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    Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement
    Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement
    Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement
    Ebook306 pages6 hours

    Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement

    By Nancy Whittier

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    The radical feminist movement has undergone significant transformation over the past four decades—from the direct action of the 1960s and 1970s to the backlash against feminism in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on organizational documents and interviews with both veterans of the women's movement and younger feminists in Columbus, Ohio, Nancy Whittier traces the changing definitions of feminism as the movement has evolved. She documents subtle variations in feminist identity and analyzes the striking differences, conflicts, and cooperation between longtime and recent activists.

    The collective stories of the women—many of them lesbians and lesbian feminists whom the author shows to be central to the women's movement and radical feminism—illustrate that contemporary radical feminism is very much alive. It is sustained through protests, direct action, feminist bookstores, rape crisis centers, and cultural activities like music festivals and writers workshops, which Whittier argues are integral—and political—aspects of the movement's survival.

    Her analysis includes discussions of a variety of both liberal and radical organizations, including the Women's Action Collective, Women Against Rape, Fan the Flames Bookstore, the Ohio ERA Task Force, and NOW. Unlike many studies of feminist organizing, her study also considers the difference between Columbus, a Midwest, medium-sized city, and feminist activities in major cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, as well as the roles of radical feminists in the development of women's studies departments and other social movements like AIDS education and self-help.


    In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTemple University Press
    Release dateJun 30, 2010
    ISBN9781439905357
    Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement

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    • 3/5
      Whittier tracks, in some detail, the development of the radical women's movement in Columbus, Ohio, centered at Ohio State University, from its beginnings in the late 1960's, all the way through the '90s. She seeks to explore how and why the feminist movement changed so radically in both ideology and culture over the years.Her central conclusion is novel and well supported by her evidence. She argues that the women's movement changed, not because the women grew up and abandoned their radicalism, or because feminism had won all its battles, but because each new group of women that entered the movement found a new political environment and therefore developed an new feminist worldview.Whittier shows how this process actually occurred every few years, with each new group (she refers to them as micro-cohorts) developing a slightly different feminist perspective, while the older activists retained their original views.On this narrow level her thesis succeeds beautifully. However, her concept of movement generations is presented as having more general worth as a sociological theory of social movements. Here she only half succeeds. Her insight that movements alter their own social contexts, and therefore new recruits develop new perspectives should be generalizable. However, the other half of the coin, that activists retain their original worldviews even through changing circumstances, is tainted by the location of her study. College campuses have a naturally high turnover rate and she argues that internal movement dynamics increased this turnover. Separation from the movement is a simpler explanation for static ideologies.Overall, a solid work in social movement sociology.

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