i	Sociology 432: Social Movements

Sociology 432: Controversy and Coalition

The New Feminist Movement Across Four Decades of Change

Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess

Tactics and Organizations: chapters 3.2-6.1, (pages 56-136)

Ferree and Hess make a distinction between two "strands" or "organizational styles" in the feminist movement: a bureaucratic and a collectivist mode. This distinction should be familiar from our discussion of Staggenborg's analysis of organizations in the pro-choice movements.

Our discussion will focus on this difference. You should be able to:

• identify examples of each type of feminist organization
• discuss the major organizational differences between the two modes
• suggest links of the two types of internal organization to differences in the types of goals of different feminist organizations.

This last task (linking goals and organizational styles) is the most difficult part since it is not always clear in the text (and there was not always a clear division in the 1970s movement). We will start by:

• listing all the types of goals and activities of various feminist organizations
• noting any evidence whether the groups that pursued each type of goal were more bureaucratic or more collectivist.

There is another important theme in these chapters which we will have time only to note now and will come back to later in the semester: the feminist movement included many diverse groups and goals. Sometimes, it appears as if diversity led to divisions which led to a weakening of the movement. This is a general theme in analyses of many social movements. To what extent is decline in a movement (i.e., the second half of the cycle of protest) a result of divisions within a social movement so that energies are directed internally against different factions rather than externally against opponents?