Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement

by Nancy Whittier

Book Overview

The radical feminist movement has undergone significant transformation over the past four decades--from the direct action of the 1960s and 1970s to the backlash against feminism in the 1980s and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566392829
• ISBN13: 9781566392822
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

What makes a movement?

Whittier tracks, in some detail, the development of the radical women's movement in Colombus, Ohio, centered at Ohio State University, from its beginnings in the late 1960's, all the way through the '90s. She seeks to explore how and why the feminist movement changed so radically in both ideology and culture over the years. Her central conclusion is novell and well supported by her evidence. She argues that the women's movement changed, not because the women grew up and abandoned their radicalism, or because feminism had won all its battles, but because each new group of women that entered the movement found a new political environment and therefor developed an new feminist worldview.Whittier shows how this process actually occured every few years, with each new group (she refers to them as micro-cohorts) developing a slightly different feminist perspective, while the older activists retianed their original views.On this narrow level her thesis succeads beutifully. However, her concept of movement generations is presented as having more general worth as a sociological theory of social movements. Here she only half succeeds. Her insight that movements alter their own social contexts, and therefor new recruits develop new perspectives should be gereralizable. However, the other half of the coin, that activists retain their original worldviews even through changing circumstances, is tainted by the location of her study. College campuses have a naturally high turnover rate and she argues that internal movement dynamics increased this turnover. Seperation from the movement is a simpler explination for static ideologies.Overall, a solid work in solcial movement sociology.