Women’s Movements Facing the Reconfigured State Guillaume
Marche This book results from two years’ concerted efforts on the part of a team of social science scholars from Canada, Western Europe and the United States to work out a set of conceptual tools to account for the changes in women’s mobilization in Western Europe and North America, in a shifting political context where states have been divesting themselves of many of what used to be considered as their prerogatives. The book itself consists in a collection of twelve articles which basically fall under three main categories: three chapters offering a case study on one country each (Spain, Italy, and The United States), five chapters dealing with a given issue or set of issues (gender parity in elections, shelter movements, constitution designing, abortion and equal pay, political representation) by comparing their treatment in two or more Western European or North American countries, and one introductory and three concluding chapters synthesizing the ambitions and findings of the project. In their introduction the three editors sketch the four modes of state reconfiguration in the 1980s and 1990s: uploading authority to supranational organizations, downloading to local governments, lateral loading to non-elected state bodies, and offloading to non-state venues. Such changes tend to depoliticize decision-making, so that social movements’ influence on decision-making may decline. But, as proponents of an “interactional” model of social movement theory, the editors insist that the impact of social movements is dependent on more variables than the configuration of state power—the nature and context of state-movement interactions matter particularly. Women’s movements are in a paradoxical situation, as they were being mainstreamed in national politics even as this level was actually losing some of its political significance. The question, for the editors, therefore is whether the reconfiguration of the state is necessarily detrimental to women’s movements—and, further, whether women’s movements merely endure state reconfiguration. Women’s movements’ strategies, nations’ overall political culture and configuration of power, and the forums where movement/state interactions occur make up a complex dynamic in which it is important to consider how state and movements impact each other. Drawing either from their own research or from secondary literature on women’s movements in various countries, the authors of the next eight chapters articulate specific case studies in the theoretical terms framed in the introduction, with a view to highlighting the significant parameters of the shifts in women’s movements since the 1980s. One of the most significant effects of state reconfiguration which come out of their contributions is the availability of different resources. In chapter 8, Karen Beckwith shows that political uploading to the European Parliament has given European women greater access to political representation. State reconfiguration has generally implied the professionalization of women’s movement organizations: in chapter 2 Celia Valiente shows that offloading some services (for family planning or against domestic violence, for instance) has tended to transform formerly civil-disobedience-oriented organizations into service providers; Donatella della Porta concurs in chapter 3 about Italy. Uploading and downloading have in some cases combined to increase the political significance of civil and political rights of representation, while decreasing the significance of such social issues as abortion, violence and family policy: this is what Jane Jenson and Celia Valiente show in chapter 4, on gender parity in France and Spain. This implies that state reconfiguration influences women’s movements’ agenda in such a way that issues of access take precedence over protesting inequality, so that the discourse and claims of social movement organizations may eventually be articulated in less and less explicitly feminist terms, as R. Amy Elman shows about the shelter movement in the United States, in chapter 5. In fact, regarding the shelter movement in Great Britain, she claims that, due to shrinking material resources, far-reaching goals of social transformation have assumed secondary importance compared to the urgency of cooperating with the authorities in order to secure funds. Nevertheless, the authors claim, protest is not the sole index of social movement success: just because within a social movement’s repertoire of action protest declines, while service provision increases, does not necessarily mean that the social movement fails to influence the state. R. Amy Elman shows that by offloading services to victims of domestic violence to social movement organizations the state entrusts them with, and thus becomes partly dependent on feminists for, the definition of what counts as a crime in this domain. As a result, not only does state reconfiguration affect the social movement, but social movement organizations also impact state policy. “The significance of movements is no longer discerned in their ability to marshal visible demonstrations against the state or business communities, but instead as carriers of ideas that influence states to alter their agencies in ways that make such protest unnecessary,” Alexandra Dobrowolsky concurs in chapter 6 about women’s movements’ involvement in constitutional debates in Canada and the United Kingdom [p. 113]. In fact, she claims, shrinking opportunities for Canadian women to participate in constitutional reform have caused grassroots organizations to challenge general cultural definitions, rather than institutional political decision making. And the development of a critical women’s consciousness may eventually have a longer-term impact on government: it initiates a trend which government may later on follow in making policy. All the contributions in the volume thus converge to question the validity of apprehending social movements strictly in terms of political opportunity structures. In chapter 11 Dieter Rucht compares the women’s movement in Germany with other social movements in the same country (the labor, peace, environment, and anti-nuclear movements) to show that a social movement’s evolutions should not be entirely premised on the configuration of the state. Rucht synthesizes the authors’ findings in resorting to Sidney Tarrow’s concept of dynamic opportunities, “which are not simply given, but, at least in some cases, can be shaped by social movements” [p. 260]. State-movement interactions, he claims, should be premised on the combination of the actors’ worldview, the stake of conflicts, and the context of interactions—that is to say a broader set of parameters than mere state configuration. Rucht concludes that “we should regard with caution general decontextualized theories about the nature, logic, and determinants of interactions between movements and state” and recommends “more restricted but systematic and empirically grounded comparisons across movements, countries and time” [p. 274]. Celia Valiente, for example, insists that any given structure of political opportunities may have differing effects on women’s mobilization, depending on how institutionalized it already is. Alexandra Dobrowolsky likewise takes issue with political opportunity structure theory’s tendency to present social movement repertoires as constrained by incentives from the outside, which is tantamount to paying disproportionately more attention to determination than to agency. She proves, on the contrary, that despite inopportune political circumstances women’s movements in the United Kingdom and Canada have managed to articulate new political challenges through the development of identity politics, which she defines as “efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct multiple and intersecting identities in order to resist and contest dominant power relations and socioeconomic, political and cultural discourses and practices” [p. 119]. Donatella della Porta also claims that political opportunity structure theory fails to account for the fact that, while the formal Italian women’s movement swerved toward more institutionalization, consciousness raising continued among informal feminist groups. The authors thus often insist on the sheer diversity of Western European and North American women’s movements, and on the significance thereof: just as the state is a site of struggle rather than unilateral domination, as Karen Beckwith insists in chapter 8, liberal and radical paradigms of women’s mobilization respond to and influence each other, so that increased institutionalization and professionalization, which have undeniably sprung from neo-liberal state reconfiguration, do not necessarily result in the homogenization of women’s movements. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein’s study of women’s status as citizens in the United States (chapter 9) thus traces the origins of the constitution of poor women in the United States as a distinct class back to the New Deal—whose welfare programs benefited men and women unequally—and to neo-liberal state reconfiguration in the 1980s—which reinforced the inequalities between the middle-class and the poor. As a result, she argues, poor women are disproportionately affected by welfare reform, while they disproportionately fail to benefit from equal opportunity legislation, since it targets unequal treatment between men and women otherwise similarly situated. Drawing on Katzenstein, David S. Meyer suggests in chapter 12 that reactivating the socioeconomic problematic in women’s mobilization may be a way for women’s movements to reactivate conflict in the future. For example, even as the women’s movement in England dealt with the constitutional debate in the 1990s by institutionalizing further, women’s movements in Northern Ireland and Scotland—though confronted with even less favorable political opportunity structures—have taken to more daring forms of identity mobilization, for instance reflecting the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity among women through coalitions. Alexandra Dobrowolsky refers to this effort as “porous politics,” a form of “democratic experimentation” [p. 136] which defies the odds with which women’s movements there are confronted. She argues that it has not only allowed for the empowerment of previously disenfranchised women, but also effectively contributed to shaping the terms of the British constitutional debate. In his synthesis in chapter 12 David S. Meyer presents social movements as temporary coalitions, thus concurring with Carol McClurg Mueller and John D. McCarthy’s conclusions in chapter 10: analyzing the diversity within women’s movements the latter characterize social movements as clusters, so as to account for the fact that mobilization is unstable and constantly renegotiated. The variable interactions between the components of social movement clusters, they claim, are not sufficiently taken into account by political opportunity structure theory, which thus misses the sheer unpredictability in social movements’ evolutions: McClurg Mueller and McCarthy in effect argue that while women’s movements may alter their structure, they do so in order to promote a relatively continuous culture. This volume is an extremely valuable contribution both to the study of women’s movements and to social movement theory, as it presents a wide array of specific case studies as well as theoretical conclusions based upon comparisons. The eight context-specific chapters consistently use the tools proposed in the introduction, while the final three chapters base their arguments upon data taken from the studies in the volume, which guarantees the cohesion of the collection. What may however be brought into question is the very scope of the study: the book presents its reader with such a broad variety of situations, presumably not so well-known even to the specialized readership it targets, that each author has to dedicate much more space to generally presenting the country’s idiosyncratic situation, than to analyzing the theoretical issues it raises. In fact the authors tend to evince the institutionalization and professionalization which one may easily expect from state reconfiguration at much greater length than they sketch the truly unpredictable processes (the persistence of consciousness-raising, the stimulation of grassroots organizing, the resurgence of provocative identity politics, and the reactivation of socioeconomic and racial problematics, for example) which in this reader’s opinion make up the most challenging part of the book’s contribution. It would have been particularly interesting, for instance, to learn more about the actually complementary nature of institutional and grassroots, or of liberal and radical, women’s movement organizing. Besides, despite the editors’ ambition to break new theoretical ground, the outcome is overladen with analyses in terms of social movement organizations’ resources. For example Lee Ann Banaszak in chapter 7 studies abortion and equal pay in four European Union-member countries to assess whether “feminists’ ability to achieve policy goals […] is influenced by the degree to which an issue is essential to neoliberal ideology,” and whether “feminists’ policy effectiveness is shaped by the degree of reconfiguration that has occurred in a particular country” [p. 142]. While her findings are extremely interesting, as they provide unexpected answers to these questions, she tends to account for social movements’ successes or failures in terms of the availability of such resources as an audience, political representation, or institutional access.
In fact, even though McClurg Mueller and McCarthy distinguish between
a movement’s structure and culture, this volume pays almost
exclusive attention to the form of social movement: insofar
as its authors consider women’s movements from a rather wide
angle they tend to altogether leave aside the experience and aspirations
of the social actors who make up these social movements. For example,
while laying emphasis on the impermanent nature of social movements,
David S. Meyer writes: “Social movements emerge when a potential
constituency can claim sufficient political legitimacy to express
its claims, but is alienated enough to be unable to win much without
making a tremendous fuss” [p. 277]. Even though his analysis
does provide enlightening insight into how social actors organize
and mobilize latent constituencies into significant social
movements, it is symptomatic of an approach to social movements
which places actors’ rational interest above all
other factors of mobilization—thus failing to account for
grievances which are not articulated in terms of the advantage
of a specific constituency.
Cercles©2004
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