Gender and Social Movements

The sociological study of gender and social movements is relatively new. Until the 1970s, scholarship on social movements largely neglected questions of feminism and gender, and the fields of gender and social movements consisted of separate literatures. As a result, the major theories of social movements failed to take into account the impact of gender on the emergence, nature, and outcomes of social movements. But as mass feminist activism flourished in the United States and around the globe, so too did scholarship on gender and social movements. The earliest work in this area focused on women’s movements, both feminist and antifeminist, and applied the concepts and perspectives of social movement theory without explicitly taking into consideration the impact of gender. These studies, along with research on men’s movements, brought gender to the attention of social movement scholars by acknowledging women’s participation in political protest and men’s political experiences in gender movements, which had been ignored by mainstream social movement theory. But this body of work failed to consider systematically the effects of gender on political activism. By the 1990s, a new wave of research began to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and social movements by attending not only to how gender affects social movement structures and processes, but how social movements, in turn, affect gender. Many social movements have targeted the structures, cultural practices, and interactional norms that sustain gender inequality. Further, movements that are not oriented specifically around gender issues are also shaped by gender as a central feature of social structure, culture, and everyday life. Scholarship at the intersection of the fields of gender and social movements has had a significant impact on the cultural turn in social movement research, as well as on mainstream theories of social movements. Examining social movements through a gender lens has advanced several areas of social movement inquiry: (1) collective identity and intersectionality, (2) collective action frames, (3) movement leadership and organizations, (4) political and cultural opportunity structures and constraints, (5) movement tactics and strategies, and (6) movement outcomes. The research in this subfield and, correspondingly, this article, focuses primarily—but not exclusively—on the United States. The literature on gender and social movements has exposed many underexplored dimensions of social activism and has been foundational for the development of intersectional approaches to social movements. There is still much to learn by applying an intersectional approach that considers how power structures such as race, class, gender, and nationality intersect and the implications for social movement processes.