In this impressively researched and thought-provoking book, Lee Ann Banaszak explores the role of “movement insiders”—women's movement activists working inside the federal bureaucracy—in shaping policy on women's rights. Through a series of engaging narratives, she highlights the often-invisible role of feminist lawyers, regulators, other members of the civil service, and political appointees in shaping important policies on such issues as equal employment, educational equity (particularly Title IX), and foreign policy (women in development). Banaszak's investigation into the role of feminist activists within the bureaucracy illuminates the critical role that the movement played within the state on a number of policy issues. More broadly, her argument for an expanded view of the dynamics of social movements, movement–state intersections, and policymaking represents a needed corrective to the rather stark dichotomies that often dominate the study of social movements.
Banaszak defines movement insiders as “individuals who identify themselves with the [women's] movement during their government service and are activists in one or more women's movement organizations” (p. 12). She interviews 40 mid- to high-level civil servants working in the federal bureaucracy between 1960 and 2000 and examines a wealth of archival information on feminist activists in the bureaucracy. Her research highlights the critical ways that these women were able to “utilize routine legislation and regulatory actions as political opportunities” (p. 137). Their positions inside the state further allowed them to funnel information to women's organizations and to mobilize the larger movement in response to specific government actions.
Banaszak's analysis challenges a number of common assumptions about social movements, from the dynamics governing movement institutionalization to the relationship among movement location (inside or outside the state), goals, and tactics. For example, she demonstrates that the presence of feminist activists inside the state does not simply reflect the institutionalization of the movement. Rather, women's entry into the bureaucracy preceded and was instrumental in mobilizing the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Many of the women who entered civil service, particularly after World War II, were lawyers facing discrimination in private practice (p. 56). Some of these women were feminist activists prior to entering the bureaucracy; others converted to feminism in the course of their careers. Thus, feminists within the bureaucracy were both a critical support for the women's movement and also profoundly impacted by it.
The author also finds that the tactics employed by movement activists within the bureaucracy were no more moderate than those employed by movement members outside the state, nor did the politics of most insiders moderate over time. (However, it is worth noting that some Republican women who had been activists in earlier decades no longer self-identified as feminist by the time Banaszak interviewed them in 2003–4.) While insiders did use “conventional” tactics more often than outsiders, Banaszak argues that this was because they were well positioned to take advantage of these tools, for example, by altering regulations or mounting legal challenges to discriminatory policies. She argues against conflating location within the state with moderate tactics, noting that insiders engaged in confrontational actions when conventional tactics proved ineffective. In fact, she illustrates the ways that a particular tactic may be conventional or confrontational, depending on the context. She argues that “if the purpose of confrontational tactics is to disrupt the system, or polarize a conflict, or even to challenge the existence of established institutions, then any single tactic may vary in its degree of confrontation depending on the context of its use” (p. 135). Thus, changing the wording on a regulation or launching a lawsuit could be a conventional act or a highly provocative one.
Finally, Banaszak explores the ways that their position inside the state allowed feminist activists to hold the line on progressive policy even during hostile presidential administrations (here she singles out the Reagan and the first Bush administrations as particularly aggressive in attempting to undo feminist policies).
The author makes a convincing case that a relatively small number of feminist activists were able to exert a significant influence on policy from their various positions within the bureaucracy. Their technical expertise was critical in allowing them to intervene at key moments in the policy process. Equally important was their ability to disseminate information to feminists throughout the bureaucracy and help mobilize the outside movement. But left underexplored in this work is the less optimistic picture that also emerges from this study, suggesting the limits of these strategies.
Banaszak makes clear that the movement insiders she interviewed were not representative of the movement as a whole. They were overwhelmingly upper middle class, educated, and white (only a few of her interviewees were African American, and one was Latina). In addition, she notes that the feminist networks that linked insiders and outsiders were divided by race. While she emphasizes the ideological diversity of her total sample, she labels most inside activists “liberal,” as opposed to radical, feminists. (In simplified shorthand, liberal feminists aimed to work within existing political structures; radical feminists sought to transform them.)
Banaszak focuses on equal employment, educational equity, and, to a lesser extent, issues of women in development, because these reflect the areas where movement insiders were most involved in influencing policy. She argues that insider activists focused on these issues in part because they could be addressed from various points in the bureaucracy. But perhaps more significantly, these were the areas of most concern to these insider activists. She notes that insider activists failed to address, and at times even opposed, gender equality policies that touched on class, race, and especially sexuality.
What does this relatively narrow focus of insider activists say about the representation of feminist interests inside the state? Are there inherent limits to what the relationship between movement insiders and outsiders can accomplish, given the particular demographic of insiders? What are the implications of this study for theories of representation? Banaszak mentions that some sectors of the women's movement were critical of movement insiders. It would be helpful to know which groups or individuals were most critical: Were they feminists representing interests that insiders were not active in pursuing? Or were the criticisms largely tactical, that is, based on the belief that feminists should not work with the state? While beyond the main focus of the book, some discussion of these issues would have helped clarify the limits of different types of movement–state intersections.
A final point flows from the methodology used in this study. Because lists of bureaucrats who were active in the women's movement do not exist, Banaszak utilizes a version of snowballing to identify feminist activists. Beginning with a list of feminist activists in government provided by Jo Freeman (who had undertaken earlier research on the US women's movement), Banaszak asked her respondents to identify other feminist activists in the government. To check against personal bias in these responses, she supplemented this information with a list of activists identified in archival documents. She limited her list of activists to those who were mentioned multiple times in interviews and/or documentary sources. She emphasized variation in location within the bureaucracy and interviewed both political appointees and civil servants.
This methodology has both strengths and weaknesses, as Banaszak readily concedes. It allows her to identify individuals who influenced policymaking “below the radar” of higher-level administrators (and movement historians). Her in-depth individual interviews are a striking example of the rich data that can be mined with careful qualitative research. However, because the methodology relies heavily on insider activists identifying other insider activists, it risks limiting the circle of interviewees to women in a similar generational and demographic cohort who are involved with similar issues. It is also not clear, as Banaszak explains, how representative this group of activists was of all feminist activists within the federal bureaucracy.
A way to mitigate this potential bias would be to examine the policy dynamic from the other end of the equation as well, by choosing key pieces of policy, identified by her respondents as critical (such as Title IX or the Title VII controversy within the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), and identifying the major players involved with their adoption and implementation. This approach would allow for the possible identification of activists not mentioned by other movement members (particularly younger feminists). It would also facilitate a comparison between the behavior of movement insiders and feminists who were not active in the women's movement. Were they equally likely to go beyond their job descriptions to promote feminist policy change? How big was the circle of support for these policy reforms beyond self-identified feminists?
In my work on Chile, for example, I found that male representatives from the Left were in some cases more proactive on feminist policy issues than moderate and conservative women. But these men were rarely mentioned by members of the movement or by feminists working in the state. (In fact, these men were criticized by some in the movement for working independently of feminist organizations on feminist issues.) Thus, even a brief snapshot of the larger dynamic at work on particular issues would help illuminate the larger context in which feminist activists operated.
These concerns aside, this book represents a significant advance in our understanding of the history of the US women's movement and social movements in general. Banaszak makes visible the critical contributions of feminist activists within the federal bureaucracy, and she illuminates the ways these contributions relied on a symbiotic relationship between activists inside and outside the state. While focused on the US women's movement, her analysis of the importance of the bureaucracy, the significance of movement–state intersections, and the dynamics of movement institutionalization offers important insights for comparative research as well, particularly for regions like Latin America, where movement–state relations are politically more fraught and relatively few feminists occupy high-level bureaucratic posts.
