theory with an original survey experiment in the United States. We find that individuals prefer to volunteer with local over national women's organizations and prefer organizations that provide direct support rather than indirect interventions. There are no significant differences between men and women; those that identity as feminist and not; and those with past volunteer experience. These findings help us understand how organizational attributes shape preferences for civic engagement and demonstrate that, even amid deep political polarization, individuals still prioritize local and immediate responses to women's issues rather than national and institutional solutions.

ABSTRACTConditions for women in the Global South have increasingly become acknowledged as critical components of global security. However, the development and implementation of policies to address these conditions, particularly the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, have rested on essentializing assumptions of women’s victimhood and certain traditional roles in society. On the basis of these assumptions, national governments, transnational NGOs and international organizations provide financial and technical assistance to women's local civil society organizations to implement the WPS agenda. In response, local women’s organizations in Côte d'Ivoire perform “pragmatic scepticism” in the face of these essentializing international discourses. Local women, challenge the discourses at the same time they reclaim them for their own needs. This article uncovers two frames that women articulate – vulnerability and motherhood – as markers of identity in advocating for peace and security and as instruments to attract attention from the international community.

Crises abound and solutions remain scarce as we begin to make our way through the 21st century. As a result, are social movements making a comeback? In the past several years, citizens around the world watched the protestors of the Arab Spring on one continent, Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percenters on another, and Ukraine on a third; each began as a social protest whose leaders and activists hoped would become a successful social movement. Instead, each has demonstrated the limits of political and economic power and underscored the rapidity with which threat, physical domination, and violence can appear as a response. Underlying all of this has been a worldwide economic downturn featuring increasing inequality and injustice fueling ever-growing anger among citizens of all nations who feel betrayed by both international banking systems and their own national governments. Thus, the intractability and violence of poverty has expanded everyone’s insecurity has increased, and the possibilities for social justice have diminished.

British research on social movements, with a few exceptions, has been criticised for making little reference to social movement theory, such that the term, social movement is often used as an unproblematic descriptor. This failure leaves intact assumptions about the relationship between the aims, organisation and activity of social movements and the `interests' that underlie them. This paper attempts to integrate theoretical and substantive analyses of social movements in the context of the `two women's movements' in the United States and Britain which have had the family as a key focus for mobilisation: one conventionally associated with feminism, the other a mass movement of women mobilised to challenge feminism's claim to speak on their behalf. The analysis reveals the limitations of both mainstream and radical/Marxist explanations of social movements on account of their shared reductionist orientation. It suggests that a more fruitful account is provided by resource mobilisation and post-Marxist theorists who, despite drawing on different traditions and questions, recognise the autonomy of politicised culture. The article concludes by questioning whether any foundationalist notion of `interests' and the associated concept of `identity' can provide the basis for grounding political behaviour.

Occasional references to Jessie Craigen occur in the literature on the nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement, generally emphasizing her importance as a working-class suffragist. Previously unknown material throws more light on her career, revealing the eddies of love and exasperation which flowed around her. This paper discusses the various representations of Jessie Craigen to be found in letters among her friends, representations which served to paint her – sometimes warmly, sometimes dismissively – as odd, eccentric, undisciplined. It also examines the more positive sense of herself which she attempted to convey in letters to several of her middle-class promoters – as a romantic authentic in the grip of unbrookable, passionate conviction. Her story confirms the existence of a current of radical-liberal opinion within the nineteenth-century women's movement, and the difficulties which confronted those who found themselves among its paid employees