On
the Origins of Social Movements
by Jo Freeman
Published in Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties, (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, pp. 7-24. Based on a paper written in 1971 and first published in Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, (Longman 1983).
Most movements have inconspicuous beginnings. The significant elements
of their origins are usually forgotten or distorted by the time a trained
observer seeks to trace them out. Perhaps this is why so much theoretical
literature on social movements concentrated on causes (Gurr 1970, Davies
1962, Oberschall 1973) and motivations (Toch 1965, Cantril 1941, Hoffer
1951, Adorno et al. 1950), while the "spark of life" by which
the "mass is to cross the threshold of organizational life"
(Lowi 1971, 41) has received scant attention.
From where do the people come who make up the initial, organizing cadre
of a movement? How do they come together, and how do they come to share
a similar view of the world in circumstances that compel them to political
action? In what ways does the nature of its sources affect the future
development of the movement?
Before answering these questions, let us first look at data on the origins
of four social movements prominent in the sixties and seventies: civil
rights, student protest, welfare rights, and women's liberation. These
data identify recurrent elements involved in movement formation. The ways
in which these elements interact, given a sufficient level of grievances,
would support the following propositions:
Proposition 1: The need for a preexisting communications network
or infrastructure within the social base of a movement is a primary
prerequisite for "spontaneous" activity. Masses alone do not
form movements, however discontented they may be. Groups of previously
unorganized individuals may spontaneously form into small local associations
—- usually along the lines of informal social networks -— in
response to a specific strain or crisis. If they are not linked in some
manner, however, the protest does not become generalized but remains a
local irritant or dissolves completely. If a movement is to spread rapidly,
the communications network must already exist. If only the rudiments of
a network exist, movement formation requires a high input of "organizing"
activity .
Proposition 2: Not just any communications network will do. It must
be a network that is cooptable to the new ideas of the incipient
movement. To be cooptable, it must be composed of like minded people whose
backgrounds, experiences, or location in the social structure make them
receptive to the ideas of a specific new movement.
Proposition 3: Given the existence of a cooptable communications network,
or at least the rudimentary development of a potential one, and grievances,
one or more precipitants are required. Here, two distinct patterns emerge
that often overlap. In one, a crisis galvanizes the network into
spontaneous action in a new direction. In the other, one or more persons
begin organizing a new organization or disseminating a new idea.
For spontaneous action to occur, the communications network must be well
formed or the initial protest will not survive the incipient stage. If
it is not well formed, organizing efforts must occur; that is, one or
more persons must specifically attempt to construct a movement. To be
successful, organizers must be skilled and must have a fertile field in
which to work. If no communications network already exists, there must
at least be emerging spontaneous groups that are acutely attuned to the
issue, albeit uncoordinated. To sum up, if a cooptable communications
network is already established, a crisis is all that is necessary to galvanize
it. If it is rudimentary, an organizing cadre of one or more persons is
necessary. Such a cadre is superfluous if the former conditions fully exist, but it is essential if they do not.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
The civil rights movement has two origins, although one contributed significantly
to the other. The first can be dated from December 1, 1955, when the arrest
of Rosa Parks for occupying a "white" seat on a bus stimulated
both the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the formation of the Montgomery Improvement
Association. The second can be dated either from February 1, 1960 when
four freshmen at A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat-in
at a white lunch counter. or from April 15-17, when a conference at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina, resulted in the formation of the
Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). To understand why
there were two origins one has to understand the social structure of the
southern black community, as an incipient generation gap alone is inadequate
to explain it.
Within this community the two most important institutions, often the only
institutions, were the church and the black college. They provided the
primary networks through which most southern blacks interacted and communicated
with one another on a regular basis. In turn, the colleges and churches
were linked in a regional communications network. These institutions were
also the source of black leadership, for being a "preacher or a teacher"
were the main status positions in black society. Of the two, the church
was by far the more important; it touched on more people's lives and was
the largest and oldest institution in the black community. Even during
slavery there had been an "invisible church". After emancipation,
"organized religious life became the chief means by which a structured
or organized social life came into existence among the Negro masses"
(Frazier 1963, 17). Furthermore, preachers were more economically independent
of white society than were teachers.
Neither
of these institutions represented all the segments of black society but
the segments they did represent eventually formed the main social base
for supplying civil rights activists. The church was composed of a male
leadership and a largely middle-aged, lower-class female followership.
The black colleges were the homes of black intellectuals and middle-class
youth, male and female.
Both origins of the civil rights movement resulted in the formation of
new organizations, despite the fact that at least three seemingly potential
social movement organizations already existed. The wealthiest of these
was the Urban League, founded in 1910. It, however, was not only largely
restricted to a small portion of the black and white bourgeoisie but,
until 1961, felt itself to be "essentially a social service agency"
(Clark 1966, 245).
Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) pursued channels of legal change until it finally persuaded
the Supreme Court to abolish educational segregation in Brown v. Board
of Education. More than any other single event, this decision created
the atmosphere of rising expectations that helped precipitate the movement.
The NAACP suffered from its own success, however. Having organized itself
primarily to support court cases and utilize other "respectable'`
means, it "either was not able or did not desire to modify its program
in response to new demands. It believed it should continue its important
work by using those techniques it had already perfected" (Blumer
1951, 199).
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), like the other two organizations,
was founded in the North. It began "in 1942 as the Chicago Committee
of Racial Equality, which was composed primarily of students at the University
of Chicago. An off-shoot of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation,
its leaders were middle-class intellectual reformers, less prominent and
more alienated from the mainstream of American society than the founders
of the NAACP. They regarded the NAACP's legalism as too gradualist and
ineffective, and aimed to apply Gandhian techniques of non-violent direct
action to the problem of race relations in the United States. A year later,
the Chicago Committee joined with a half dozen other groups that had emerged
across the country, mostly under the encouragement of the F.O.R. to form
a federation known as the Congress of Racial Equality" (Rudwick and
Meier 1970, 10).
CORE's activities anticipated many of the main forms of protest of the civil
rights movement, and its attitudes certainly seemed to fit CORE for the
role of a major civil rights organization. But though it became quite influential,
at the time the movement actually began, CORE had declined almost to the
point of extinction. Its failure reflects the historical reality that organizations
are less likely to create social movements than be created by them. More
important, CORE was poorly situated to lead a movement of southern blacks.
Northern-based and composed primarily of pacifist intellectuals, it had
no roots in any of the existing structures of the black community, and in
the North these structures were themselves weak. CORE could be a source
of ideas, but not of coordination.
The coordination of a new movement required the creation of a new organization.
But that was not apparent until after the Montgomery bus boycott began.
That boycott was organized through institutions already existing in the
black community of Montgomery.
Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man was not
the first time such defiance of segregation laws had occurred. There had
been talk of a boycott the previous time, but after local black leaders
had a congenial meeting with the city commissioners, nothing happened—on
either side (King 1958, 37-41). When Parks, a former secretary of the local
NAACP, was arrested, she immediately called E. D. Nixon, at that time the
president the local chapter. He not only bailed her out but informed a few
influential women in the city, most of whom were members of the Women's
Political Council (WPC). After numerous phone calls between their members,
it was the WPC that actually suggested the boycott, and E. D. Nixon who
initially organized it. (Ibid., 44-45).
The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed at a meeting of
eighteen ministers and civic leaders the Monday after Parks's conviction
and a day of successful boycotting, to provide ongoing coordination. No
one then suspected that coordination would be necessary for over a year
with car pools organized to provide alternative transportation for seventeen
thousand riders a day. During this time the MIA grew slowly to a staff of
ten in order to handle the voluminous correspondence, as well as to provide
rides and keep the movement's momentum going. The organization, and the
car pools, were financed by $250,000 in donations that poured in from all
over the world in response to heavy press publicity about the boycott. But
the organizational framework for the boycott and the MIA was the church.
Most of the officers were ministers, and Sunday meetings with congregations
continued to be the main means of communicating with members of the black
community to encourage them to continue the protest.
The boycott did not end until the federal courts ruled Alabama's bus segregation
laws unconstitutional late in 1956 -— at the same time that the state
courts ruled the boycott illegal. In the meantime, black leaders throughout
the South had visited Montgomery, and out of their discussions came agreement
to continue antisegregation protests regularly and systematically under
the aegis of a new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). The NAACP could not lead the protests because, according to an SCLC
pamphlet "during the late 50s, the NAACP had been driven out of some
Southern states. Its branches were outlawed as foreign corporations and
its lawyers were charged with barratry, that is, persistently inciting litigation."
On January 10, 1957, over one hundred people gathered in Atlanta at a meeting
called by four ministers, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Bayard Rustin
drew up the "working papers." Initially called the Southern Leadership
Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, the SCLC never
developed a mass base even when it changed its name. It established numerous
"affiliates" but did most of its work through the churches in
the communities to which it sent its fieldworkers.
The church was not just the only institution available for a movement to
work through; in many ways it was ideal. It performed "the central
organizing function in the Negro community" (Holloway 1969, 22), providing
both access to large masses of people on a regular basis and a natural leadership.
As Wyatt Tee Walker, former executive director of SCLC, commented, "The
Church today is central to the movement. If a Negro's going to have a meeting,
where's he going to have it? Mostly he doesn't have a Masonic lodge, and
he's not going to get the public schools. And the church is the primary
means of communication" (Brink and Harris 1964, 103). Thus the church
eventually came to be the center of the voter registration drives as well
as many of the other activities of the civil rights movement.
Even the young men and women of SNCC had to use the church, though they
had trouble doing so because, unlike most of the officers of SCLC, they
were not themselves ministers and thus did not have a "fraternal"
connection. Instead they tended to draw many of their resources and people
from outside the particular town in which they were working by utilizing
their natural organizational base, the college.
SNCC did not begin the sit-ins, but came out of them. Once begun, the idea
of the sit-in spread initially by means of the mass media. But such sit-ins
almost always took place in towns where there were black colleges, and groups
on these campuses essentially organized the sit-in activities of their communities.
Nonetheless, "CORE, with its long emphasis of nonviolent direct action,
played an important part, once the sit-ins began, as an educational and
organizing agent" (Zinn 1964, 23). CORE had very few staff in the South,
but there were enough to at least hold classes and practice sessions in
nonviolence.
It was SCLC, however, that was actually responsible for the formation of
SNCC; though it might well have organized itself eventually. Ella Baker,
then executive secretary of SCLC, thought something should be done to coordinate
the rapidly spreading sit-ins in 1960, and many members of SCLC thought
it might be appropriate to organize a youth group. With SCLC money, Baker
persuaded her alma mater, Shaw University, to provide facilities to contact
the groups at centers of sit-in activity. Some two hundred people showed
up for the meeting, decided to have no official connection with SCLC beyond
a "friendly relationship," and formed the Student Non-Violent
Co-ordinating Committee (Zinn 1964, 32-34). It had no members, and its fieldworkers
numbered two hundred at their highest point, but it was from the campuses,
especially the southern black colleges, that it drew its sustenance and
upon which its organizational base rested."THE MOVEMENT"
The term "the Movement" was originally applied to the civil rights
movement by those participating in it, but as this activity expanded into
a general critique of American society and concomitant action, the term
broadened with it. To white youth throughout most of the sixties, "the
Movement" referred to that plethora of youth and/or radical activities
that started from the campus and eventually enveloped a large segment of
middle-class youth. The term also refers to "the student movement"
and "the New Left." The campus was a natural communications network
for students and intellectuals. But it was a large place, for the most part,
so at least in the beginning the basic units had to be smaller and the ties
between them more definitive than was necessary once the movement was more
developed.
In the late 1950s liberal and socialist groups of students on different
campuses formed new organizations. SLATE appeared at Berkeley, POLIT at
Chicago, and VOICE at Michigan. Student journals, such as New University
Thought and Studies on the Left, modeled after the New Left
Review in London, began publishing. Several crises prompted other student
organizations to form. The Bay of Pigs fiasco led to Fair Play for Cuba
chapters. The Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961, the resumption of nuclear
testing, and the push for a massive civil defense program, resulted in the
Student Peace Union and student chapters of SANE (O'Brien 1969, 4-5). These
groups were not themselves a student movement, merely the student branches
of "adult" organizations (Haber 1966, 35-36). They were inspired
to reach beyond their origins by the Southern sit-ins of 1960. "[T]he
sit-ins served as a mechanism for bringing ... students together for the
first time for practical interaction over political issues." and disrupted
"the prevailing pattern of political apathy" (Flacks 1970, 1).
In 1960, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several
national student political groups. It had recently changed its name from
the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), but still remained the
relatively insignificant youth affiliate of an aging social democratic clearinghouse
for liberal, pro-labor, anti-communist ideas. What put life into this moribund
group were two University of Michigan students, Al Haber and Tom Hayden.
In the late spring of 1960 Al Haber organized a conference on "Human
Rights in the North," ... which began SDS's long association with SNCC
and recruited some of the young people who subsequently became the 'old
guard' SDS leadership" (Kissinger and Ross 1968, 16).
After the conference, the United Auto Workers donated $10,000 to SDS, which
used the money to hire Haber as an organizer. He corresponded widely, mimeographed
and mailed pamphlets, gave speeches, and generally made contacts with and
between others (Sale 1973, 35). Both Hayden and Haber argued that the different
issues on which activists were working were interconnected, that a movement
had to be created to work for broad social change, that the university was
a potential base and agency in a movement for social change, and that SDS
could play an important role in this movement (O'Brien 1969, 6). Despite
this potential, SDS "remained practically non-existent as an organization
in the late 1960-to-1961 school year. Then, in the summer of 1961, the 14th
Congress of the National Student Association was held in Madison, Wisconsin....
It was regional and national meetings of NSA which first brought together
Northern white radicals" (Kissinger and Ross 1968, 16). In 1962 SDS
broke away to stand by itself.
What followed were years of hard organizing effort, stimulated by civil
rights activity and campus protests (Sale, 1973). In the early years SDS
had many competitors for the affections of students, but none in the form
of organizations claiming to represent students as students. The others
were largely youth groups of national liberal and socialist organizations.
SDS's activities were never confined solely to the campus, and usually sought
to channel student activity to the support of other movement efforts. But
its formation does illustrate once again the pattern found elsewhere (Haber
1966, 35).THE NATIONAL WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION
The welfare rights movement is an excellent example of movement entrepreneurship
and government involvement in movement formation. If ever a movement was
constructed, this one was. The building blocks of its construction
were the Great Society antipoverty programs and the plethora of black and
especially white civil rights workers who were left "unemployed"
with that movement's decline (Piven and Cloward 1971, 321). Many local welfare
protest groups originated in antipoverty agencies in order to get more money
for the poor. Many others came out of community organizations formed by
liberal church groups and urban civil rights activists a few years before.
These groups were widely scattered throughout the country and not linked
by any communications mechanism.
The entrepreneur who linked them in order to create a movement was George
Wiley, a former chemistry professor and civil rights activist who left CORE
after losing his bid to become national director. Attracted to the idea
of organizing welfare recipients by a pamphlet written by Columbia social
work professor Richard Cloward, later published in the Nation, Wiley
organized the Poverty/Rights Action Center in Washington in May 1966. The
P/RAC office opened on a $15,000 budget soon after a conference on the guaranteed
annual income at the University of Chicago. Organized by three social work
students, the conference brought together organizers and representatives
of welfare groups, community organizations, and poverty workers. Although
not specifically invited, Wiley came and was given a place on the conference
program. When the participants seemed receptive to his ideas, Wiley announced
to the press that there would be national demonstrations on June 30 in support
of an Ohio march for adequate welfare already being organized by the Cleveland
Council of Churches (Piven and Cloward 1977, 288-91).
Wiley volunteered his new organization to coordinate the national support
actions. Drawing upon his contacts from the civil rights movement and those
he met at the conference, his "support activities" were highly
successful. "On the morning of June 30, when they finally reached Columbus,
the forty marchers were joined by two thousand recipients and sympathizers
from other towns in Ohio. On the same day in New York two thousand recipients
massed in front of City Hall to picket in the hot sun.... Groups of recipients
in fifteen other cities.... also joined demonstrations against 'the welfare'"
(Piven and Cloward 1971, 323).
This action was followed by a national conference of a hundred people in
August that elected a Co-ordinating Committee to plan a founding conference
for the National Welfare Rights Organization. "The organizers were
members of Students for a Democratic Society, church people, and most prominently,
VISTA and other antipoverty program workers" (Piven and Cloward 1977,
291-92).
VISTA volunteers continued to be the NWRO's "chief organizing resource"
(Piven and Cloward 1971, 329). But they were not the only resource supplied
by the government. "If the NWRO developed as a by-product of federal
intervention in the cities, it later came to have quite direct relations
with the national government. In 1968, the outgoing Johnson Administration
granted NWRO more than $400,000 through the Department of Labor, a sum roughly
equivalent to the total amount raised from private sources after the organization
was formed.... Federal officials were aware that the money would go toward
strengthening local relief groups" (Piven and Cloward 1971, 329-30).
In effect, the federal government was supporting a social movement organization
whose purpose was to extract more money from state and local governments.
This intimate connection between the federal government, the NWRO, and recipient
groups lasted only a few years. The NWRO eventually faced organizational
problems it was unable to surmount, and antipoverty programs were dismantled
by the Nixon administration (Piven and Cloward 1977). But while they lasted,
local recipient groups were forged into a movement by experienced civil
rights activists and government-funded volunteers under the direction of
a single well-trained organizer with an entrepreneurial instinct.THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Women are not well organized. Historically tied to the family and isolated
from their own kind, only in the nineteenth century did women in this country
have the opportunity to develop independent associations of their own. These
associations took years and years of careful organizational work to build.
Eventually they formed the basis for the suffrage movement of the early
twentieth century. The associations took less time to die. Today the Women`s
Trade Union League, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's
Christian Temperance Union, not to mention the powerful National American
Woman Suffrage Association, are all either dead or a pale shadow of their
former selves.
As of 1960, not one organization of women had the potential to become a
social movement organization, nor was there any form of "neutral"
structure of interaction to provide the base for such an organization. Only
the National Woman's Party remained dedicated to feminist concerns, and
it was essentially a lobbying group for the Equal Rights Amendment, which
few outside Washington, D.C. had ever heard of. The 180,000-member National
Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs might have provided
a base. Yet, while it steadily lobbied for legislation of importance to
women, as late as l966 it "rejected a number of suggestions that it
redefine . . . goals and tactics and become a kind of 'NAACP for women'
. . . out of fear of being labeled 'feminist'." (Hole and Levine 1971,
81). Before any social movement could develop among women, there had to
be a structure to bring potential feminist sympathizers together.
What happened in the 1960s was the development of two new communications
networks in which women played prominent roles that allowed, even forced,
an awakened interest in feminist ideas. As a result, the movement actually
has two origins, from two different strata of society, with two different
styles, orientations, values, and forms of organization. The first of these
will be referred to as the "older branch" of the movement, partially
because it began first and partially because it was on the older side of
the "generation gap" that pervaded the sixties. Its most prominent
organization is the National Organization for Women (NOW), which was founded
in 1966. The "younger branch" consisted of innumerable small groups
engaged in a variety of activities whose contact with one another was always
tenuous (Freeman 1975, 50).
The forces that led to NOW's formation were set in motion in 1961 when President
Kennedy established the President's Commission on the Status of Women at
the behest of Esther Peterson, then director of the Women's Bureau at the
Department of Labor. Its 1963 report, American Women, and subsequent
committee publications documented just how thoroughly women were denied
many rights and opportunities. The most significant response to the activity
of the President's Commission was the establishment of some fifty state
commissions to do similar research on a state level. The Presidential and
State Commission activity laid the groundwork for the future movement in
two significant ways: (1) It unearthed ample evidence of women's unequal
status and in the process convinced many previously uninterested women that
something should be done; (2) it created a climate of expectations that
something would be done. The women of the Presidential and State Commissions
who were exposed to these influences exchanged visits, correspondence, and
staff, and met with one other at an annual commission conference organized
by the Women's Bureau. They were in a position to share and mutually reinforce
their growing awareness and concern over women's issues. These commissions
created an embryonic communications network.
During this time, two other events of significance occurred. The first was
the publication of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique in
1963. A quick best seller, the book stimulated many women to question the
status quo and some women to suggest to Friedan that an organization
be formed to do something about it. The second event was the addition of
"sex" to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting employment
discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission refused to seriously
enforce the "sex" provision. A rapidly growing feminist coterie
within the EEOC concluded that "sex" would be taken more seriously
if there were "some sort of NAACP for women" to put pressure on
the government. They talked to the women they thought could organize such
a group.
On June 30, 1966, these three strands of incipient feminism came together,
and NOW was tied from the knot. At that time, government officials running
the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, ironically
titled "Targets for Action," forbade the presentation of a suggested
resolution calling for the EEOC to treat sex discrimination with the same
consideration as race discrimination. The officials said one government
agency could not be allowed to pressure another, despite the fact that the
state commissions were not federal agencies. The small group of women who
desired such a resolution had met the night before in Friedan's hotel room
to discuss the possibility of a civil rights organization for women. Not
convinced of the need, they chose instead to propose the resolution. When
conference officials vetoed it, they held a whispered conversation over
lunch and agreed to form an action organization "to bring women into
full participation in the mainstream of American society now, assuming all
the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with
men." The name NOW was coined by Friedan who was at the conference
doing research on a book. When word leaked out, twenty-eight women paid
five dollars each to join before the day was over (Friedan 1967, 4). By
the time the organizing conference was held the following October 29 and
30, over three hundred men and women had become charter members. Instead
of organizational experience, what the early NOW members had was experience
in working with and in the media, and it was here that their early efforts
were aimed. As a result, NOW often gave the impression of being larger than
it was. It was highly successful in getting in the press; much less successful
in either bringing about concrete changes or forming an organization. Thus
it was not until 1970, when the national press simultaneously did major
stories on the women's liberation movement, that NOW's membership increased
significantly (Freeman, 1975, 85-87).
In the meantime, unaware of and unknown to NOW, the EEOC, or the State Commissions,
younger women began forming their own movement. Here, too, the groundwork
had been laid some years before. The different social action projects of
the sixties had attracted many women, who were quickly shunted into traditional
roles and faced with the self-evident contradiction of working in a "freedom
movement" but not being very free. No single "youth movement"
activity or organization is responsible for forming the youngest branch
of the women's liberation movement, but together they created a "radical
community" in which like-minded people continually interacted or were
made aware of one another. This community provided the necessary network
of communication and its radical ideas the framework of analysis that "explained"
the dismal situation in which radical women found themselves.
Papers had been circulated on women and individual temporary women's caucuses
had been held as early as 1964 (see Hayden and King 1966). But it was not
until 1967 and 1968 that the groups developed a determined, if cautious,
continuity and began to consciously expand themselves. At least five groups
in five different cities (Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Seattle, and Gainesville,
Florida) formed spontaneously, independently of one another. They came at
an auspicious moment, for 1967 was the year in which the blacks kicked the
whites out of the civil rights movement, student power was discredited by
SDS, and the New Left was on the wane. Only draft resistance activities
were on the increase, and this movement more than any other exemplified
the social inequities of the sexes. Men could resist the draft. Women could
only counsel resistance.
At this point, there were few opportunities available for political work.
Some women fit well into the secondary role of draft counseling. Many didn't.
For years their complaints of unfair treatment had been forestalled by movement
men with the dictum that those things could wait until after the Revolution.
Now these political women found time on their hands, but still the men would
not listen.
A typical example was the event that precipitated the formation of the Chicago
group, the first independent group in this country. At the August 1967 National
Conference for New Politics convention a women's caucus met for days, but
was told its resolution wasn't significant enough to merit a floor discussion.
By threatening to tie up the convention with procedural motions the women
succeeded in having their statement tacked to the end of the agenda. It
was never discussed. The chair refused to recognize any of the many women
standing by the microphone, their hands straining upwards. When he instead
called on someone to speak on "the forgotten American, the American
Indian," five women rushed the podium to demand an explanation. But
the chairman just patted one of them on the head (literally) and told her,
"Cool down, little girl. We have more important things to talk about
than women's problems."
The "little girl" was Shulamith Firestone, future author of The
Dialectic of Sex, and she didn't cool down. Instead she joined with another
Chicago woman she met there who had unsuccessfully tried to organize a women's
group that summer, to call a meeting of the women who had halfheartedly
attended those summer meetings. Telling their stories to those women, they
stimulated sufficient rage to carry the group for three months, and by that
time it was a permanent institution.
Another somewhat similar event occurred in Seattle the following winter.
At the University of Washington an SDS organizer was explaining to a large
meeting how white college youth established rapport with the poor whites
with whom they were working. "He noted that sometimes after analyzing
societal ills, the men shared leisure time by 'balling a chick together.'
He pointed out that such activities did much to enhance the political consciousness
of poor white youth. A woman in the audience asked, 'And what did it do
for the consciousness of the chick?'" (Hole and Levine 1971, 120).
After the meeting, a handful of enraged women formed Seattle's first group.
Subsequent groups to the initial five were largely organized rather than
formed spontaneously out of recent events. In particular, the Chicago group
was responsible for the formation of many new groups in Chicago and in other
cities. Unlike NOW, the women in the first groups had had years of experience
as trained organizers. They knew how to utilize the infrastructure of the
radical community, the underground press, and the free universities to disseminate
women's liberation ideas. Chicago, as a center of New Left activity, had
the largest number of politically conscious organizers. Many traveled widely
to left conferences and demonstrations, and most used the opportunity to
talk with other women about the new movement. In spite of public derision
by radical men, or perhaps because of it, young women steadily formed new
groups around the country.ANALYSIS
From these data there appear to be four essential elements involved in movement
formation: (1) the growth of a preexisting communications network that is
(2) cooptable to the ideas of the new movement; (3) a series of crises that
galvanize into action people involved in a cooptable network, and/or (4)
subsequent organizing effort to weld the spontaneous groups together into
a movement. Each of these elements needs to be examined in detail.Communications Network
The four movements we have looked at developed out of already existing networks
within their populations. The church and the black college were the primary
institutions through which southern blacks communicated their concerns.
In the North the church was much weaker and the black college nonexistent,
perhaps explaining why the movement had greater difficulty developing and
surviving there. The Movement, composed primarily of white youth, had its
centers on the campus because this was where that constituency could readily
be found. Nonetheless, campuses were too large and disconnected for incipient
movement leaders to find each other. Instead they fruitfully used the national
and regional conferences of the National Student Association to identify
and reach those students who were socially conscious. The welfare rights
movement, much more than the others, was created by the conscious efforts
of one person. But that person had to find constituents somewhere, and he
found them most readily in groups already organized by antipoverty agencies.
Organizers for the national movement, in turn, were found among former civil
rights activists looking for new directions for their political energies.
The women's liberation movement, even more than the previous ones, illustrates
the importance of a network precisely because the conditions for a movement
existed before a network came into being, but the movement didn't exist
until afterward. Analysts of socioeconomic causes have concluded that the
movement could have started anytime within a 20 year period. Strain for
women was as great in 1955 as in 1965 (Ferriss 1971). What changed was the
organizational situation. It was not until new networks emerged among women
aware of inequities beyond local boundaries that a movement could grow past
the point of occasional, spontaneous uprisings. The fact that two distinct
movements, with two separate origins, developed from two networks unaware
of each other is further evidence of the key role of preexisting communications
networks as the fertile soil in which new movements can sprout.Co-optibility
A recurrent theme is that not just any communications network will do. It
must be one that is co-optable to the ideas of the new movement. The Business
and Professional Women's (BPW) clubs were a network among women, but having
rejected feminism, they could not overcome the ideological barrier to new
political action until after feminism became established. Similarly, there
were other communications networks among students than that of the NSA,
for example fraternities and athletic associations. But these were not networks
that politically conscious young people were likely to be involved in.
On the other hand, the women on the Presidential and State Commissions and
the feminist coterie of the EEOC were co-optable largely because their immersion
in the facts of female status and the details of sex discrimination cases
made them very conscious of the need for change. Likewise, the young women
of the "radical community" lived in an atmosphere of questioning,
confrontation, and change. They absorbed an ideology of "freedom"
and "liberation" far more potent than any latent antifeminism"
might have been.
NSA does not appear to have been as readily co-optable to the Movement as
the new women's networks were to feminism. As an association of student
governments, its participants had other concerns besides political ones.
But while it didn't transform itself, it was a source of recruitment and
a forum for discussion that gave the early SDS organizers contacts on many
campuses.
Exactly what makes a network co-optable is harder to elucidate. Pinard (1971,
186) noted the necessity for groups to "possess or develop an ideology
or simply subjective interests congruent with that of a new movement"
for them to "act as mobilizing rather than restraining agents toward
that movement." The diffusion of innovation studies point out that
new ideas must fit in with already established norms for changes to happen
easily. Furthermore, a social system that has as a value "innovativeness"
(as the radical community did) will more rapidly adopt ideas than one that
looks upon the habitual performance of traditional practices as the ideal
(as most organized women's groups did in the fifties). People who have had
similar experiences are likely to share similar perceptions of a situation
and to mutually reinforce those perceptions as well as their subsequent
interpretation. A co-optable network, then, is one whose members have had
common experiences that predispose them to be receptive to the particular
new ideas of the incipient movement and who are not faced with structural
or ideological barriers to action. If the new movement can interpret these
experiences and perceptions in ways that point out channels for social action,
then participation in a social movement becomes the logical thing to do.The Role of Crises
As our examples have illustrated, similar perceptions must be translated
into action. This is often done by a crisis. For blacks in Montgomery, this
was prompted by Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white
man. For women who formed the older branch of the women's movement, the
impetus to organize was the refusal of the EEOC to enforce the sex provision
of Title VII, precipitated by the concomitant refusal of federal officials
at the conference to allow a supportive resolution. For younger women there
were a series of minor crises.
While not all movements are formed by such precipitating events, they are
quite common, as they serve to crystallize and focus discontent. From their
own experiences, directly and concretely, people feel the need for change
in a situation that allows for an exchange of feelings with others, mutual
validation, and a subsequent reinforcement of innovative interpretation.
Nothing makes desire for change more acute than a crisis. Such a crisis
need not be a major one; it need only embody collective discontent.Organizing Efforts
A crisis will only catalyze a well-formed communications network. If such
networks are embryonically developed or only partially co-optable, the potentially
active individuals in them must be linked together by someone. This is essentially
what George Wiley did for local recipient groups and what other SDS organizers
did with the contacts they made in NSA and on campuses. "Some protest
may persist where the source of trouble is constantly present. But interest
ordinarily cannot be maintained unless there is a welding of spontaneous
groups into some stable organization" (Jackson et al. 1960, 37). In
other words, people must be organized. Social movements do not simply occur.
The role of the organizer in movement formation is another neglected aspect
of the theoretical literature. There has been great concern with leadership,
but the two roles are distinct and not always performed by the same individual.
In the early stages of a movement, it is the organizer much more than any
leader who is important, and such an individual or cadre must often operate
behind the scenes.
The importance of organizers is pervasive in the sixties' movements. Dr.
King may have been the public spokesperson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
who caught the eye of the media, but it was E.D. Nixon and the WPC women
who organized it. Certainly the "organizing cadre" that young
women in the radical community came to be was key to the growth of that
branch of the women's liberation movement, despite the fact that no "leaders"
were produced (and were actively discouraged). The existence of many leaders
but no organizers in the older branch of the women's liberation movement
readily explains its subsequent slow development. The crucial role of organizers
in SDS and the National Welfare Rights Organization were described earlier.
Other organizations, even the government, often serve as training centers
for organizers and sources of material support to aid the formation of groups
and/or movements. The civil rights movement was the training ground for
many an organizer of other movements. The League for Industrial Democracy
financed SDS in its early days, and the NSA provided indirect support by
hiring many SDS organizers as NSA staff. The role of the government in the
formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization was quite significant.
From all this it would appear that training as an organizer or at least
as a proselytizer or entrepreneur of some kind is a necessary background
for those individuals who act as movement innovators. Even in something
as seemingly spontaneous as a social movement, the professional is more
valuable than the amateur.REFERENCES
Adorno, L. W., et al.
1950, The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row.
Blumer, Herbert
1951 "Social Movements." In A. M. Lee, ed., New Outline of the Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Brink, William, and Louis Harris
1964 The Negro Revolution in America. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Cantril, Hadley
1941, The Psychology of Social Movements. New York: Wiley
Clark, Kenneth B.,
1966, "The Civil Rights Movement: Momentum and Organization." Daedalus, Winter. Vol. 95, No. 1, pp. 239-267.
Davis,James C.
1962, "Toward a Theory of Revolution." American Sociological Review Vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 5-19.
Ferriss, Abbott L.
1971 Indicators of Trends in the Status of American Women. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Firestone, Shulamith
Flacks, Richard
1970 "The New Left and American Politics: After Ten Years." Paper presented at the American Political Science Association convention, September.
Frazier, E. Franklin
1963 The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken.
Freeman, Jo
1973, "The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement", American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 4, January, pp. 792-811.
1975, The Politics of Women's Liberation. New York: Longman.
Friedan, Betty
1963 The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell.
1967 "NOW: How It Began." Women Speaking, April. pp. 4, 6.
Gurr, Ted
1970, Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Haber, Robert A.
1966 "From Protest to Radicalism: An Appraisal of the Student Movement: 1960." In Michael Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 34-42.
Hayden, Casey, and Mary King
1966 "A Kind of Memo." Liberation, April. Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 35-36.
Hoffer, Eric
1951 The True Believer. New York: Harper & Row.
Hole,Judith, and Ellen Levine
1971 Rebirth of Feminism, New York: Quadrangle Books,
Holloway, Harry
1969 The Politics of the Southern Negro. New York: Random House.
Jackson, Maurice, et al.
1960 "The Failure of an Incipient Social Movement." Pacific Sociological Review Vol. 3. no. 1, pp. 40.
King, Martin Luther,Jr.
1958 Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Harper & Row.
Kissinger, C. Clark, and Bob Ross
1968 "Starting in '60: Or From SLID to Resistance." New Left Notes, 10 June.
Lowi, Theodore J.
1971 The Politics of Discord. New York: Basic Books.
Oberschall, Anthony
1973, Social Conflict and Social Movements. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
O'Brien, James
1969 A History of the New Left, 1960-68. Cambridge, Mass.: New England Free Press.
Pinard, Maurice
1968 "Mass Society and Political Movements: A New Formulation." American Journal of Sociology Vol. 73, no. 6 (May): 680-92.
1971 The Rise of a Third Party: A Study in Crisis Politics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall .
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward
1971 Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon.
1977 Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Pantheon.
Rudwick, Elliott, and August Meier
1970, "Organizational Structure and Goal Succession: A Comparative Analysis of the NAACP and CORE, 1964-1968." Social Science Quarterly 51 (June). pp. 9-24.
Sale, Kirkpatrick
1973 SDS. New York: Random House.
Toch, Hans
1965, The Social Psychology of Social Movements. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Zinn, Howard
1964 SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press.
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