Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T03:15:47.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Comparative Politics of Women's Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2005

Karen Beckwith
Karen Beckwith
Affiliation:
College of Wooster (kbeckwith@wooster.edu)
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The comparative study of women's movements is developing within the political science subfield of women and politics, largely by drawing on concepts and findings from several disciplines. From political science it borrows theories of the state, political development, democracy, and democratization. Sociology offers insights on social movements and the gendered nature of societies. Women's studies scholarship enables us to understand systematic gendered arrangements of power and privilege, including those fragmented or reinforced by class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. The subfield of women and politics contributes both feminist theoretical insights and scholarship on elected women, female leaders, and women's policy preferences; these contributions inform comparative research on women's movements.Karen Beckwith is a professor of political science at the College of Wooster (kbeckwith@wooster.edu). She is coeditor, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht, of Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State and author of American Women and Political Participation. Beckwith is the founding editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender, the journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. The author thanks Jeff Lantis and Kent Kille for extensive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Information

Type
REVIEW ESSAYS
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 583 - 596
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

The comparative study of women's movements is developing within the political science subfield of women and politics, largely by drawing on concepts and findings from several disciplines. From political science it borrows theories of the state, political development, democracy, and democratization. Sociology offers insights on social movements and the gendered nature of societies. Women's studies scholarship enables us to understand systematic gendered arrangements of power and privilege, including those fragmented or reinforced by class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. The subfield of women and politics contributes both feminist theoretical insights and scholarship on elected women, female leaders, and women's policy preferences; these contributions inform comparative research on women's movements.

The comparative study of women's movements has given rise to courses that focus critically on democracy—its construction, its relation to community building and contention, and its potentially gendered nature. Because they focus on women, employ a range of comparative political approaches, and engage issues of citizen participation, these courses provide insights into democracy that could not be easily gleaned from more conventional or narrowly focused courses. As Jane S. Jaquette writes in the Journal of Democracy, “The trajectories of women's movements and the vitality of women's organizations are important indicators of how well democratic institutions are working on the ground.”1

Jaquette 2001, 111. For recent work on democracy and women's representation in the United States, see Hawkesworth 2003; Dovi 2002.

In 2002 I offered a course titled Women's Movements in Comparative Perspective. Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on women's movements in Europe, Latin America, North America, south central Asia, and elsewhere, the course broadly defined women's movements to encompass both feminist and nonfeminist organizing and activism and focused specifically on women and gender identity with respect to movement content, leadership, development, issues, and goals.2

The course investigated both bourgeois and socialist feminist movements as well as nonfeminist women's movements, including those of mothers, urban poor women, welfare rights activists, and others in which women constitute the majority of activists and leaders and in which women's gender identity, however constituted, inspires mobilization and issue demands. Using a woman-centered, rather than a more narrowly feminist-centered, definition of women's movements permitted a range of inquiry across nations and regions and included women's movements located primarily but not exclusively in states.3

Ibid., 433–39.

Based partly on what I learned through this course, in this essay I analyze thirty course syllabi that focus on comparative women's movements.4

Courses were identified as “comparative women's movements” courses and included as the database for this article if they met any of the following conditions: (1) the course title identified women's movements and comparative politics or comparative women's movements as the course topic; (2) the course title or content concerned women and politics with a strong comparative perspective and a substantial course focus on women's movements; or (3) the course content involved cross-national comparisons of women and politics, with a substantial focus on women's movements. Courses that focused on a single nation only or that excluded women's movements (with an exclusive focus on women's electoral behavior and public opinion) are not included.

They are a subset of a sample of syllabi identified by the staff of Perspectives on Politics (19) and/or solicited by me (24). The latter were gleaned from my query to nearly 250 scholars of women and politics in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. My sample comprises three graduate, three combined graduate and undergraduate, twenty-two upper-division undergraduate, and two introductory courses.5

Three of the comparative women's movements courses have been team-taught; one is an international distance learning course offered by Kathleen Jones of San Diego State University (USA) and Gun Hedlund of Orebro University (Sweden).

Because the comparative analysis of women's movements is a new venture, the syllabi are marked by unevenness. Some rely on unpublished, cutting-edge research; others emphasize well-established texts that have been foundational for comparative research on women and politics. I also consider the wider range of comparative women's movements research for its potential to expand the scope of present course offerings.

What Are Women's Movements?

Few course syllabi offer definitions of women's movements. The definitional debate is still developing among comparative women and politics scholars, a debate reflected in the syllabi.6

Eighteen syllabi offer no explicit definition and provide no contextual discussion or identifiable set of readings to define women's movements. Some, however, do engage the definitional question by offering definitions or by constructing readings that encourage discussion of how one might conceptualize women's movements. These syllabi begin to distinguish women's movements from feminist movements, and to identify women's political activism distinctively.

Syllabi with definitions use one of two strategies. The first is to identify women's movements on the basis of their goals and demands, primarily with respect to women's rights and feminism. Such courses focus on feminist movements, and the concept of feminism itself is an issue for discussion. These syllabi situate questions about feminist politics in the context of feminist theory and in relation to the state. They also address debates within feminism, concerning, for example, black women's liberation in the United States and lesbian feminism. In her course Feminist Politics and Policy, Dorothy McBride Stetson, for example, notes that “discourses about feminist politics frequently build on references to monolithic entities: the state, the movement, Feminism, Politics, Women. This course will examine and unpack each of these and learn how they inform the public's and the public intellectuals' understanding of the state of gender politics …” (emphasis in original). Similarly, R. Amy Elman's course focuses in part on “the ongoing debates within (US and European) women's movements about whether and how to engage the state….” By stressing “movements struggling for women's liberation,” Elman grounds exploration of the key course questions in feminist theory, as well as liberal democratic, anarchist, and queer theory. In short, this subset of syllabi uses an ideological distinction to classify women's movements and to link them with demands on the state. This strategy is most apparent where the national or regional focus is on Western Europe or North America.

A second strategy treats feminist movements as a subset of women's movements that are not specifically feminist. Scholars in this group share regional interests and, in many cases, fieldwork experiences, in Latin America and in other less developed regions. This is not a coincidence; as Lisa Baldez notes, “Women in Latin America are perhaps the most highly mobilized population in the world.” The proliferation of women's activism in Latin American nations—around urban poor women's issues; mobilization concerning the “disappeared” of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico; support of and opposition to democratization in Chile; reform of divorce and abortion laws; and mobilization to combat violence against women—includes movements that are not explicitly feminist, rightwing women's movements, and distinctively Latin American feminist movements. Demands made by many of these women's movements upon the state are not easily subsumed under a “rights” rubric. Instead, women's movements are identified in this set of syllabi on the basis of who the activists are (women) and the collective nature of their activism (frequently class-specific), whether directed at the state or focused on autonomous and primarily local efforts.

The distinction between these two strategies is emerging as a point of debate among scholars. Although scholarship in the 1980s employed “feminist” movement and “women's movement” interchangeably,7

See, for example, Katzenstein 1987.

by the 1990s, scholars of Latin America were distinguishing between two types of women's movements: feminine and feminist.8 Conversely, some, such as Laurel Weldon, deliberately incorporated into the category of feminist even those “activists or organizations that do not consider themselves to be feminists, or who have conflicting understandings of feminism … [including] conservative or traditional women's groups who focus on women's differences or distinctive contributions as mothers or caregivers, as long as these groups aimed to improve women's status or shared similar goals.”9 Still others insist upon the difficulty of defining “women's movement” as a concept at all. Amy Mazur and Dorothy McBride Stetson confess to having “found no definition of the concept women's movement applicable to cross national, longitudinal comparative research.”10

Mazur and Stetson 2002, 4 (emphasis original).

We can begin to sort out this definitional issue by noting that women's movements are a subset of social movements generally. As such, they are social networks that mount sustained political challenges, through collective action, to advance their interests. David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow define social movements as “collective challenges to existing arrangements of power and distribution by people with common purposes and solidarity, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” 11

Meyer and Tarrow 1998, 4 (emphasis original).

Tarrow, with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, has moved further toward locating social movements specifically in collective action, distinguishing between contained and transgressive contention and analyzing how social movements move across these boundaries of contentious politics.12

Tarrow 1998; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001. Note that Tarrow, and McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, emphasize types of action as the foundational component of social movements, in contrast to an older sociological tradition that emphasized ideology (for example, Heberle 1951 and Mannheim 1952).

Transgressive collective action distinguishes women's movements from conventional political organizations such as interest groups as well as from some other social movements; it is what makes women's movements move.13

This is not to argue that organized interest groups are not part of social movements, but rather that social movements are not defined by conventional organizations or by any specific number of interest groups. As Weldon (2002) observes, “The existence of a few small-scale organizations is not in itself a movement” (p. 62). At the same time, social movements, as McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly suggest, move across fields of contention, engaging in collective action that may be more or less conventional, in response to political structural opportunities, new issues, and unanticipated events.

Identifying women's movements, at least initially, as those where women are the major actors and leaders, further underscores an important difference between women's and other social movements: women's movements mobilize women. This distinction, naturally enough, places women at the center of women's movements and obviates, for the purpose of definition, the need to theorize about feminism, feminist issues, practical versus strategic issues,14

Molyneux 1985. See the discussion of these distinctions in Alvarez 1990, 23–27.

and nation- or culture-specific understandings of feminism. (Of course, placing women at the definitional center does not preclude recognizing their activism in other movements in which they are active but not necessarily central.) Women's movements are further distinguished by gendered identity claims that serve as the basis for activism where women explicitly organize as, for example, mothers or daughters. The primacy and decision making of women—“the common thread of which [is] the politicization of their lived experience as women”15

Alvarez 1990, 56 (emphasis original).

—is what makes such movements women's movements. In short, feminist movements are best considered a subset of women's movements,16 which can be defined as social movements where women, organized explicitly as such, are the major actors and leaders and make gendered identity claims the basis for their actions.17

Much of the literature on feminist women's movements has grappled with defining feminism, a project that becomes more complicated in a comparative context. See Beckwith 2000; Beckwith 2001b; Mohanty 1991.

These definitional questions undergird, if only implicitly in the syllabi, choices of regional focus and specific movements.18

See, however, Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp's graduate course on “National Feminisms, Transnational Arenas, Universal Human Rights,” which begins with a session entitled “What are Women's Movements?” and assigns Ferree and Mueller 2004.

By explicating definitions of women's movements and feminist movements, regional and cross-national differences and similarities are more readily discerned, and a range of research questions becomes apparent. A comparative perspective encourages the suspension (or explication) of a priori assumptions about ideology or goals, and students can investigate the construction of grievances, identification of issues, articulation of demands, and mobilization of women, as well as strategies, tactics, and alliances. In short, a comparative perspective enables different women's movements to reveal their differences in their ability to direct claims against the state, their willingness to forge connections with political elites, their alliance opportunities with other movements, and the issues around which mobilization occurs.19

See S. Phillips 1991, 765–67.

Perhaps most importantly, distinguishing between women's movements that are explicitly feminist and those that may have feminist implications allows us to investigate political learning over time. We see how movements change, what impediments to change exist, and how feminist movements face gendered institutions that may also affect nonfeminist women's movements. Rather than imputing feminism by definition, it may be more analytically fruitful to withhold attribution of “feminism” in order to investigate the conditions under which women's movements become feminist—or fail to do so.

Strategies of Comparative Political Analysis

Comparative politics contributes to the study of women's movements in part through its emphasis on case selection: “Students of comparative politics examine a case to reveal what it tells us about a larger set of political phenomena.”20

Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997, 4 (emphasis added).

Four comparative political strategies are employed across these courses: cross-national, cross-movement, cross-time, and cross-scope. Some courses rely on a single strategy, while others employ a combination.

Cross-national

First, and perhaps most conventional in comparative politics, is a cross-national (or cross-regional) comparison, which hypothesizes that women's movements in different states will face different opportunities, conditions, and constraints. Any of the ways in which states vary—political system, party system, political culture—may produce variation in, for example, movement emergence and mobilization, expressed demands, means of articulating grievances, and chances for success. Cross-national comparison may also underscore the different ways in which women's movements affect nation-states, by transforming political institutions, changing political practice, shifting the configuration of power,21

Kriesi 1996, 163–65.

and regendering institutions. That is, in cross-national comparison, characteristics of women's movements can serve as both independent and dependent variables.22 Course syllabi in this group include Dorothy McBride Stetson's course on “the United States in the comparative context of countries in North America and Europe”; Pat Boling's course, which “examines women's movements in … the United States, several countries of the European Union, Japan, India, and a number of others from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America”; and Lisa Baldez's course “Women's Movements in Latin America.”

Cross-movement

Several courses compare women's movements with other social movements, asking general questions about the latter and investigating differences between similarly situated movements to identify particularities about women's movements. The cross-movement strategy starts with the hypothesis that actors and their demands affect the state's response, even within a single state. That is, variation in movements' actors and demands will explain differences in movement mobilization, strategy, available tactics, and alliance opportunities, as well as movement success in attracting state support and in achieving goals. A cross-movement strategy generally selects specific movements for comparison, with nation-states treated as characteristics of the selected movements.23

In her course “Women and the Western State,” R. Amy Elman asks her students to compare women's movements in North America and western Europe with four contemporaneous movements: animal rights, civil rights, anti-nuclear, and gay/lesbian movements, particularly in regard to alliance histories and opportunities.

Aili Mari Tripp's course, for example,

looks at women's objectives in the context of these new social movements in their efforts to redefine understandings of politics and strategies of collective action [and] focuses on women's movements in the context of social movements that demand reforms of government policies and changes in social relations. The course examines a variety of approaches to the study of social movements with a focus on “new social movements,” [which] include, for example, ecological, cultural, human rights, civic, urban neighborhood, gay and lesbian, and peace movements. They also include anti-authoritarian movements that emerge in the context of political liberalization. Women's movements have been central to all of these movements but have also advocated their own specific concerns around reproductive rights, violence against women, affirmative action, sexual harassment, increasing women's political leadership, and many other issues.

Cross-time

Using a cross-time strategy, a course compares changes in specific women's movements over time, such as the first and second waves of the United States women's rights movement or the iterations of the women's suffrage movement in Switzerland.24

Women's movements in North America and Western Europe, especially, show a history of feminist waves.25

Research on social movement temporality, sequencing, and cyclicity26

provides a strong rationale for a cross-time strategy. Different movements can mobilize in “waves,” with “early riser” movements signaling to others opportunities for action.27

Tarrow 1998, 24–25.

Later, as protest becomes routine, minor or more violent components of social movements emerge.28 Research on “cycles of protest” shows that the recurrence of disruptive activism associated with social movements is not confined to a single nation or set of movements.29 Scholars' distinctions between “old” and “new” social movements also suggest a chronological development, if not of individual movements, then of movements in the aggregate.30

That is, the shifts in values, constituencies, and tactics that gave rise to new movements were a response to postindustrialism. See, for example, Inglehart 1990; Kriesi et al. 1995. Thus major historical shifts, rather than deprivation or resources, explained “the development of new grievances within the highly industrialized societies” of western Europe (Klandermans 1991, 17), changing the traditional base of (old) social movements and, ultimately, their expression.

Cross-scope

Finally, a cross-scope approach compares nationally based women's movements with transnational ones. Cross-scope analyses position movement scholars on the boundaries between comparative politics and international relations. Although research on transnational movement activism is relatively new, the number of courses is growing, with Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's Activists beyond Borders as a core text.

Transnational activists, according to the authors, are those who “interact with each other, with states, and with international organizations [constituting] networks of activists, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formation.”31

The “modularity of collective action repertoires,”32

Tarrow 1998, 194–98.

the rise of global mass media and the relocation and diffusion of state powers33 have encouraged and facilitated transnational movements, especially but not exclusively in the late twentieth century. Furthermore, social movement transnational organizing and activism increases in response to state reconfiguration and globalization—but not similarly for all movements, nor in the same venues, nor necessarily around the same sets of issues.

Because activist women and feminists have mobilized to advance their issues through transnational movements, research comparing national and transnational women's movements can contribute to the discipline's understanding of what Sidney Tarrow refers to as “transnational contention.”34

A cross-scope strategy can help to identify, for example, the conditions under which nationally based movements ally to make demands upon specific national governments, international actors and institutions, or transnational authoritative suprastate institutions and organizations, such as the European Union or the World Trade Organization. Some issues may be more amenable to transnational organizing and activism than others; for example, equality-based legal rights claims may find more success through transnational contention than concerns based on gender differences, such as abortion or violence against women.35

Weldon (2002) emphasizes the importance of nationally based autonomous women's movements in persuading governments to enact legislation against violence against women. Yet she also suggests that “feminist activists were inspired by and learned from their contacts with women in other parts of the world” (p. 206). See also Keck and Sikkink (1998), who found that a human rights methodology and frame has been especially successful in promoting women's rights transnationally.

In addition, understanding the ways that women's movements frame issues to achieve their goals in transnational movement contributes to the literatures on framing and on meaning-making in politics across national boundaries.36

Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp ask similar questions in their syllabus: “How has the language of universal human rights been used by feminists in a variety of national and transnational contexts to make gains for women, and at what cost? If “women's rights are human rights” makes a good slogan, what are the processes behind picking up this phrasing and circulating it globally? Since national feminisms vary, how do feminists come together in the context of increasingly important transnational arenas such as the European Union and the United Nations to form common agendas and work cooperatively to deal with issues that cross national boundaries? How have the EU and the UN been spurs for women's international consciousness and collective action, and how have they been sources of conflict and obstacles?”

Each of the four strategies outlined above provides a structure within which to test hypotheses on social movements, nonconventional (or transgressive) collective action, state transformation and citizen response, and globalization. These strategies also permit us to generate hypotheses concerning how women organize within and across nations, express their demands, and present challenges to other movements, states, and trans-state and international actors. Most generally, the comparative study of women's movements also contributes to the subfield of comparative politics by testing existing hypotheses not specifically designed for women's movements, by generating new hypotheses to be tested with other cases, and by confirming and refining theories of mass citizen participation, political engagement, and influence.

None of the four comparative strategies, however, moves the study of women's movements beyond a conventional “women and politics” approach; in general, scholarship in this field does not employ a gendered comparative political analysis. It is difficult to identify gendered constructs across cases, and meanings of masculinities and femininities that frame politics have not yet been developed. A new comparative gendered analysis, however, could identify ways in which women's movements engage in gender framing37

and use discourse politics38

Katzenstein 1998, 16–19.

to regender disputes. Do women describe their agenda in masculine terms to take advantage of public support for other issues? Do they employ a feminized language for mobilization, or organize collective action in ways that minimize gender schemas39

By “gender schema,” I mean the“[encoding] and [organization of] information … according to the culture's definitions of maleness and femaleness … , [a process that] is itself derived from the sex-differentiated practices of the social community” (Bem 1983, 603).

or confound conventionally gendered state responses to contention? Courses on women's movements must await developments in scholarship before they can fully encompass a comparative politics of gender.

Women's Movements, Politics, and Democracy

Most comparative women's movement courses explicitly address democracy, employing at least one of three foci: democracy in the state, democratization as a process of state building, and democracy as citizen participation. In all of these courses, democracy is recognized as a gendered set of institutions and practices.

Democracy in the state

A focus on democracy in the state varies from a “thin,” institution-focused definition of democracy concerned with the existence of civil liberties and free and open regular elections40

to a richer study of institutional and structural features of specific nation-states, including electoral systems, party-state linkages, and women's descriptive and substantive representation in decision making.41 Cross-national comparisons explicate women's movements' efforts to achieve women's political presence in democratic states through election and appointment, and to influence state decision makers concerning public policy. A central message of such courses is that democracy—in its state institutionalized form—is not necessarily conducive to women's movements' policy concerns or to women's political presence, for several reasons.

First, the ability of women's movements, feminist or otherwise, to influence the state, depends upon a variety of factors, including the political opportunity structure faced by the movements. As Louise Chappell shows, “The interplay between institutions can create new openings that can enable feminists to engage in a particular arena and, just as easily, it can cause alterations in the interaction of institutions that will foreclose these opportunities.”42

Where opportunity is absent and constraints (or even threats) prevail, the degree of democracy in a nation-state may have little effect on women's movements' chances for institutional inclusion. Courses on comparative women's movements examine a common set of political opportunity contexts, including the presence and receptiveness of leftwing political parties, electoral system arrangements, and alliance opportunities. These shared foci reveal the force of such contexts and variations within them even across multiple movements and political systems.

Second, even with variation in political opportunity, the pattern of women's movements' success in achieving political presence—that is, the positioning of actual women within state institutions—is more similar than different across democratic states. Women's political presence is consistently low, and feminists in Australia and Canada (as in other democratic nations) “have found that the rewards of [an electoral] strategy—in terms of gaining a winnable seat and exercising influence within the legislature—have been incommensurate with the effort needed to enter Parliament.”43

Ibid., 173.

Third, democratic states are susceptible to influence from all sectors of civil society, including antifeminist and conservative political groups and movements. Where such states offer openings for influence, women's movements may find themselves not only in competition with other claims-making groups, but in direct conflict with opposing movements.44

Interactions between women's movements (specifically feminist movements) and their opponents are still under-researched. For the United States, see, however, Luker 1984; Staggenborg 1991.

In addition, when feminist movements struggle for the inclusion of women in decision making, opportunities also open for conservative and antifeminist women. In principle, democratic states may offer women access to office and to political influence; in practice, feminists may find themselves excluded, defeated by opponents who are more successful in persuading the state to respond to their issues and demands instead.

At the level of democracy in the state, therefore, comparative women's movements courses illustrate both the constancy of women's exclusion (or limited inclusion) in nations with explicitly democratic political systems, and the gendered nature of (apparently neutral) state institutions in the face of organized movement campaigns for greater access.45

Research on the relationship of women's movements to “institutional” politics includes Friedman 2000; Vargas and Wieringa 1998; and Waylen 1996.

Because the lack of relationship between women's movements' success and democratic political system is counterintuitive to many students,46

This is not to claim that democracies offer less to women than do dictatorships, but to emphasize that democracies do not uniformly advance women's political rights, their inclusion in state decision making, or even their inclusion in base-level political rights such as voting (for example, Banaszak 1996a).

these courses are ideal venues for discussions about gendered democracy.

Democratization and state building

Several syllabi emphasize democratization and state building rather than links between women's movements and ongoing democratic politics.47

Democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa (including South Africa),48

See, for example, Britton 2002.

and even parliamentary construction in Scotland and constitution-building in Canada49 are cases that have received considerable attention from scholars of women's movements and state change.50 Women's movements' contributions to democratization51 as well as women's participation in regime-changing or revolutionary movements, have been mixed.52 In some Latin American nations, activist women in revolutionary movements and in women's movements allied with other democratizing forces succeeded in constructing a democracy more positively gendered towards women than might otherwise have been the case. Representational quotas for women within political parties and for legislative seats, separate police stations for women, women's rights provisions in revised constitutions, and women's policy agencies are examples of the ways in which women's movements were able to restructure states. For example, María del Carmen Feijoó found that “the evolution of democratic institutions and political culture in Argentina [produced] more sustainable forms of empowerment [for women] … creating an environment in which feminist and women's groups have experienced advances.”53 In other nations, even where the democratization process involved activist women and women's movements, democratic practice marginalized them. In her work on abortion, divorce and family policy in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, Mala Htun concluded that “transitions to democracy will not necessarily lead to the liberalization of laws on gender and may in fact lead to the opposite.”54

Htun 2003, 172 (emphasis original); see also 179–82.

Sonia Alvarez found, in the Brazilian case, that women's movements faced “a democratizing, but ever-more conservative civilian regime.”55

Weak women's movements may themselves signal problematic democratization. In Central and East Europe, “women had few opportunities to be active in autonomous political organizations prior to 1989.”56

Democratization movements attracted less active support from women than was the case in Latin America; women “participated in dissident and opposition groups during the transitions, but rarely as women or as feminists,”57

Ibid., 6.

with serious consequences for women during democratic consolidation.58

For a comparative analysis of women's political position in East and Central Europe after democratic transitions, see Matland and Montgomery 2003.

In several postcommunist democratizing nations of Central and East Europe, as institutions democratized, opportunities for activist women began to close. Nonetheless, Richard Matland concludes that during democratic consolidation, organized women have succeeded in establishing their presence, “[making] real progress … [in] the countries in which stable democracy has taken root and political issues have moved beyond discussions of developing democratic institutions and market mechanisms.”59 The role of the military and of the major religious organizations in transitions, the configuration of power—including “authoritarian enclaves”—political parties, electoral systems, and the relationship between the legislature and the executive are variables that gender the transition process and the public policy it produces.60

Ibid., 172–75.

In terms of comparative women's movements, Latin American and postcommunist Central and East European cases predominate in the democratic transition research;61

nonetheless, several comparative women's movement courses use cases of democratic transition in south central Asia, Western Europe (including the reunited Germany and post-Franco Spain),62 Africa, and the Middle East. Across all of these nations, important factors that have gendered consequences for women's experience of democratic development are women's previous inclusion or exclusion; state attention to women as a social category; pace of the transition process and organized women's involvement in it; the extent to which economic and social transformations, concurrent with political change, positively affect women; and the political opportunity structure.63

Waylen (2003) identifies four factors that gender the democratic transition process: “the nature of the transition; … the role of women activists; … the nature of the political parties and politicians involved in the transition; and … the nature of the institutional legacy of the non-democratic regime” (pp. 157–78).

Women's movements' contributions may be especially important in democratizing nations because these movements can insist upon women's political inclusion during the state-building process. As Eileen McDonagh argues, “what is crucial for women's political citizenship is the incorporation of gender difference into the construction of the state.”64

McDonagh 2002, 547 (emphasis original). Based on her analysis of 190 nations, McDonagh concludes that two gender-paradoxical components of state construction undergird women's political citizenship: first, “women's group difference,” in terms of reproductive capacity and care work and, second, “the affirmation of women's individual equality.” These factors, if incorporated into state-building, can be employed to “construct government institutions and constitutional policies of the state that [enhance] women's political citizenship” (p. 548).

Democracy as citizen participation

Women's movements are themselves manifestations of mass citizen participation. Democracy, as Jill Bystydzienski and Joti Sekhon write, “allows for the fullest realization of the human creative potential…. [and] thus support[s] the development of values and structures that promote and give people a direct voice in matters that affect their lives.”65

Their view of “democracy as a process by which the voices of ordinary people can find increasing organized expression in the institutions of their societies”66 is reflected in many of the comparative women's movements syllabi, if only implicitly, since they focus on movement as the major form of women's collective expression, thus locating democracy in citizen practice.

Courses that employ a conventional cross-national comparative analysis generally ask how women came to politicize their identities as women, how they organized around those identities, which organizational forms advanced women's issues, and which strategies women employed to achieve their ends. At the grassroots level (or the base or community level), women in collective effort were found to raise issues specific to women, beyond their identities as workers or Catholics or revolutionaries, often focusing on reproductive issues, sexuality, and sexual practice. These specific concerns enabled women's movements to challenge undemocratic exclusion of women and inattention to women's issues.67

For work on democratic participation of women's movements, see Schild 1998; Tripp 2002, 413–40; Paidar 2002; A. Phillips 2002.

Organized women, in alliance with others, often tested repressive state tolerance of issues “unraisable” by other interests and, in many cases, began the initial leveraging of repressive states toward increasing openness and accommodation. Conversely, in transitional states where women were not active in these ways, emerging democracy was stunted, and women's rights and social policies were often diminished.

Women's movements carry within them an inherent capacity for democracy at the level of citizen participation when they meet two conditions of inclusion. First, they approach democracy when they organize inclusively. Current evidence suggests that women's movements mobilize primarily by “socializing the scope of the conflict,”68

through public activism, and by recruiting additional women to the movement or its campaign. In short, women's movements generally extend mass participation and thus contribute to democratic development.69

Again, this must be determined empirically; I do not posit this as an automatic consequence of women's movements.

Many of the course syllabi explicate specific cases of women's movements mobilization and their capacity for generating alliances and building coalitions.

Second, all women share the common experience of political exclusion as a class. As Nelson and Chowdhury observe, “[I]n no country do women have political status, access or influence equal to men's,”70

and, as Lisa Baldez reminds us, “[W]hat unites women is their exclusion from the political process and their collective status as political outsiders.”71 As a result, all women share a common focus as they organize: to challenge and to transcend their political exclusion as they struggle for specific goals. In this regard, women's movements challenge the state (and civil society) to be receptive to groups not usually encompassed within state power.

The combination of these two conditions of inclusion suggests that women's movements may position women as potential (if sometimes inadvertent) makers of democracy through inclusionary practices, collective action in conventional and unconventional (and even disruptive) terms (as “staples of the contemporary repertoire in democratic states”),72

and challenges to the state.73

Women's movements may also be inherently descriptively democratic insofar as they involve female actors advancing women's issues (whether or not those issues concern gender or women directly). Whether women's movements actually “speak” for all women is contestable, but a failure to do so is not undemocratic on its face. See the extensive literature on the descriptive and substantive representation of women; for the U.S. literature, see Dovi 2002; Mansbridge 1999; Reingold 2000; Swers 2002; Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994; A. Phillips 1991, 60–91.

Courses on comparative women's movements, then, share a focus on the ways in which democracy, however conceived, might have specific consequences for women, that is, the ways in which forms of democracy might be gendered. Further, these courses help us to develop and to critique alternative, progressive, or feminist understandings of democracy that can contribute powerfully to contemporary democratic practice and structure, and to international democratic interaction and negotiation. As a result, comparative women's movements courses are located at the heart of political science disciplinary concerns as well as current international political debate.

Conclusion

Courses on comparative women's movements serve two important purposes for political science. First, they confirm the utility of comparative political methodology and the variety of comparative strategies for a relatively new subfield. Second, by elaborating the gendered nature of democratization and citizen participation, they show how democracy is constructed. Moreover, such courses clarify what is meant by “women's movements,” and they critically integrate the social movement literature into political science. That these courses make such contributions is impressive in the context of the tensions normally involving a new area of inquiry, where the definitions and theoretical frameworks are still being developed and where some of the most basic data are yet to be collected.

Courses on comparative women's movements are positioned between two frequently antipathetic disciplines: political science and women's studies. Some of the best comparative women's movements scholarship is published outside the disciplinary journals of political science.74

This is the case for social movements and political movements research generally. For examples, see the special issue of Feminist Review devoted to South African women, especially Hassim 2003 and Seidman 2003.

Within political science, scholarship is still developing, and common concepts, terminology, and research foci have yet to be established.

An additional difficulty for this new subfield is the developmental tension between comparative research concerned with women and politics, on the one hand, and a comparative gendered analysis of women's movements, on the other. The extent to which institutional contexts and strategic opportunities are gendered shifts the research focus to specific gendered actors, to questions of how movement actors frame their strategic choices, preferences, demands, and tactics, and how they interact in gendered forms, bodies, and sequences with other (also gendered) actors. The comparative study of women's movements has helped to shift—if only partially—the focus from organizations, resources, and strategies of social movements to movement actors themselves.75

Who the actors are becomes as central as the political context for social movements. A major contribution of courses on comparative women's movements, where these ideas often have their first test, has been the identification of the dynamic, actor-specific political opportunity structures that operate in gendered terms. If institutions and opportunities are gendered, women's movements will face unique constraints and conditions.

Basic evidence concerning women's movements remains to be collected. Are women's movements latent in nondemocratic regimes? Are feminist movements presaged by women's conventional political participation in developing nations? Are women's movements and feminist movements sequenced in industrialized nations, with each other or with other movements? Do women's movements share tactical repertoires across nations, independent of context?76

Understanding the gendered nature of social movements and their interactions with states and other actors is, or will be, an important advance in the study of women's movements.77

Beckwith 2001b, 382–86.

Given that the subfield of comparative women's movements is so new, and still marginal to political science, courses on comparative women's movements bear the burden—perhaps an unwarranted and overwhelming one—of addressing and responding to a wide range of relevant political science research, not all of which can be easily accommodated. The syllabi reflect this dilemma. There is as yet little direct contribution to political theory evidenced in the courses themselves. Moreover, the courses have done little to incorporate the political economy literature (the same holds for more general social movements courses). Class-based analyses of women's movements are generally absent from the syllabi as well, even where courses address class-specific women's movements.

In political science, new ideas, new concepts, and new areas of inquiry emerge from our coursework as frequently as they do from our research. In courses on comparative women's movements, our engagement with current scholarship intersects with original research on women's movements, and in comparative politics, democratization, democratic theory, and citizen participation. As a result, courses on comparative women's movements are positioned powerfully, if surprisingly, at the center of political science, primed to reinvigorate comparative politics and, perhaps, the discipline itself.

Appendix

Undergraduate courses

Alvarez, Sonia. University of California at Santa Cruz: Fall 2001. Feminisms, trans/national cultural politics and gender policy advocacy.

Alvarez, Sonia, and Gwendolyn Mink. University of California at Santa Cruz: Spring 1999. Women and politics.

Baldez, Lisa. Harvard University: Fall 2002. Women's movements in Latin America.

Baldez, Lisa. Washington University: Spring 1999. Women in global perspective.

Basu, Amrita. Amherst College: Spring 2002. Globalization, social movements and human rights.

Basu, Amrita, Kristin Bumiller and Margaret Hunt. Amherst College: Spring 2000. Women's activism in global perspective. www.womencrossing.org/wags44syl.html.

Beckwith, Karen. The College of Wooster: Spring 2002; Spring 2005. Women's movements in comparative perspective. http://www.wooster.edu/polisci/kb/psci247-13.html.

Bell, Diane. George Washington University: Fall 2000. Global feminisms. www.gwu.edu/∼wstu/courses/global.htm.

Britton, Hannah. Mississippi State University: Spring 2000. Women and global politics.

Calman, Leslie. Barnard College: Spring 1998. Colloquium on women and Third World politics. www.econ.barnard.columbia.edu/∼polisci/courses/3414lc98.html.

Camerra-Rowe, Pamela. Kenyon College: Spring 1998. Women and politics: Western Europe and the U.S.

Elman, R. Amy. Kalamazoo College: no date. Women and the Western state.

Enloe, Cynthia. Clark University: Fall 2001. The comparative politics of race, ethnicity and gender.

Enloe, Cynthia. Clark University: Fall 2001. International feminist thinking.

Gelb, Joyce. City University of New York: no date. Women and politics.

Hipscher, Patricia. Oklahoma State University: Spring 2001. Women and politics.

Jeydel, Alana. Oregon State University: no date. Gender and politics. http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/jeydel/ps317syl.htm.

Liebowitz, Debra. Drew University: Fall 2001. Global feminisms. www.drew.edu/catalog/cla/courses/display.php?name=PSCI+154&group=PSCI.

Mazur, Amy. Washington State University: Spring 2001. Gender and politics: Women's empowerment, policy, and democratic development in comparative perspective. www.cawp.rutgers.edu/Research/syllabuslist.html#comparative.

Park, You-me. George Washington University: Fall 2001. Third World women's movements. www.gwu.edu/∼wstu/courses/global_Park.htm.

Rexroat, Jennifer. University of Illinois at Chicago: Spring 1999. Senior seminar in women's studies.

Stetson, Dorothy McBride. Florida Atlantic University: no date. Feminist politics and policy.

Taglia, Kathryn. University of Northern British Columbia: Fall 1996. Women's movements from cross-cultural perspectives. www.h-net.msu.edu/∼women/syll/syll-crossmove.html.

Tripp, Aili Mari. University of Wisconsin: Fall 1998. Special topics in women and society: Women and social movements in comparative perspective.

Combined undergraduate and graduate courses

Bashevkin, Sylvia. University of Toronto: Fall 2001. Women and politics.

Charlton, Sue Ellen. Colorado State University: Spring 2000. Women and international development. www.colostate.edu/Depts/PoliSci/fac/sc/syllabi/ie470/ie470syl.html.

Jones, Kathleen B., and Gun Hedlund. San Diego State University and Orebro University (Sweden): no date. International women's movements/comparative gender politics.

Graduate courses

Boling, Patricia. Purdue University: Spring 2002. Comparative women's movements.

Tripp, Aili Mari, and Myra Marx Ferree. University of Wisconsin: Spring 2003. National feminisms, transnational arenas, universal human rights. www.polisci.wisc.edu/users/tripp/teaching.htm.

Zippel, Kathrina. Northeastern University: Winter 2003. Gender and globalization. http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/zippel/courses/syllabi/3366syllabus.pdf.

References

Alvarez, Sonia. 1990. Engendering democracy in Brazil: Women's movements in transition politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baldez, Lisa. 2002. Why women protest: Women's movements in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Banaszak, Lee Ann. 1996a. Why movements succeed or fail: Opportunity, culture and the struggle for woman suffrage. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Banaszak, Lee Ann. 1996b. When waves collide: Cycles of protest and the Swiss and American women's movements. Political Research Quarterly 49 (4): 837–60.Google Scholar
Banaszak, Lee Ann, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht. 2003a. When power relocates: Interactive changes in women's movements and states. In Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003b, 1–29.
Banaszak, Lee Ann, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht, eds. 2003b. Women's movements facing the reconfigured state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Beckwith, Karen. 2000. Beyond compare? Women's movements in comparative perspective. European Journal of Political Research 37 (4): 431–68.Google Scholar
Beckwith, Karen. 2001a. Gender frames and collective action: Configurations of masculinity in the Pittston Coal strike. Politics and Society 29 (2): 297–330.Google Scholar
Beckwith, Karen. 2001b. Women's movements at century's end: Excavations and advances in political science. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 371–90.Google Scholar
Beckwith, Karen. 2003. The gendering ways of states: Women's representation and state reconfiguration in Britain, France, and the United States. In Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003b, 169–202.
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. 1983. Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: Raising gender-aschematic children in a gender-schematic society. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (4): 598–616.Google Scholar
Britton, Hannah. 2002. The incomplete revolution: South African women's struggle for parliamentary transformation. International Feminist Journal of Politics 4 (1): 1–29.Google Scholar
Bystydzienski, Jill M., and Joti Sekhon. 1999. Introduction. In Democratization and women's grassroots movements, ed. Jill M. Bystydzienski and Joti Sekhon, 1–21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Castro, Mary García. 2001. Engendering powers in neoliberal times in Latin America: Reflections from the left on feminism and feminisms. Latin American Perspectives 28 (6): 17–37.Google Scholar
Chappell, Louise. 2002. Gendering government: Feminist engagement with the state in Australia and Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Darcy, R., Susan Welch, and Janet Clark. 1994. Women, elections, and representation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Della Porta, Donatella. 1995. Social movements, political violence, and the state: A comparative analysis of Italy and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Della Porta, Donatella, Celia Valiente, and Maria Kousis. 2000. Unpublished manuscript. Women's movement and democratization: Paths to women's rights in southern Europe.
Dobrowolsky, Alexandra. 2000. The politics of pragmatism: Women, representation, and constitutionalism in Canada. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dobrowolsky, Alexandra. 2003. Shifting states: Women's constitutional organizing across time and space. In Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003b, 114–40.
Dobrowolsky, Alexandra, and Vivien Hart, eds. 2003. Women making constitutions: New politics and comparative perspectives. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dovi, Suzanne. 2002. Preferable descriptive representatives: Will just any woman, Black or Latino, do? American Political Science Review 96 (4): 729–43.Google Scholar
Feijoó, María del Carmen. 1998. Democratic participation and women in Argentina. In Women and democracy: Latin America and central and eastern Europe, ed. Jane S. Jaquette and Sharon L. Wolchik, 29–46. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ferree, Myra Marx, and Carol McClurg Mueller. 2004. Feminism and the women's movement: A global perspective. In The Blackwell companion to social movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, 576–607. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Friedman, Elisabeth J. 2000. State-based advocacy for gender equality in the developing world: Assessing the Venezuelan National Women's Agency. Women and Politics 21 (2): 47–80.Google Scholar
Hassim, Shireen. 2003. The gender pact and democratic consolidation: Institutionalizing gender equality in the South African state. Feminist Studies 29 (3): 505–28.Google Scholar
Hawkesworth, Mary. 2003. Congressional enactments of race-gender: Toward a theory of raced-gendered institutions. American Political Science Review 97 (4): 529–50.Google Scholar
Heberle, Rudolph. 1951. Social movements: An introduction to political sociology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Htun, Mala. 2003. Sex and the state: Abortion, divorce, and the family under Latin American dictatorships and democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jaquette, Jane S. 1998. Women and democratization in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe: A comparative introduction. In Women and democracy: Latin America and central and eastern Europe, ed. Jane S. Jaquette and Sharon L. Wolchik, 1–28. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jaquette, Jane S. 2001. Women and democracy: Regional differences and contrasting views. Journal of Democracy 12 (3): 111–25.Google Scholar
Jaquette, Jane S., and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds. 1998. Women and democracy: Latin America and central and eastern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jenson, Jane, and Celia Valiente. 2003. Comparing two movements for gender parity: France and Spain. In Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003b, 69–93.
Kaplan, Temma. 1982. Female consciousness and collective action: The case of Barcelona, 1910–1918. Signs 7 (3): 545–66.Google Scholar
Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1987. Comparing the feminist movements of the United States and Western Europe: An overview. In The women's movements of the United States and Western Europe: Consciousness, political opportunity, and public policy, ed. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller, 3–20. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1998. Faithful and fearless: Moving feminist protest inside the church and military. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Klandermans, Bert. 1991. New social movements and resource mobilization: The European and American approach revisited. In Research on social movements: The state of the art in Western Europe and the USA, ed. Dieter Rucht, 17–44. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1996. The organizational structure of new social movements in a political context. In Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, 152–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kriesi, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni, eds. 1995. New social movements in Western Europe: A comparative analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lichbach, Mark Irving, and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds. 1997. Comparative politics: Rationality, culture, and structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lovenduski, Joni, and Pippa Norris, eds. 1993. Gender and party politics. London: Sage.
Luker, Kristin. 1984. Abortion and the politics of motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Maloof, Judy, ed. 1999. Voices of resistance: Testimonies of Cuban and Chilean women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. Essays on the sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mansbridge, Jane. 1996. What is the feminist movement? In Feminist organizations: Harvest of the new women's movement, ed. Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess, 27–34. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. Should blacks represent blacks and women represent women: A contingent “yes.” Journal of Politics 61 (3): 628–57.Google Scholar
Matland, Richard E. 2003. Women's representation in post-communist Europe. In Women's access to political power in post-communist Europe, ed. Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery, 321–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matland, Richard E., and Kathleen A. Montgomery, eds. 2003. Women's access to political power in post-communist Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matynia, Elzbieta. 1995. Finding a voice: Women in postcommunist central Europe. In The challenge of local feminisms: Women's movements in global perspective, ed. Amrita Basu, 374–404. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Mazur, Amy G., and Dorothy McBride Stetson. 2002. Defining women's movements cross-nationally and over time: Lessons from the Project of the Research Network on Gender, Politics, and the State. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Political Science Association, Bellevue, Washington, October 17–19.
Mazur, Amy G., and Dorothy McBride Stetson. 2003. Quantifying complex concepts: The case of the women's movement in the RNGS project. APSA-CP Newsletter 14 (1): 11–14.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonagh, Eileen. 2002. Political citizenship and democratization: The gender paradox. American Political Science Review 96 (3): 535–52.Google Scholar
Melucci, Alberto. 1981. New movements, terrorism, and the political system: Reflections on the Italian case. Socialist Review 56: 97–136.Google Scholar
Meyer, David S., and Sidney Tarrow. 1998. A movement society: Contentious politics for a new century. In The social movement society: Contentious politics for a new century, ed. David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, 1–28. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Minkoff, Debra C. 1997. The sequencing of social movements. American Sociological Review 62 (5): 779–99.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Third World women and the politics of feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Molyneux, Maxine. 1985. Mobilization without emancipation? Women's interests, the state and revolution in Nicaragua. Feminist Studies 11 (2): 227–54.Google Scholar
Molyneux, Maxine. 2003. Analyzing women's movements. In Women's movements in international perspective: Latin America and beyond, ed. Maxine Molyneux, 140–62. London: University of London Institute of Latin American Studies.
Nelson, Barbara J., and Najma Chowdhury. 1994. Redefining politics: Patterns of women's political engagement from a global perspective. In Women and politics worldwide, ed. Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury, 3–24. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Paidar, Parvin. 2002. Encounters between feminism, democracy and reformism in contemporary Iran. In Gender justice, development, and rights, ed. Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi, 239–76. New York: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, Anne. 1991. Engendering democracy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Phillips, Anne. 2002. Multiculturalism, universalism and the claims of democracy. In Gender justice, development, and rights, ed. Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi, 115–40. New York : Oxford University Press.
Phillips, Susan D. 1991. Meaning and structure in social movements: Mapping the network of national Canadian women's organizations. Canadian Journal of Political Science 24 (4): 765–67.Google Scholar
Power, Margaret. 2002. Right-wing women in Chile: Feminine power and the struggle against Allende, 1964–1973. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Randall, Vicky, and Georgina Waylen, eds. 1998. Gender, politics and the state. New York: Routledge.
Reingold, Beth. 2000. Representing women: Sex, gender, and legislative behavior in Arizona and California. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rucht, Dieter. 2003. Interactions between social movements and states in comparative perspective. In Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003b, 242–74.
Schattschneider, E. E. 1975. The semisovereign people: A realist's view of democracy in America. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press.
Schild, Verónica. 1998. New subjects of rights? Women's movements and the construction of citizenship in the “new democracies.” In Cultures of politics/politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, 93–117. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Seidman, Gay W. 2003. Institutional dilemmas: Representation versus mobilization in the South African Gender Commission. Feminist Studies 29 (3): 541–63.Google Scholar
Smith, Lois M., and Alfred Padula. 1996. Sex and revolution: Women in socialist Cuba. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organizing women in contemporary Russia: Engendering transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Staggenborg, Suzanne. 1991. The pro-choice movement: Organization and activism in the abortion conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stetson, Dorothy McBride, and Amy Mazur, eds. 1995. Comparative state feminism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Swers, Michele L. 2002. The difference women make: The policy impact of women in Congress. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1989. Democracy and disorder: Protest and politics in Italy 1965–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1998. Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2002. The new transnational contention: Organizations, coalitions, mechanisms. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, August 29–September 1.
Threlfall, Monica. 1996. Feminist politics and social change in Spain. In Mapping the women's movement: Feminist politics and social transformation in the North, ed. Monica Threlfall, 115–51. London and New York: Verso Press.
Tripp, Aili Mari. 2002. Conflicting visions of community and citizenship: Women's rights and cultural diversity in Uganda. In Gender justice, development, and rights, ed. Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi, 413–40. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tyyskä, Vappu. 1999. Western feminism? Problems of categorizing women's movements in cross-national research. In Émigré feminism: Transnational perspectives, ed. Alena Heitlinger, 252–66. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Vargas, Virginia, and Saskia Wieringa. 1998. The triangle of empowerment: Processes and actors in the making of public policy for women. In Women's movements and public policy in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt, Virginia Vargas, and Saskia Wieringa, 3–24. New York: Garland.
Waters, Elizabeth, and Anastasia Posadskaya. 1995. Democracy without women is no democracy: Women's struggles in postcommunist Russia. In The challenge of local feminisms: Women's movements in global perspective, ed. Amrita Basu, 351–73. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Waylen, Georgina. 1994. Women and democratization: Conceptualizing gender relations in transition politics. World Politics 46 (3): 327–54.Google Scholar
Waylen, Georgina. 1996. Women's movements, the state and democratization in Chile: The establishment of SERNAM [Servicio nacional de la mujer]. In Women and politics in the Third World, ed. Halef Afshar, 90–103. London and New York: Routledge.
Waylen, Georgina. 2003. Gender and transitions: What do we know? Democratization 10 (1): 157–78.Google Scholar
Weldon, S. Laurel. 2002. Protest, policy and the problem of violence against women: A cross-national comparison. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Whittier, Nancy. 1995. Feminist generations : The persistence of the radical women's movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Young, Lisa. 2000. Feminists and party politics. Toronto: Harcourt Brace.