Social Movements

In my series of blog posts, I'm going to focus on an issue that is near and dear to me: women’s equality and rights. As a woman, I feel that this is something very important and it's something that I have enjoyed learning about. Because of the women's movement that started around 170 years ago, I have every right that a man has (yes, there are still many issues), but I am incredibly inspired by how far we've come. Throughout my blog posts, I will be taking a term from our readings and placing it in the context of the women’s movement to better understand the movement as a whole.

To begin, I am going to discuss what a social movement actually is and how the women’s movement is a social movement. A social movement, according to class discussion, is a collective challenge based on common purposes, solidarity, and sustained interaction with elites, opposites, and authority. Another definition states the following: “a deliberate, voluntary effort to organize individuals to act in concert to achieve enough group influence to make or block changes.” I think it is hard to put an exact start date on when social movements became an effective and legitimate way to make change. You could argue that Jesus led a social movement through his teachings thousands of years ago. However, Tilly and Tarrow say that social movements were not really relevant until the 1860’s when the Industrial Revolution drove the poor populations into the cities. Workers came together and mass communication came about, and thus social movements are born. I believe that social movements existed long before that, but just didn’t have the title. Now, I would like to discuss the women's movement as a social movement. 

The women’s movement really started in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two prominent feminists, organized the convention, along with three other women. After being barred from the floor at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, they decided to hold their own convention in order to discuss the state of women’s rights. Over the course of the two-day convention, around 300 people gathered and essentially started the women’s movement. Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances, which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and included 18 greivances and 11 resolutions. This two-day convention was the start of a social movement that has lasted until present day, which is both impressive and sad.

The women’s movement is a social movement because it encompasses the qualities I previously mentioned: collective challenge, common purposes, solidarity, and sustained interactions with elites, opposites, and authority. Now I want to go a little more in depth to show how the women’s movement embodies each value.

•           Collective challenge: a collective challenge is a group of like-minded individuals coming together for a common purpose. In this case, it is a group of women coming together in order to protest the state of their rights. From about 1848-1920, the biggest challenge that the women’s movement faced was gaining the right to vote. Now, the issue involves things such as equal wages, sexual and domestic violence, and unequal gender representation in the workforce. I mentioned before that while it is impressive that the women’s movement has lasted so long, it is also sad in that there is still a need for a women’s movement.
•           Common purposes: I touched on this in the section above when talking about the challenges that the women’s movement comes together to protest. The common purpose in the women’s movement is simple: equal rights for women. This is why it’s also called the feminist movement. Many of my Facebook friends from high school (I live in one of the most conservative counties in Texas) post about how the feminists want to “take away rights from men” and that they are a bunch of “fat lib-tards”, but these people are petty and ignorant, and I have no patience for sexists. Feminists only want the same rights as men, and I don’t think that is asking for too much.
•           Solidarity: solidarity means unity in a group. This is a no-brainer. In order for a social movement to be successful, there must be unity within the group. While solidarity is important, it can be hard to achieve. In a large group setting, it is often difficult to all be able to agree on the same principles. For example, the 2017 Women’s March on Washington tried to be very inclusive, but there were reports that they would not allow pro-life feminists to march with them.
•            Sustained interactions: this can mean a lot of different things, but in this case I’m going to interpret it to mean sustained interactions with those who can make change. In the women’s movement, it is important to interact with legislators, both those who agree with you and those who do not. A social movement is not legitimate if all you do is stand on the street in large numbers. There has to be some kind of interaction. One of my favorite examples of this is the National Women’s Suffrage Association continually lobbying Congress and President Wilson to pass an amendment allowing women to vote, and not stopping until they got what they wanted.