The Challenges of Framing Women's Mobilization

A primary challenge to mobilizing women as women into collective action stems from the fact that they constitute a large and diverse group. Differences include (but are not limited to) variations in age, race and ethnicity, class background, education, sexual orientation, geographic origin, political ideology, experiences of subordination, and attitudes toward the proper roles of women in society. These differences, along with changing times and circumstances, guarantee that not all women are reachable through the same calls for action.

Social movement leaders develop and borrow collective action frames to mobilize movement participants into action. Erving Goffman explains that a “frame” establishes a “definition of a situation … in accordance with the principles of organization that govern events.”Footnote ¹⁴ In essence, a frame instructs us what to pay attention to, and what to ignore, about a situation. Within the context of social movements, David Snow and Robert Benford specify that collective action frames are “emergent, action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns.”Footnote ¹⁵ That is, frames instruct potential participants on why and how they should undertake action for a cause. Since different people are inspired by different sets of beliefs and meanings, multiple frames emerge within any movement. For this reason, William Gamson observes that “[m]ovements may have internal battles over which particular frame will prevail or may offer several frames for different constituencies …”Footnote ¹⁶ Struggles over which collective action frame is most appropriate for which constituencies has been a key feature of women's organizing in the United States. While a large number of different frames have been used to animate women's collective action, we focus on three of the most prevalent ones: the maternal frame, the equality frame, and what we term the feminine-expressive frame.

The maternal frame highlights women's roles as mothers, nurturers, and caregivers, as well as their differences from men, in calling them to action. This frame is rooted in maternalism, the belief that women have biological—and perhaps psychological—differences from men that justify the distinct social roles that have been constructed around those differences. Women's proclivity toward care-giving has been used to justify their political engagement on behalf of issues including public education, children's healthcare, mothers' pensions, and women's suffrage.Footnote ¹⁷

Most relevant for our purposes, maternalism has been a significant rationale for women's involvement in peace work. Women's groups have pursued this peace agenda through internationally oriented groups, such as the Woman's Peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and through national multi-issue associations, such as the League of Women Voters and the Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1925, major women's groups formed the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which claimed to represent 20% of American women.Footnote ¹⁹ A leading Progressive Era reformer explained women's intense engagement by observing that “women are mothers, or potential mothers, [and] therefore have a more intimate sense of the value of human life … [affording] more meaning and passion in the determination of a woman's organization to end war than in an organization of men and women with the same aim.”Footnote ²⁰ This rationale continued with the creation in 1961 of Women Strike for Peace, which protested nuclear testing in a way that was “intentionally simple, pragmatic, nonideological, moralistic, and emotional.”Footnote ²¹ The organization played to cultural stereotypes of proper womanhood to ensure its credibility within the political and media realms,Footnote ²² but it also represented the actual motivations of many women and certainly of its leaders. “They wore their status of middle-class wifehood and motherhood proudly, while asserting their responsibility for nurturance, moral guardianship, and life preservation.”Footnote ²³

The equality frame stresses women's sameness with men—especially as bearers of civil and political rights and as labor market participants and occupiers of professional roles—in calling them to action. This frame is rooted in egalitarianism, which has been essential in making the case for women's right to equal treatment under the law (especially universal adult suffrage), reproductive autonomy, and equal opportunities in the economic sphere.Footnote ²⁴ Late-19^th-century suffragists and the advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment a century later are archetypal examples of egalitarianism as a rationale for public policy and a motivation for collective action.Footnote ²⁵

The feminine-expressive frame reclaims feminine stereotypes and attire and uses them in a playful, self-parodying way in order to call women to action. Feminine expression is rooted in individual empowerment through the reclamation of “Girlie” iconography and unabashed feminine sexual expression.Footnote ²⁶ The feminine-expressive frame has long been a feature of women's collective action: It was employed by early 20^th century suffragists who staged mock theatrical pageants, feminists who protested the Miss America pageant in the late 1960s, and the Guerrilla Girls, who assaulted the “conscience of the art world” in the 1980s.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, both Code Pink and the March exemplify new efforts to synthesize this rhetorical frame creatively with the discourses of “maternalism” and “egalitarianism.”

Each of these collective action frames has spoken to American women in different times and political contexts. Yet, by the early 21^st century, these frames faced challenges from within the women's community and critiques from counter-movements seeking to identify and take advantage of weaknesses in their opponents' narratives. In both cases, the rhetorical polarization of “maternalism” and “egalitarianism” has been promoted by a mass media heavily inclined toward what E.J. Dionne, Jr., called “false polarization.”Footnote ²⁸ Political entrepreneurs within women's organizations are thus challenged to confront these criticisms by devising new ways to reach women for whom these internal and external critiques have resonated.

The maternal frame is regularly challenged by actors who claim that an emphasis on a women's care ethic does a disservice to women's political stature. For example, some proponents of egalitarianism criticized Women Strike for Peace for enforcing “a gender hierarchy in which men made war and women wept” and argued that “until women go beyond justifying themselves in terms of their wombs and breasts and housekeeping abilities, they will never be able to exert any political power.”Footnote ²⁹ In 1971, the National Organization for Women resolved that women should cease traditional, service-oriented volunteering on the grounds that it reinforced gender inequality.Footnote ³⁰ Other critics argue that maternalism undermines women's claims to full, effective citizenship by reinforcing stereotypes of women as instinctive, emotional, and guardians of the private sphere.Footnote ³¹ Reflecting on the maternalist frame articulated by Progressive Era reformers, Theda Skocpol contends that “in the United States today no such unproblematic connections of womanhood and motherhood, or of private and public mothering, are remotely possible—not even in flights of moralism or rhetorical fancy.”Footnote ³²

The equality frame is regularly challenged by actors who claim that calls for equality are tantamount to the dismissal of motherhood, devaluation of marriage, and the rejection of femininity. These critiques have been nurtured by conservative institutions and media figuresFootnote ³³ such as radio host Rush Limbaugh, who coined the term “feminazis.” These figures promote “the myth that all feminists are … fat, man-hating, no-fun lesbians.”Footnote ³⁴ Amid the conservative backlash, critics and the media have developed a narrative of feminism in decline.Footnote ³⁵ Between 1989 and 2001, “some 86 articles in English language newspapers referred to the death of feminism and another 74 articles referred to the post-feminist era.”Footnote ³⁶ A 2004 book title went so far as to pronounce “feminism” The F-Word. Footnote ³⁷

An effect of media and conservative portrayals of feminism has been to increase the difficulty of mobilizing women using the equality frame. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, a series of national polls of women revealed a seven-point decline in feminist self-identification, from 33% to 26%, and a concomitant increase in the fraction of women who said they were decidedly not feminists.Footnote ³⁸ The decline was driven by younger women (born after 1955), who accepted the negative connotations of feminism perpetuated by media caricatures or who were uncertain about what feminism meant.Footnote ³⁹

The feminine-expressive frame is regularly challenged by actors who claim that activism based on expressions of femininity and sexuality tends to neglect important public policy issues. Echoing other media accounts, a prominent article in Time magazine depicts this approach as largely “divorced from matters of public purpose.”Footnote ⁴⁰ New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen dismisses expressive activism as “babe feminism,” which she predicts will have “a shorter shelf life than the feminism of sisterhood.”Footnote ⁴¹ Within the women's movement, some critics worry that activism intended as parody will be misunderstood and may reinforce stereotypes.Footnote ⁴² Others question whether accepting stereotypes of male dominance (even if in the form of parody), “might undermine equality in the public sphere.”Footnote ⁴³

All three frames are vulnerable to the challenge that they neglect the concerns of less-advantaged women, especially regarding education, poverty, and discrimination. Many activists are keen to identify the ways in which women are intersectionally marginalized; that is, how identities linked to race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, disability, and other disadvantaged statuses interact with gender to compound experiences of marginalization.Footnote ⁴⁴ These activists advocate that gendered frames must be combined with other identities in order to have political resonance. Whereas criticisms of maternalism, egalitarianism, and expressivism typically challenge the way each of these approaches frames questions of gender, the focus on intersectionality questions the exclusive focus on gender itself, insisting that politics deals not simply with women (understood as mothers, citizens, or provocateurs) but with black or white women, middle-class or poor women, gay or straight women (and, of course, the literature on intersectionality underscores the range of permutations of race, class, gender, and sexuality).

As the critiques above suggest, the ability to navigate among competing collective action frames is a critical challenge for contemporary women's organizers. Framing disputes have the potential to induce schism within a movement and undermine prospects for collective action.Footnote ⁴⁵ Movement leaders thus search for novel frames that have the potential to reconcile conflicts between existing, often competing frames.Footnote ⁴⁶ Organizations that are able to innovate in this way may ameliorate both internal and external threats to effective collective action. The Million Mom March and Code Pink represent such innovators.

Social Movement Adaptation

To understand how the Million Mom March and Code Pink have navigated their changing political environments, we draw upon the political science and sociology literature on how social movements adapt and evolve. We briefly review five major perspectives on social movement organizations—the cohort perspective, the organizational ecology/niche perspective, the political process/opportunity perspective, the diffusion perspective, and the spillover perspective. Footnote ⁴⁷ Then, drawing from each, we develop a modified organizational-innovation perspective, focusing on the ways that organizational and rhetorical hybridity have enabled both Code Pink and the Million Mom March to adapt to the challenges of women's collective action.

Cohort-perspective studies examine how social movements evolve as new generations of activists enter and founding generations exit.Footnote ⁴⁸ Much of this work extends pioneering studies on the formation of collective identity in social movement organizations.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the case of the Million Mom March and Code Pink, the cohort perspective would argue that new generations of women were responsible for organizational innovation. The organizational ecology/niche perspective, which draws on insights from population studies and bioecology, examines the birth, death, and adaptive strategies of organizations, including advocacy organizations.Footnote ⁵⁰ This work privileges factors such as the density of an organizational field, niche-seeking behavior, and external patronage support as critical to organizational innovation and survival. The ecology/niche perspective would predict that the Million Mom March and Code Pink arose to fill gaps in the existing organizational field, but would do little to illuminate how the gaps were identified or how leaders of the emerging organizations crafted a collective identity.

The political process/opportunity perspective focuses on how changes in the socio-political context can lead to an intensification of protest activity,Footnote ⁵¹ which sometimes takes the form of “cycles of protest.”Footnote ⁵² This perspective would explain the March and Code Pink as responses to frustrated political agendas on the left and the opportunity to identify focal points around gun control and the Iraq War. But it would not necessarily account well for why women emerged as leaders of these movements or how or why these movements would frame their issues creatively in gendered terms. The diffusion perspective examines how tactics and ideas spread within the same movement across geographic boundaries,Footnote ⁵³ such as the effect of the New Left in America on the comparable movement in GermanyFootnote ⁵⁴ and the spread of anti-Apartheid shantytowns across college campuses in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁵ This perspective would emphasize how the March and Code Pink borrowed tactics from other gun control and peace organizations but would not necessarily draw attention to the relationship between these tactics and tensions among women's constituencies.

Finally, the spillover perspective emphasizes how tactics, personnel, and ideas spread between movements. For example, Larry Isaac and his colleagues document the effects of the U.S. civil rights movement on the revival of the American labor movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ David Meyer and Nancy Whittier examine the influence of the women's movement on the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rhonda Evans and Tamara Kay document the effect of environmentalism on the labor movement.Footnote ⁵⁸ The spillover perspective would highlight the borrowing of the March and Code Pink from other contemporaneous peace or social-justice movements, but would not necessarily explain why and how certain strategies, tactics, and organizational innovations were adopted, while others were not.

In short, while each of these five perspectives offers important insights, none of them sufficiently theorizes the creative process of recombination exemplified by the strategies of March and Code Pink. More promising is the organizational innovation perspective, associated with scholars such as Elizabeth Armstrong, Elisabeth Clemens, Victoria Johnson, Francesca Polletta, and Fabio Rojas.Footnote ⁵⁹ This perspective argues that movements adapt over time through organizational innovations that sample and recombine ideational and strategic components of predecessor movements. As Victoria Johnson explains, political entrepreneurs often innovate through hybrid forms to respond strategically to varied actors that place demands on the organization.Footnote ⁶⁰ While these demands may come from state actors, Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein point out that demands may also come from non-state actors (such as media, corporations, and interest groups). These actors constrain organizations to develop hybrid forms that satisfy the requirements of multiple institutions in their environments, thus making hybridization a product of “multi-institutional politics.”Footnote ⁶¹ While this kind of hybridity is one of many possible paths to organizational innovation, we believe that it best explains the distinctive strategies and activities of both the March and Code Pink.

For these women's anti-violence organizations hybridity operates in three ways simultaneously. We term these strategic adaptations inter-movement hybridity, intra-constituency hybridity, and inter-institutional hybridity. Each approach allows women to organize as women while managing tensions surrounding their distinctive frameworks of collective action.

• • Inter-movement hybridity. The March and Code Pink bring a women's perspective—embodied in leaders, rhetorical frames, and tactics—to the broader anti-violence movements of which they are a part. At the same time, these women's organizations work with, and draw substantive ideas and resources from, mixed-gender groups within their respective movements.Footnote ⁶² Drawing from and feeding into the broader anti-violence movement while maintaining a distinctive approach to this movement is a major accomplishment of these organizations.

• • Intra-constituency hybridity. In the absence of a clear consensus among women about what unites them, the March and Code Pink both recombine three collective action frames—the maternal frame, the equality frame, and the feminine-expressive frame—in ways that can attract constituencies drawn by one frame without alienating constituencies drawn by the other frames.Footnote ⁶³ Balancing and synthesizing these distinct gender frames is also a major accomplishment.

• • Inter-institutional hybridity. The March and Code Pink sample from and recombine the tactical repertoires of both “outsider” social movement organizations and “insider” interest groups to amplify their external reach. This approach allows the March and Code Pink to shift between historical understandings of women as “virtuous” political outsiders and contemporary recognition of women as “savvy” political insiders. Such tactical shifting helps the groups appeal to the diverse values and interests of external political actors—such as the media, Congress, and the PresidentFootnote ⁶⁴—and thus secure their cooperation.

In applying the hybridity perspective to women's collective action, we borrow from and elaborate theories of hybrid organizations,Footnote ⁶⁵ hybridized identities in social movements,Footnote ⁶⁶ and gender-based hybridity. Research on gender-based hybridity has explored, for example, the combination of maternal and egalitarian understandings in the women's suffrage movement, contemporary campaigns of women candidates, and nation-states that promote women's leadership.Footnote ⁶⁷ We recognize that hybridizing within women's organizations is not new to our times. Women for at least a century have used maternal, equality, and expressive frames to motivate and/or legitimize their participation in the public sphere. As Joan Scott has argued, the equality-difference (i.e., maternal) tension has long been a core paradox of women's political engagement.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, we argue that both the Million Mom March and Code Pink employ distinctive hybrid forms in reaction to contemporary challenges. Of particular interest is how the March and Code Pink mix equality and feminine-expressive frames, together with maternal frames, to advocate for not-explicitly-feminist issues.

We thus enlist hybridity to understand organizational adaptation and innovation. This perspective is indebted to, yet also distinct from, other approaches to social movement adaptation. Like the cohort, political opportunity, and organizational ecology/niche perspectives, the organizational innovation perspective recognizes the role that political context plays in organizational strategies and fortunes. However, unlike these perspectives, it does not assume that generational replacement or other macro-level shifts necessarily drive the adoption of innovative organizational forms or collective action frames. Like the organizational ecology perspective, we are interested in organizational births. However, rather than emphasizing mechanistic factors such as population density and organizational age, we emphasize the importance of culturally sensitive political entrepreneurship in catalyzing organizational formation and in motivating organizational strategy. The organizational innovation perspective is similar to diffusion and spillover perspectives in that it recognizes that social movement organizations are indebted to immediate precedents and contemporaneous models. But while diffusion and spillover theories focus on the transmission of movement tactics, ideas, and frames from one movement locus to another, hybridity emphasizes that movements not only sample desirable components of other movements but also adapt or discard undesirable or outdated components. While diffusion focuses on intra-movement learning in a single movement period, and spillover attends to inter-movement learning over time, hybridity reveals the mechanisms behind organizational innovation.

Our perspective echoes that of Sidney Tarrow, who argues in the context of the U.S. civil rights movement that “the symbols of revolt are not drawn like musty costumes from a cultural closet and arrayed before the public. Nor are new meanings unrolled out of whole cloth. The costumes of revolt are woven from a blend of inherited and invented fibers into collective action frames in confrontation with opponents and elites.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Our cases support Tarrow's observation that movements are “both consumers of existing cultural meanings and producers of new meanings.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Along these lines, Francesca Polletta and James Jasper observe that little is known about “how individuals sort out and combine different sources of identity,” how they “juggle and choose among” the various roles available, or how “cultural building blocks … are used to construct collective identities.”Footnote ⁷¹ Our analysis unpacks the manipulation of these “cultural building blocks” by savvy entrepreneurs in two innovative contemporary organizations.

The Million Mom March and Code Pink: Who Are These Women?

To understand how the Million Mom March and Code Pink evolved as new modes of women's mobilizing, it is useful to paint a portrait of the groups' participants.Footnote ⁷² Both March and Code Pink participants were rich in civically valuable resources. First, these participants were highly educated: Roughly half of the March organizers, the March participants, and the Code Pink activists had attended graduate school or received a graduate school degree—compared to just under 8% of women 25+ in the national population.Footnote ⁷³ Second, they were affluent: 40% of March participants (and 33% of organizers) had household income over $100,000, compared to 10% of American households at that time. Code Pink activists are likewise advantaged: Roughly one-third had more than $75,000 in personal income; their median personal income was in the $45,001-$60,000 range.Footnote ⁷⁴ Third, neither movement was especially racially diverse; whites constituted 95% of Code Pink activists, 83% of Code Pink members, 90% of March organizers, and 83% of March participants—compared to 71% of the nation at large.Footnote ⁷⁵ African-Americans in these organizations are underrepresented relative to their proportions in the relevant reference groups—military personnelFootnote ⁷⁶ and victims of gun violence.Footnote ⁷⁷

These educated, affluent, white women were also politically progressive and inclined toward liberal activism. Fully 83% of March organizers, 74% of March participants, and 60% of Code Pink activists identified as Democrats. More than 70% of March participants and 91% of Code Pink activists had been involved in a prior social-political movement. Among March participants, the most common were civil, women's, or gay rights (43%); abortion rights (34%); peace/antiwar/anti-nuclear issues (32%); and environmentalism, including animal welfare (26%). Among Code Pink activists, the most common were women's rights (68%); environmentalism (67%); civil rights (56%); and anti-nuclear issues (46%). The data suggest that these activists move freely between causes associated with egalitarianism, such as women's rights and abortion rights, and women's causes rooted in an ethic of care, such as peace and environmental protection.

Although both organizations attracted white, affluent, activism-prone women, the groups differed along one dimension that was important to their hybridity strategy: the age distribution of activists. The March participants were normally distributed around a mean of 44 years of age, while Code Pink attracted relatively more participants at the high and low ends of the age distribution. However, since the two groups were surveyed seven years apart (the March in 2000 and Code Pink in 2007), a direct comparison of their ages at the time of the survey would be misleading. To compare the two groups directly, we added seven years to the age of all March participants, which synchronizes the birth years of both groups. The adjusted age distributions are plotted side by side in Figure 1. Both groups drew heavily on baby boomers, who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. However, Code Pink mobilized a slightly older cohort of women (even after allowing the Marchers to “age” to 2007), while the March drew more women in the traditional ages of childbearing and childrearing. Code Pink also attracted more young women, who became politically active after 9/11 and the start of the War in Iraq, while the March was less successful in enlisting women in the 18–32 age range.

Figure 1

Age distribution of Million Mom March (aged 7 years) and Code Pink (actual)

Source: Authors' surveys of 766 Million Mom Marchers (2000) and 138 Code Pink participants (2007).

Note: the age of all Million Mom Marchers is increased by seven to make them comparable to Code Pink participants, who were surveyed seven years later.

The way that each movement organization frames women's collective identity aligns with the generational and life cycle experiences of the women whom these organizations attracted. In the case of the March, organizers consciously targeted mothers of adolescent and teenage children, the women most likely to feel immediately threatened by gun violence in schools. Code Pink attracted women who were a part of the anti-war movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 2000s, largely consisting of two groups: (1) older women who supported the women's movement's Vietnam-era pacifist agenda but also recall the subordination of women within the anti-war movement itself and (2) younger women who were politically catalyzed by post-9/11 foreign policy in the United States. As we explore below, both the March and Code Pink simultaneously embraced, rejected, and made playful use of women's essentialism to attract women to their respective causes.Footnote ⁷⁸

Hybridity As a Political Strategy

The March and Code Pink drew upon maternal, equality, and feminine-expressive frames, melding together diverse views of women's roles on behalf of singular political objectives. They hybridized these frames by adopting, yet simultaneously exaggerating, symbols of gender as a political identity. They embraced the moral authority that women traditionally found in separatism, while sending a public signal—a collective “wink”Footnote ⁷⁹—that they did not embrace the political subordination that often accompanied that separatism. Likewise, these organizations self-identified as women's groups, taking advantage of the solidaristic incentives for participation that “difference” appeals historically afforded, while at the same time signaling, in keeping with egalitarianism, that they would welcome men's participation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hybridity makes it possible for women with diverse perspectives on women's roles to feel comfortable within a single organizational environment.

A word about intersectionality is warranted here. Intersectionality theorists argue that many women do not experience gender in isolation from other identities, such as class, race, disability, or sexual orientation. Intersectionality theory thereby challenges the efficacy of universalistic women's collective action frames, such as maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine-expression. Both the March and Code Pink were led predominantly by white, privileged women whose experience of violence in many cases did not reflect that of their less-privileged sisters. Recognizing this, the groups confronted the intersectionality critique tactically by spotlighting diverse women and the distinct experiences of violence they represented. At the same time, however, the March and Code Pink employed a larger strategy that subsumed distinct (intersectional) experiences within a framework of universal womanhood. As measured by rank-and-file participation, this balancing act worked to some extent—both groups attracted activists outside of traditional white, middle-aged, middle-class constituencies. However, because the groups' collective action frames centered on gender, with other identities secondary, the groups may have had difficulty resonating with diverse women who had complex feelings about gender solidarity.

Million Mom March Hybridity: Maternalism, with a Wink

After a spate of shootings in schools and a California day care center, suburban mother and part-time publicist Donna Dees-Thomases believed that mothers constituted a formidable, yet unorganized, voice in gun-control politics. This policy domain had long been dominated by the powerful National Rifle Association and its gun-rights allies. She calculated that a maternal framing, tailored to make allowances for egalitarianism's uneasiness with difference arguments, would intersect deftly with the gun-control cause (inter-movement hybridity), appeal to women with different sensibilities (intra-constituency hybridity), and facilitate varied organizational forms to draw support from political allies outside the movement (inter-institutional hybridity). The Million Mom March featured equality frames employing maternal rationales laced with playful, self-consciously ironic touches of the feminine-expressive frame.

Inter-movement hybridity

The March was designed to connect women's organizing with the gun control cause, which had been dominated by non-gendered single-interest groups at the national and state levels. For decades, public opinion polls had found women to be significantly more supportive than were men of stricter firearms regulation, but women's voluntary associations had not been a prominent force in the gun-control coalition.Footnote ⁸¹ The challenge for Dees-Thomases, then, was to create a grassroots women's niche within the gun control coalition at a time when sex-segregated organizing was no longer the dominant paradigm and women could participate instead in non-gendered gun control groups.

The March grew out of Dees-Thomases's sense that mothers, herself included, would like to work meaningfully for gun control and her inability to find an existing organization that would welcome her contributions, or even return her phone calls.Footnote ⁸² A publicist who had worked in network television, Dees-Thomases said the first question for her was, “Who's your audience?” Her answer: “Within a few calls, every mom I called was outraged. Clearly that was our targeted audience.”Footnote ⁸³ However, efforts to introduce a grassroots women's component into the existing gun control movement did not go smoothly. Dees-Thomases describes having to learn to “navigate the male politics of the gun-control world.”Footnote ⁸⁴ At several points, according to Dees-Thomases, a national gun control group attempted to scuttle the march, apparently out of fear that it would be a public failure and set the movement back. “Little did I know room was scarce for us moms on that bandwagon where the majority of seats, curiously, were occupied by men.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The effort to create a women's submovement within the larger gun control movement—what we have termed “inter-movement hybridity”—demonstrates the promise and peril of the maternal frame in the contemporary era. Dees-Thomases was betting, based on her professional judgment as a marketer and on the informal “focus group” conducted with her professional-mother friends, that women-as-mothers could be mobilized for gun control. Leading men in the gun control movement were skeptical of the resonance of maternalist appeals in an egalitarian or “post-feminist” environment. The challenge for Dees-Thomases, and other organizers, was to craft a message that would appeal to multiple women's constituencies, what we term “intra-constituency hybridity.”

Intra-constituency hybridity

Dees-Thomases calculated that explicit appeals to women's biological and social roles as mothers would mobilize women in a frontal assault on the powerful U.S. gun lobby and its Congressional supporters. Thus, the organization that Dees-Thomases and others created utilized narratives and visual symbols of maternalism, emphasizing women's differences from men. The maternalist rhetoric was not merely emotional; it contained a deeper critique of men's domination of politics and of the largely men's gun culture. The Million Mom March adopted the instrumentalist logic of maternalism, used by suffragists eighty years earlier, that women's participation in politics would result in better public policies. Yet the Million Mom March also tailored its message to make allowances for the tensions between the equality frame and the maternal frame.

To be sure, the Million Mom March's language was unrelentingly maternal in its embrace of traditional notions of virtuous womanhood. A review of key March documents reveals the core narrative. Women, and mothers in particular, were practical citizens who wanted common-sense gun control policy to protect children. Theirs was a mainstream view that would be apolitical but for the fact that an extremist, irrational gun lobby had captured a cowardly Congress. These elected legislators (who were predominantly men) were behaving in an irresponsible manner and must be disciplined by virtuous mothers representing the general good. Thus forced into politics, these civic-minded mothers would publicly scold anti-gun-control legislators, demonstrate in front of their legislative headquarters, and vote for pro-control candidates. These women utilized the language of level-headed, pragmatic motherhood familiar to lawmakers, to consumers of popular culture, and (they hoped) to everyone who has ever had a sensible mother.

Consistent with the maternal frame, March materials also emphasized the connections between motherhood and electoral power. Newsletters repeatedly remarked that the woman suffrage amendment was ratified because the mother of a 24-year-old Tennessee legislator told him to do the right thing. March materials urged women to participate in politics; the official bumper sticker read, “Million Mom March: i vote!” This symbolism is represented in the picture in Figure 2, where a woman at the March, pushing a stroller with her child, holds a sign stating “My Mommy Votes.”

Figure 2

The Million Mom March, Mother's Day, 2000

Interestingly, the March scarcely addressed the aspect of gun violence that might have resonated most with feminist activists: domestic violence. Even though guns injure or kill more adult women than schoolchildren,Footnote ⁸⁶ Dees-Thomases felt that the maternal frame would offer the most effective appeal. “We tended to get much bigger numbers just by our name.”Footnote ⁸⁷ She calculated that the equality frame had not completely discredited the maternal frame. “We are nurturers whether we want to acknowledge that or not … Some women [i.e., feminists] got very ‘we're too smart for this,’ but I haven't seen us go anywhere with that.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Yet, as suffused as the March was in the maternal frame, the organizers were careful to refine the message to resonate with women with egalitarian-feminist sensibilities. Pamphlets describe March organizers by their professional identities: “writers, editors, musicians … CEO's … public relations executives … former journalists, policewomen, doctors and lawyers,”Footnote ⁸⁹ and Dees-Thomases's book describes how her and her co-organizers' professional skills were critical to the March's development. To defuse the egalitarian critique of appeals rooted in maternal “difference,” the March made playful, almost self-parodying use of motherly iconography. For example, the March's website featured a visual “time-out chair” for pro-gun politicians and an “apple pie award” for gun-control sympathizers. Dees-Thomases' final communication with her organizers before the March instructed them to “gas up the minivans, moms.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The solidaristic elements of the equality frame, combined with the feminine-expressive frame elements, attracted women who might have been ambivalent about maternal narratives: “I always go back to the fact that the first 5–10 women were all professional women, and I figured we might as well have a little fun.”Footnote ⁹¹

Consistent with theories of intersectionality, the March organizers understood how gender intersects with other identities to create varied experiences with gun violence. Thus, at the Mother's Day event, urban African-American mothers lamented the gang-related violence afflicting their neighborhoods; Jewish women recounted a white-supremacist hate crime directed at Jewish children; white mothers testified to the random violence perpetrated by disaffected suburban teens; and political wives and daughters gave witness to the devastation of assassination. On that day, the March succeeded tactically in showcasing the complexity of women's identities, thereby visibly confronting intersectionality theorists' critique of egalitarianism while uniting women under the banner of gender solidarity. In turn, gender solidarity was achieved by hybridizing conventional frameworks of women's organizing. March organizers constructed a maternal frame but leavened it with elements of egalitarianism and feminine-expression to deal with maternalism's dated or prosaic elements.

The March's use of hybridity posed a strategic problem for the gun lobby, which sought to discredit various women's identities simultaneously. The gun lobby developed two narratives. In the first, rank-and-file marchers were portrayed as sincere mothers concerned about children's wellbeing, but also as “misinformed,” “misled,” “self-righteous,” and “hectoring,” mothers driven by (women's) emotion as opposed to (men's) reason.Footnote ⁹² In the second narrative, the organizers were portrayed as ambitious professional liberals using a maternal guise to advance their political agenda, as in this exchange between Brit Hume, then-anchor of Fox News Channel's “Special Report,” and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes:

Hume: “And this character has emerged, Donna Dees-Thomases, who is leading [the Million Mom March], and is widely described in quite favorable media accounts as a—as a mother who was simply there watching television at home one day while tending to her children, one presumes. And she saw horrible scenes of shooting at a—at a youth center, where kids were killed, and she had to do this.”

Barnes: “Of course, all that's fakery. I mean, this is a woman who is a contributor to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. She's the sister-in-law of Susan Thomases, who is a hard-nosed liberal operative and one of Hillary's best friends. She was—she's a New York City PR woman who's worked for Dan Rather. I mean, this is not some stay-at-home mom who's mad about Columbine. It's just ridiculous.Footnote ⁹³

Dees-Thomases and her organization sampled and recombined various women's roles—mother, professional, playful activist—to create a hybrid role that took advantage of the most strategically useful aspects of each role. Understanding the power of hybridity, the March's opponents disassembled this role into its component parts, then issued standard critiques of each. They believed that cracking the hybridity code was necessary to keep the women from gaining political allies.

Inter-institutional hybridity

The March sought to mobilize women while influencing two extra-movement actors: the news media, necessary to publicize and legitimize the mothers' cause, and Congress, necessary to enact the March's legislative agenda. Because these two targets had distinct interests and values, the March employed tactics associated with different organizational forms. Specifically, it hybridized the repertoire of grassroots social movements with the approaches of Washington-based interest groups. The news media value “altruistic democracy,” dedication to the public interest, and political moderation—values historically associated with maternalist organizing.Footnote ⁹⁴ On the other hand, reelection-minded Congress members are responsive to political insiders, such as interest groups, that can organize and mobilize attentive publics, which typically have intense preferences and narrower issue concerns.Footnote ⁹⁵ The news media gravitate to conflict and drama,Footnote ⁹⁶ while Congress members value stability and seek to minimize electoral uncertainty.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, to attract the media, the March had to employ the language of democratic consensus while creating political drama and conflict; to gain Congressional support, Marchers had to represent themselves both as intense, single-issue voters and as civic pragmatists who would not stir up “reasonable” gun owners. The March's use of the Internet listservs eased somewhat the creation of this balance by facilitating the kind of hybrid-driven repertoire-switching theorized by Andrew Chadwick, though the Internet's capacity in 2000 for enabling such behavior was primitive relative to what is possible today.Footnote ⁹⁸

A mothers' march allowed the women to meet these conflicting ends. They created a dramatic event for the media to cover, with an equally dramatic narrative: the David-and-Goliath battle between civically virtuous mothers and the “self-interested gun lobby.” Donna Dees-Thomases recognized the narrative's power: “The media has to go for the easiest symbol for people to understand … We're selling apple pie, safety for kids—that can be ‘gotten.’”Footnote ⁹⁹ The media responded: At least 77 newspapers covered the march, with a total of 159 articles published the following day alone.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

At the same time, the March demonstrated to Congress that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there was an intense grassroots constituency for gun control. To show that this constituency had staying power to rival that of the gun-rights forces, the Marchers incorporated themselves into a national organization, with state affiliates, to pursue conventional interest group tactics, such as direct lobbying and public education. In both its social movement and interest group incarnations, the March took care to reassure lawmakers that its agenda did not include banning guns or otherwise offending “law abiding gun owners.” This framing positioned the women in the “sensible” mainstream and reassured lawmakers that they could support the March's agenda. Thus, the March recombined social movement and interest group repertoires—what we term inter-institutional hybridity—to manage the conflicting interests of external actors.

Code Pink Hybridity: Traditional Femininity, with a Wink

While the Million Mom March emerged in response to the long-term political issue of stopping gun violence, Code Pink: Women for Peace arose in reaction to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the Bush Administration's response. A climate of fear was one of the features of American politics in the months (and years) immediately following 9/11. The color-coded alert system warning of the risk of terrorist attacks—Red: Severe, Orange: High, Yellow: Elevated, Blue: Guarded, and Green: LowFootnote ¹⁰¹—vividly symbolized this climate. A profound dilemma for activists was how to criticize the emerging policy without seeming unpatriotic, disloyal, or dangerous.

Code Pink was born during the fall of 2002 out of a discussion of women involved in the organization Bioneers.Footnote ¹⁰² They puzzled over what to make of the color-coded alerts, finally saying, “Bush says Code Red; we say Code Pink.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This response served to mock the system in a playful, non-threatening way, while attempting to demonstrate the absurdity of broader government policies, in the process mobilizing women to oppose the invasion of Iraq.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ On November 17, 2002, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans, Diane Wilson, and Starhawk (born Miriam Simos) led a group of women who began a campaign of vigils in Washington, DC, in front of the White House, thus forming the basis of Code Pink: Women for Peace.

Code Pink quickly became a central player in the American anti-war movement,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ with approximately 250 local chapters worldwide at its height.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When much of the anti-war movement receded into abeyance in 2008,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Code Pink remained active, launching actions weekly and often daily from its “Pink House,” a hybrid of an office, meeting place, and group home for Code Pink activists in Washington, DC.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ We argue that hybridity—between movements, constituencies, and institutions—was a critical part of Code Pink's success in activating and sustaining women's involvement in the anti-war movement between 2002 and 2009.

Inter-movement hybridity

The mobilization of women as women in the context of the anti-war movement is a principal focus of Code Pink. Specifically, they “call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters … and every ordinary outraged woman willing to be outrageous for peace.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Co-founder Medea Benjamin explained that they make this call because “We really think that war is a women's issue, and that women's organizations in the U.S. and around the world should be at the forefront of opposing war.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Women's role in peace comes “not because we are better or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied themselves making war.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Code Pink was able to bridge the anti-war movement and the women's movement for several reasons. First, many women participating in Code Pink believed that the organization allowed women to assume leadership roles that were often foreclosed to them in other peace organizations. Rae Abileah, the local-groups coordinator for Code Pink, explained that many other peace groups, such as Veterans for Peace, were perceived as being “strongly male-dominated, hierarchical and bureaucratic.”Footnote ¹¹² Women's experience with organizations dominated by men suggests that women need to have their own safe spaces to thrive organizationally. Because Code Pink was women-initiated and women-led—even though it does not exclude men—some members believed that the group allowed women to play leadership roles perceived to be less available in organizations dominated by men. Thus, Code Pink utilized variants of the difference rationale to marry women's peace organizing to the larger anti-war effort.

Second, Code Pink created safe, physical contexts for anti-war activists from multiple organizations to come together. Francesca Polletta argues that the formation of such “free spaces” is critical to movement development.Footnote ¹¹³ The Pink House in Washington, DC—established by Code Pink in 2007—was a place that helped to connect the women's movement to the larger anti-war movement.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Especially important were weekly “potlucks” held on Wednesday evenings.Footnote ¹¹⁵ These events were open to supporters of peace without regard to organizational affiliation. While attendance varied from week to week, a rough estimate is that one-quarter to one-half of participants in these events in any given week were not regular participants in Code Pink protests and other advocacy activities. Thus, the Pink House quickly became a place for people across the anti-war and women's movements to share information about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, the U.S. military, the rape of women soldiers, suffering women and children in Darfur, the meaning of “feminism,” or other issues that might be brought to the table in nonhierarchical setting. These discussions, and the free flow of activists participating in them, promoted the hybridization of the women's and anti-war movements.

Intra-constituency hybridity

Like the Million Mom March, Code Pink faced the challenge of attracting participants with heterogeneous attitudes about feminism and the appropriate roles of women in social movements. Code Pink activist Rae Abileah observed that “not all of us [in the Code Pink leadership] are on the same page about feminism or its relative importance in our movement” and the term “is sometimes thought to be a taboo word.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Because the primary issue that mobilized these women was opposition to violence, rather than women's rights per se, some participants did not have experience organizing on gendered issues. On the other hand, many participants in Code Pink did have long histories of fighting for women's equality and other gendered causes. How did Code Pink unify women (and men) from such diverse backgrounds?

One way that Code Pink spoke to different women's constituencies was by blending different frames. Women's roles as mothers were symbolized by holding events every Mother's Day that often highlighted women's care for children, sometimes including games, clowns, and face painting as “family friendly” activities, even while directing attention to serious foreign policy issues, such as the Iraqi refugee crisis.Footnote ¹¹⁷ At other events, Code Pink worked closely with Cindy Sheehan, who became internationally recognized when, in August 2005, she camped outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, to ask the president about “what noble cause” led to the death of her son, Casey.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Sheehan became the emblematic “peace mom” and one of the most recognizable figures in the anti-war movement; the partnership between Sheehan and Code Pink called attention to Code Pink as an organization of mothers grieving the loss of their children.

The prevailing image of Code Pink, however, relates to its often surprising appropriation of feminine-expressive symbols. The stereotypically feminine color pink is omnipresent at the organization's activities. Participants wear pink, make pink banners, and blow up pink balloons in an expression of the “pink-packaged femininity” that typifies “Girlie” feminism.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Co-founder Medea Benjamin had to replace her entire wardrobe in order to remain clothed in the color every day since Code Pink's inception.Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet participants' behavior while wearing the color typically rejects stereotypes of feminine passivity. They are often clad in a “pink slip,” which simultaneously represents women's sexuality and the termination notice at a job, in order to propose that the country “pink slip Bush” (or Vice President Cheney, or whichever government official was the target of the day). Along the same lines, Code Pink staged “I Miss America” pageants (as pictured in Figure 3) to nod to femininity while at the same time criticizing the state of public policy. The dual use of maternal and feminine-expressive symbolism opened the organization to participants from both perspectives. The fact that both types of symbols were used with a touch of levity was a collective wink that allowed participants from both perspectives to feel comfortable with their involvement.

Figure 3

Code Pink, I Miss America Pageant, 2008

Source: Photo by authors, Washington, DC, March 16, 2008.

Code Pink's deployment of feminine-expressive frames created an opening for counter-movement attacks. Pro-war organizations, such as the conservative website Free Republic, turned to pink as a way to tag Code Pink as communists—“Pink-o's”—who were disloyal to America. Similarly, Free Republic turned symbols with a feminine component, such as lingerie, into an attack on the sexuality of women in Code Pink, lampooning them as man-hating lesbians.Footnote ¹²¹ For example, one sign held by a Free Republic activist at a Washington, DC, rally on September 24, 2005, stated “Uh Oh! It's Code Pink-o!”Footnote ¹²² It then pictured a fictional woman with a shaved head, mustache, and communist tattoo, wearing a pink bra and pink men's underwear on the outside of her clothes.

A second way that Code Pink spoke to different women's constituencies was by deploying a deploying a wide range of tactics. It engaged in formal lobbying and letter writing, similar to organizations typically associated with the maternal and equality perspectives. However, its signature was the highly theatrical and disruptive approach that earned it so much media attention. As local Washington, DC, organizer Sarah Rose-Jensen explained, events such as the 2008 Valentine's Day “Kiss In” (as opposed to “sit in”) outside a military recruiting station, “makes activism fun.”Footnote ¹²³ Code Pink also supported activists who wish to engage in high-risk activism, such as when Desiree Fairooz blanketed the worldwide news after she confronted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with bloody hands at a congressional hearing on October 24, 2007.Footnote ¹²⁴ The availability of tactics with varied levels of risk helped to make the organization accessible to supporters with varied attitudes toward activism.

Code Pink applied symbols and tactics with ambiguity and flexibility to create the wiggle room necessary to accommodate people from different traditions. For example, pink was the quasi-official uniform for all Code Pink activities, but because not all activists felt comfortable wearing such feminine garb, space was allowed for individuals to participate without conforming to this norm. This flexibility opened up the space to unify multiple constituencies. In a nod to understandings of intersectionality, Code Pink sought to raise awareness of the rape of women, often black women, in the military service. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright spearheaded Code Pink's involvement in this issue, stressing the unexpected ways in which war relates to sex and gender.Footnote ¹²⁵

Inter-institutional hybridity

Code Pink hybridized the organizational structure of a social movement organization and a Washington-based interest group, as did the March, though Code Pink emphasized protest-group tactics. The March's focus on reasonableness and common sense attempted to build bridges from the middle of the political spectrum to Congress, the media, and other institutions. The outrageous disruptiveness, irreverence, and creative theatricality of Code Pink sometimes appeared to be the antithesis of reasonable dialogue. By dropping a giant pink slip from a balcony inside the Hart Senate Office Building or shouting during the congressional testimony of General David Petraeus (former commander of the forces in Iraq), Code Pink activists may be painted as unreasonable. Yet the Pink House allowed the group to be a constant presence on Capitol Hill, facilitating its adoption of Washington-style lobbying. Code Pink activists met regularly with Congress members and strategized with anti-war coalitions inside Congress, such as the Out of Iraq Caucus and the Progressive Caucus.Footnote ¹²⁶ As with the March, Code Pink combined “outsider” and “insider” tactics, reflecting an effort to turn the duality of women's place in the polity into a strategic advantage.

Despite the obvious risks, Code Pink's tactics had numerous advantages in potentially bridging the inter-institutional divide. First, disruptive tactics quickly captured the attention of the media, thus giving Code Pink far more exposure than its “competitor” organizations (e.g., the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom). This exposure raised public consciousness of the group to the level that it has been parodied on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Second, Code Pink was one of a large number of anti-war organizations, thus allowing it to assume the role of the “radical flank,”Footnote ¹²⁷ a luxury not afforded to the March, which was part of a smaller overall anti-violence movement. Third, highly creative, theatrical, and risky actions helped to build solidarity, which fosters greater attachment to the organization over a long period of time.Footnote ¹²⁸ When Congressman Gary Ackerman proposed that the United States impose a blockade on Iran, Code Pink reacted rapidly by using canoes and rafts to blockade his houseboat on the Washington waterfront at 7 a.m. on July 9, 2008. This kind of performance made activists feel like they were part of something to be proud of, while capturing the media's eye.

Finally, Code Pink's use of the Internet enabled it to engage in a hybrid-driven repertoire switching (as postulated by Chadwick) to a much greater extent than was possible for the Million Mom March, which peaked during a comparatively primitive period for Internet activism.Footnote ¹²⁹ Code Pink actively utilized “Web 2.0” applications that promoted interactivity between its member-activists in real time by channeling participants to different kinds of forums, such as congressional hearings, campaign rallies, and protests.Footnote ¹³⁰ These Web 2.0 applications aided Code Pink in targeting media attention and institutional contact (e.g., a meeting with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a news article with colorful photos in a Washington, DC newspaper). The Internet facilitated rapid switching between repertoires, depending on the relevant audience and action goals.

Organizational Rhetoric Compared

The case studies of the Million Mom March and Code Pink, presented above, reveal two organizations that have crafted unique hybrids to mobilize women for anti-violence causes, activate different women's constituencies, and attract external political support. In this section, we use statistical and network analysis to consider the similarities and differences between these groups' messages. We systematically collected documents generated by both organizations to communicate with potential supporters. For the March, this included 72 letters and newsletters mailed between 1999 and 2001, during the height of its campaign. For Code Pink, this included 202 documents posted on its Web site between 2002 and 2008, including all documents filed under the categories “campaigns” and “action alerts.” While the two sets of documents differed in their means of delivery (paper mailings versus Web postings), both reflected the organizations' efforts to motivate individuals to undertake collective action for their causes. We coded every document for each instance of its use of symbolic content, substantive debate, and discussion of organizational logistics. The results are reported in table 1.

Table 1

Content analysis of organizational documents for the Million Mom March and Code Pink

Source: Million Mom March, Newsletters, 1999–2001; Code Pink, http://codepink4peace.org/, 2002–2008.

Note: *** denotes p < 0.001, ** denotes p < 0.01, * denotes p < 0.05.

Similarities and differences were evident between the organizations in their efforts to convey messages symbolically. Consistent with the imperatives of inter-movement hybridity, both organizations explicitly invoked gendered symbols or metaphors (e.g., Mother's Day, flowers, pink) in more than 40 percent of all cases, and highlighted women as movement actors (e.g., mothers, grandmothers) in about the same proportion. These references underscored the considerable emphasis by the March and Code Pink in gendering issues of violence.

Although the March and Code Pink deployed gendered symbols and metaphors with roughly equal frequency, the groups varied in the relative weight that they gave to different frames. We coded each gendered symbol as invoking primarily the maternal, equality, or feminine-expressive frames and recorded the frequency of its use.Footnote ¹³¹ As discussed above, the organizations sampled and recombined from these three collective action frames to meet the strategic goals of attracting different types of women (intra-constituency hybridity) and of appealing to external political actors with different values and interests (inter-institutional hybridity). The results are reported in Figures 4 and 5.

Figure 4

Gendered symbols and metaphors in Million Mom March texts

Source: Million Mom March, Newsletters, 1999–2001.

Figure 5

Gendered symbols and metaphors in Code Pink texts

Source: Code Pink, http://codepink4peace.org/ 2002–2008.

Note: Statistical differences between Million Mom March and Code Pink:

• Maternal, t-score = 5.13***

• Feminine-Expressive, t-score = −3.10**

• Equality t-score = −2.21*

*** denotes p < 0.001, ** denotes p < 0.01, * denotes p < 0.05.

The March emphasized maternal symbols (e.g., Mother's Day, shopping), which it used in 67% of cases. In contrast, Code Pink placed significantly less emphasis on maternal symbols, relying on them only 34% of the time. Rather, Code Pink turned more readily to feminine-expressive symbolism (e.g., pink, lingerie), using it 50% of the time, compared to just 28% of the time for the March. While neither organization relied heavily on symbols of equality (e.g., Statue of Liberty, 19^th Amendment), Code Pink did so significantly more often (17% of the time) than did the March (4% of the time). For example, Code Pink invoked global women's solidarity (e.g., International Women's Day) in 15% of cases, while the March made no such references.

The relative emphasis of the March and Code Pink is indicated not only by the frequency of different symbols' use, but also by the relationships of symbols to one another in organizational documents. We recorded the frequency with which each pair of symbols co-occurs in a document. This exercise reveals how organizational leaders saw different symbols as relating to one another—that is, the system of thought behind each group's messaging. In Figures 6 and 7, we map the co-occurrence of symbols as an ideational network. Two symbols are tied to one another if they appear in the same document, with the thickness of the line between them indicating the frequency of co-occurrence and the size of the network node reflecting the appearance frequency of a single symbol. We represent maternal symbols with circles, feminine-expressive symbols with squares, and equality symbols with triangles.Footnote ¹³²

Figure 6

Network of gendered symbols and metaphors in Million Mom March texts

Source: Million Mom March, Newsletters, 1999–2001.

Figure 7

Network of gendered symbols and metaphors in Code Pink Texts

Source: Code Pink, http://codepink4peace.org/ 2002–2008.

A comparison of the ideational networks depicted in Figures 6 and 7 further reveals how the March and Code Pink employed symbols to articulate their arguments. The network analysis in Figure 6 documents that Mother's Day is the most central symbol in the March's ideational network,Footnote ¹³³ followed closely by flowers and childbirth. The ideal-typical feminine-expressive symbols of pink and sexiness are part of the dialogue, but they were more peripheral to the texts than were the maternal symbols. Similarly, the 19^th Amendment was invoked as a symbol of women's equality, but was not central to the ideational network.

The feminine-expressive symbol pink is the central symbol in Code Pink's ideational network, represented in Figure 7.Footnote ¹³⁴ Pink is followed closely by the slip (a provocative woman's undergarment) and the Statue of Liberty (a symbol of equal citizenship). A strong tie exists between pink and slip because of the ubiquitous presence of the “pink slip” in Code Pink literature. Maternal symbols factor into this network—Mother's Day, shopping, and baking are all part of the symbolic repertoire—but they are not as central to the thinking of Code Pink as are the feminine-expressive and equality symbols.

It is possible that the meaning of symbols by the March and Code Pink is transformed by the ideational networks in which they are embedded. Feminine-expressive symbols may take on a maternal meaning when used in the context of the March's maternal-centric discourse. Likewise, maternal symbols invoked by Code Pink may assume a more feminine-expressive interpretation given the organization's overall framing strategy. If these effects were present in the network, then the differences between the March and Code Pink would be amplified. This result may be a partial explanation for why the two organizations' recombination of similar elements yields organizational styles with a sometimes radically different ethos.

Content analysis adds precision to the observations outlined in the case studies. The March and Code Pink bring women's symbolism into debates about violence by blending maternal, equality, and feminine-expressive frames to create unique hybrids. Each organization does so differently, with the March emphasizing maternal frames and Code Pink drawing more upon feminine-expressive and equality symbols. These hybrid messages allowed the organizations to manage the challenges of women's mobilization, in the process appealing to both the grassroots constituencies and the external actors whose support they needed.

Meeting the Challenges of Grassroots Collective Action

For more than a century, women's organizations have sought to manage the uneasy coexistence of equality (“sameness”) and maternal (“difference”) arguments.Footnote ¹³⁵ This balancing act was never more apparent than in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, when suffragists argued that they should receive equal voting rights so that they might use their maternal sensibilities to enact more caring public policies.Footnote ¹³⁶ Indeed, women's organizations' use of hybridity is not new to our times, and in developing this approach the March and Code Pink echo previous efforts.

At the same time, women's anti-violence organizations historically have had a particularly difficult time managing the tensions between equality and difference rationales. Indeed, these groups have faced pressure to keep the two women's viewpoints separate. In the World War I era, for example, the Woman's Peace Party supported suffrage nationally but was forced to allow its state branches to remain neutral because of rank-and-file opposition to the vote.Footnote ¹³⁷ Moreover, women suffragists and peace activists suffered a falling out when the National American Woman Suffrage Association voted to support the U.S. government's eventual entry into World War I.Footnote ¹³⁸ During the Vietnam era, the tension between egalitarianism and maternalism again came to the fore, when members of prominent women's peace organizations, including the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace, “marched to Arlington Cemetery carrying the dummy of a rather staid-looking woman to bury as ‘Traditional Womanhood.’”Footnote ¹³⁹ The event invitation called on women to break with maternalism: “Don't bring flowers … Do be prepared to sacrifice your traditional women's roles … you must resist approaching Congress and playing these same roles that are synonymous with powerlessness.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

More than three decades later, the Million Mom March and Code Pink have developed innovative ways to manage this historic tension between the maternal frame and the equality frame. The feminine-expressive frame and aspects of intersectionality have facilitated this reconciliation by allowing women's organizations to voice claims about women's distinctive experiences and sensibilities in ways that are both serious and authentic, on the one hand, and whimsical and almost self-parodying, on the other. Likewise, maternalism and egalitarianism have amplified feminine expression's legitimacy by putting it in the visible service of substantive public policy issues.

The Million Mom March and Code Pink are institutional adaptations to the critiques of women's collective action frames in their various stages and incarnations. The groups' seemingly peculiar combinations of strategies and tactics make sense in this historical context. Their uses of inter-movement, intra-constituency, and inter-institutional hybridity make the organizations difficult to classify in the taxonomy of women's organizations. As our data show, both organizations have attracted baby-boom women who came of age during, and often participated in, the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Still, both organizations expanded beyond this group. The March used the iconography of maternal protection to attract 30-something mothers of young children, while Code Pink deployed expressive theatricality to galvanize a new generation of 20-something activists. These two organizations sampled from three major collective action frames for women's political participation to widely varying degrees. Nonetheless, all three frames were present in each group's work.

The Million Mom March and Code Pink demonstrate the power of hybridity as a political strategy for managing social ambiguity about women's “proper” roles and women's ambivalence about prevailing collective action frames. These groups sustained women's mobilization by combining enduringly powerful components of maternal, equality, and feminine-expressive frames and discarding those components that had lost their resonance. Hybridity allowed women's organizers to speak to different women's constituencies simultaneously. This approach strengthened the organizations' frames in the face of backlash from conservative media and activists, thus increasing the likelihood that these organizations could sustain robust collective action.

These organizations used hybridity to foster a politically productive ambiguity about identity, allowing sincere adherents of both egalitarianism and maternalism to join women's anti-violence groups, while also leaving room for women who were uncomfortable adopting these points of view. Thus, contemporary women's anti-violence groups salvaged the early 20^th century linkage between egalitarianism and maternalism, while using a new rhetoric of feminine expressivism to resolve the historic tensions between them.

As an intellectual enterprise, hybridity helps us to make sense of the emergence of these high-profile women's activist groups during a time when gendered organizing was thought by many commentators to be passé. Hybridity further helps us to recognize the common understandings and strategies uniting these two organizations that, on the surface, appear so different. Of course, there are limits to the success of hybridity as a way of building bridges. Neither the March nor Code Pink was highly effective in connecting with non-white or working-class/poor constituencies, though their concerns with intersectional marginalization motivated them to do so. Peace movements have traditionally had a hard time reaching out to minority communities and, instead, have found their base of support among white, middle-class constituencies. The movement against the war in Iraq has found African Americans and Latinos, for example, underrepresented at protests relative to their proportions in the population at large.Footnote ¹⁴¹ When minorities participated in the movement against the war in Vietnam, they tended to do so through racially homogeneous organizations such as the Black Panthers, rather than by cooperating with white-led peace organizations.Footnote ¹⁴² Even though the March and Code Pink did not fully cross the interracial divide in peace activism, they did succeed, through hybridity, in mobilizing women in an era when many other organizations had faced difficulties.Footnote ¹⁴³

This study contributes to theories of how social movements and their constituent organizations adapt and innovate. We utilize hybridity not simply as a construct for understanding Code Pink and the Million Mom March empirically, but also for theorizing about how successive social movement cohorts learn from one another and how organizations adapt to a changing political context. Our two cases expand upon organizational hybridity theory by spotlighting hybridity in organizational form, tactics, and framing processes. We likewise add to the theory of gender hybridity by spelling out its uses as a strategy of innovation for women's organizations and by bringing feminine expression and intersectionality into the picture. Finally, we expand the evidence available on intersectionality by applying this perspective to issues beyond women's particularistic interests.

The Million Mom March and Code Pink may represent the cutting edge of an emerging era in women's collective action, in which women's advocates are mobilizing women's multiple identities for transformative political action and, in the process, transforming what it means to organize as women in the 21^st century. At the same time, the hybrid forms adopted by the March and Code Pink may reflect broader trends in grassroots collective action across the political spectrum. A wide range of activists increasingly employ spectacle and parody—supported by hybrid organizational forms—to mobilize support and reach ideologically diverse constituencies. The Billionaires for Bush (recently morphed into the Billionaires for Wealthcare) followed scripts and an organizational form not unlike Code Pink to critique Republican policies, officials, and candidates.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Similarly, the “Radical Cheerleaders” have turned to playfulness and humor in hybridizing the stereotypical feminine role of cheerleader with the role of social critic to “challenge gendered assumptions about women's political activity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On the Right side of the political spectrum, grassroots organizations have created new, hybrid political forms—merging talk radio, social movement tactics, and interest group politics—to oppose health care reform and other items on the agenda of the Obama Administration through “Tea Party” protests.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Hybrid organizational forms may be particularly well suited for grassroots constituencies to respond to collective action frames under sustained challenge. The crisis of confidence suffered by conservatives in the wake of Obama's election as President in 2008, which strengthened Democratic majorities in Congress, poses strategic challenges for activists on the Right. Thus, further development of hybrid organizations may be a way for conservatives to galvanize their grassroots base. Future scholars may have the opportunity to investigate these dynamics in real time as the Internet and related digital technologies make social movements simultaneously easier to mobilize and to observe surreptitiously. Such studies promise to illuminate the range of conditions under which hybridity is a politically effective approach for social movements seeking to adapt their repertoires to increasingly complex and changing conditions.