Knocking on the Door of Power: How Activism becomes Women’s Work

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14. Law, Activism, and Institutional Politics

Abstract

How do issues like gun control, health care, and education become associated with not only women’s support, but institutionalized as gendered in voluntary organizations, activist circles, and institutional politics? Political commitments appear to stem from gendered processes rooted in cultural schemas and divisions of labor. In this paper, I synthesize extensive research across gendered divisions of labor, civic organizations, activism, and public opinion scholarship to build a theoretical framework for understanding gender differences in issue salience, participation in voluntary/civic/activist organizations, and illuminate how women are able make space in politics around some issues rather than others. I then offer a two-part theoretical model that explains how gender is reinscribed and institutionalized through a recursive process. This occurs first through the deployment of cultural schemas, which shape divisions of labor and impact issue resonance. Second, organizations draw upon these gendered issue networks to recruit members and engage in strategic framing tactics that reinscribe gendered cultural schemas. To demonstrate this empirically, this article draws on thirty-three interviews with women in public education activism to show how policies and social movement spaces are constructed and reified in this recursive model. Women in this study demonstrate their active agency in this process by expressing diverse opinions on whether to lean into essentialist framing to meet their movement’s goals. Ultimately, this article argues that we must consider a holistic model to understand how gender organizes and structures political space.

Author

• Emily Tingle, University of Georgia