Why have there been so many obituaries for the women's movement, written in so many different countries, despite so many continuing manifestations of life? We argue here that the problem is not simply the short attention span of the media and the constant quest for newness but also the terms in which social movements have been understood. This is partly a methodological question concerning how social movements are distinguished from other political actors, the repertoires that are expected of them, and the associated measurement of social movement activity through protest event databases. It is also a question of how “institutionalization” is understood. It has often been assumed that social movement activism is by definition extrainstitutional or that institutionalization is something that comes after, replaces, or usurps the role of social movements.

In contrast, our approach builds on the work of Verta Taylor and others who have pointed to the lack of fit between propositions derived from male-dominated movements and the nature of the women's movement. We see women's movements as challenging the existing social order through gendered claims making and women-centered discourses, without this necessarily involving disruptive collective action. In other words, we argue that institutionalization is part of the way that the women's movement has always operated.

Background

It is evident that feminist institutionalization has proceeded apace in most parts of the world over recent decades. We understand institutionalism in the broadest sense to mean the creation of women-centered institutions with a mandate to empower women and promote gender equality, whether through democratic service provision, through the provision of cultural space, through the provision of redress for discrimination, or through policy advice and policy monitoring. Some of this women's institution building takes place within existing institutions, such as within professional or cultural bodies, churches, trade unions, governments, parliaments, or multilateral bodies. Other institution building takes place outside existing bodies, whether through the creation of women's centers or advocacy groups, community-based women's services, or cultural spaces such as feminist blogs and women's choirs. Since the late 1960s such “autonomous” institution building has often been deeply influenced by antihierarchical organizational philosophies. The term institutionalization may also be used more broadly to refer to the establishment of new norms of behavior or the adoption of new discursive frameworks: for example, policy documents framing domestic violence in feminist ways. Like Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (Reference Katzenstein, Meyer and Tarrow1998), however, we use it mainly to refer to the creation of space for women's claims.

Some of the most visible recent forms taken by feminist institutionalism include the adoption of electoral quotas for women in more than a hundred countries, the adoption of women's policy machinery in more than 165 countries, the creation and public funding of feminist services to address gender-based violence, and the creation of parliamentary bodies with a mandate to focus on gender issues—the Inter-Parliamentary Union found 93 of these in 2004 (Sawer Reference Sawer, LeDuc, Niemi and Norris2010). At the international level, feminist advocacy from both inside and outside has resulted in new normative regimes, enshrined in instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), UN Security Council Resolution 1325, or the UN Millennium Development Goals.

In the face of such evidence, it seems incredible to suggest that the women's movement is “over.” Like other feminist scholars, we believe that part of the reason is the way that social movements have been theorized (e.g., Staggenborg and Taylor Reference Staggenborg and Taylor2005). For example, political process theory (PPT) made the employment of noninstitutionalized disruptive action the defining feature of social movements and that which distinguished them from other political actors. Charles Tilly (Reference Tilly1978) provided historical explanations concerning how such new repertoires of protest emerged, while Sidney Tarrow (Reference Tarrow1994) developed a life-cycle model of such movements, arguing that by their nature as noninstitutionalized mass movements, they cannot be sustained for long. A movement's adoption of more institutional forms, incorporation into existing institutions, or collapse altogether is seen as inevitable. This view of social movement life cycles lends itself to proclamations of a movement's death when the activities of movement activists are no longer visible. Either the movement's claims are accommodated and institutionalized or else the movement fails, but either way the movement is “over.”

As has been pointed out by many women's movement scholars, however, the focus on disruptive action does not fit the histories or repertoires of the women's movement. Women's movements have been less likely to be engaged in disruptive or violent action than male-led movements and have characteristically relied on different (though not necessarily less challenging) repertoires (Rucht Reference Rucht, Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht2003). Social movement theorists themselves have become more inclined to see the original dichotomy between contentious and conventional politics as too sharply drawn (Goldstone Reference Goldstone and Goldstone2003). On the other hand, there is still a strong tendency to see “institutionalization” in negative terms: to view it as a strategy mistakenly adopted by social movements, which results in co-option, marginalization, or “fading” (Morgan Reference Morgan2007). Institutionalism is identified with work inside the system, a choice that drains energy from social movement activism.

The idea that the women's movement is over is tied both to negative perceptions of institutionalization and to the association of social movements with disruptive or contentious repertoires of action (see Andrew in this issue). While women's movements have drawn inspiration from “heroic” moments of disruptive action, such as the militancy of the English suffragettes, the lack of such actions during the campaigns for suffrage in Australia and New Zealand did not mean the absence of a women's movement. Moreover, while feminists in the periods following broader mobilizations have often lacked visibility, they themselves have generally recognized the continuity of their claims making.

In response to such dilemmas of how to define social movements and whether social movements could still be said to exist when they became relatively unobtrusive, social theorists, most notably Verta Taylor, began to develop the concept of social movement abeyance (Taylor Reference Taylor1989). The term abeyance refers to a holding process by which movements sustain themselves in nonreceptive political environments. The women's movement might no longer be visible on the streets but still be working its way through institutions. It might be alive within submerged networks, cultural production, cyberspace, and everyday living (Maddison Reference Maddison2004; Whittier Reference Whittier1995). Meanwhile, women's organizations may become more specialized and professionalized. They may also turn away from direct policy engagement and public contestation when this has few returns and focus more on commemorative activities that validate collective identities and values (Sawer Reference Sawer2008). While this may result in policy costs and “missed opportunities” (Sawyers and Meyer Reference Sawyers and Meyer1999), it may also enable the “unobtrusive” survival or submerged existence of women's movement challenges to dominant cultural codes. The key concept is that abeyance periods are characterized by a retreat from contentious political action but the sustaining of women-centered discourses.

This may sound as though we are rejecting one form of social movement theorizing, such as political process theory, only to embrace another—the stress on meaning construction and submerged networks found in the work of Alberto Melucci and other new social movement theorists. Melucci describes submerged networks as “small groups submerged in everyday life which require a personal involvement in experiencing and practicing cultural innovation,” a definition that might seem a close fit for the women's movement (Melucci Reference Melucci1985, 800). However, we suggest that there are also problems with this approach, not the least because the focus on the “newness” of the postmateralist movements overlooks the genealogy of the women's movement.

There has been a continuity of gendered claims making over the last century or so (Spender Reference Spender1983), providing historical resonance to such claims, even if they are not on the nightly news. Women have struggled for equal citizenship, for control of their bodies, and for recognition of their claims as mothers and workers. In doing so, they have identified with women's past struggles and drawn upon them as inspiration for present action. When we talk about women's movement identity, this includes identifying with past as well as present generations of women (Dahlerup Reference Dahlerup, Christensen, Halsaa and Saarinen2004).

Defining Women's Movements

Our definition of women's movements has three aspects:

• • Mobilizing collective identity as women

• • Sustaining the challenge of women-centered discourses

• • Making claims on behalf of women.

This brings our characterization of women's movements close to that offered by Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, who in turn draw on Jane Mansbridge and Karen Beckwith: “A women's movement means collective action by women organized explicitly as women presenting claims in public life based on gendered identities as women” (McBride and Mazur Reference McBride, Mazur, Goertz and Mazur2008, 226). This definition of women's movement does not make use of disruptive repertoires as a necessary element of the movement. Hence, the absence of such repertoires does not indicate that a movement is necessarily in decline or is over. The inclusion in our definition of a discursive element acknowledges the important and challenging role of women's organizations in sustaining women-centered discourses during the reign of gender-blind discourses such as those of neoliberalism.

Women's movements operate in different arenas, using a wide variety of repertoires, which may include disruptive action but also many other forms of challenge. One of the best known is that of consciousness raising—working in small groups to raise the awareness of women that problems experienced as individuals are shared by other women and are socially produced, rather than the consequence of personal inadequacy. While this technique requires the trust established in small groups, disruptive action may be used to get the message out via the media to broader groups of women.

Women-centered discourses and claims making may be institutionalized in and promulgated by community organizations, vocational bodies, women's units in government, and women's services. Women's units established in Australian governments in the 1970s institutionalized the feminist insight that no public policy could be assumed to be gender neutral in its effects, given the social division of labor. Women's services may institutionalize explanations of domestic violence as arising from systemic inequalities between men and women, rather than from family dysfunction.

Women-centered discourses may also be sustained through cultural production, such as films, books, music, art, theater, Websites, or blogs. This form of expressive politics has been crucial for maintaining a feminist political space during hostile or unfavorable political periods. Challenges to gender norms may also take place in the politics of everyday life and personalized resistance to gendered inequalities.

Not all of these modes of operation will necessarily occur at the same time, although they may be more simultaneous than allowed for in PPT, where institutionalization is expected to follow from a period of contentious action, rather than to be engaged in simultaneously, as has often occurred with the women's movement.

So Is the Women's Movement Over?

As we have seen, suggestions that women's movements are over may derive from different theoretical or methodological positions. Some authors share the negative assumptions concerning institutionalization discussed here. For example, Sabine Lang, in an influential piece, “The NGOization of Feminism,” saw the institutionalization of the German feminist movement inside and outside the state as having replaced movement activism. She described institutionalization as having led to the proliferation of women's equality offices inside the state and, outside the state, to more specialization, professionalization, and focus on obtaining state resources. She depicted the major carrier for this institution-oriented feminism as “Realo” (realistic) women within the Green Party (Lang Reference Lang, Scott, Kaplan and Keates1997, 109). In general, Lang interprets institutionalism as a strategy adopted at the expense of broader feminist mobilization strategies and ultimately as responsible for the lack of identification of young women with feminism. Whether social movements indeed engage in this form of strategic choice between repertoires, and whether institutionalization can bear this kind of explanatory weight, is another question.

Kate Nash, in another approach to the question, cites Alberto Melucci to the effect that a social movement requires both a common identity and a common adversary; in the absence of these, a movement is over and replaced by micropolitics (Nash Reference Nash2002, 320). Nash suggests that in the United Kingdom, or at least in the English part of it, the mobilizing of collective identity as women has been actively rejected, particularly by young women. Gendered claims making is viewed as necessarily involving the suppression of multiple identities such as ethnicity, race, and class, as well as the construction of men as the enemy—the image of the feminist as a “man hater.”

The argument that a social movement requires a common adversary is appealing on one level—the strength of the pro-choice and pro-life movements are said to derive from each other. However, it is too simple to suggest that the common adversary of women's movements is men. Over time, the women's movement has engaged with a range of adversaries, from the institutional conservatism of church and state to economic philosophies of laissez-faire. Arguably, the chief adversary in recent years has been the neoliberal push to eliminate the labor market regulation required for equal opportunity.

The idea that women's movement mobilizing of gender identity required the suppression of competing claims arising from social and racial diversity is again an interesting one. Yet as Margaret Henderson (Reference Henderson2006) has shown, it tends to be a retrospective reading of the nature of 1970s feminism. Gendered claims making then, as now, included demands that government consult with diverse communities of women, for example indigenous and immigrant women, as a routine component of policy development.

Nonetheless, it is clear that in Western democracies, the inroads of neoliberalism have weakened many forms of collective identity, including that of the women's movement, offering in their place the chimera of individual choice and consumerism. The lack of visibility of the women's movement and the cessation of disruptive action has weakened the political base for women's policy at the national level, even while important international gains are being made. But while the criteria provided by new social movement or political process theory might suggest that the women's movement is over, as assessed on our own criteria it is definitely continuing, even where in abeyance.