Structure in Accounts of Feminist Emergence

Structural changes in opportunities for women in American society facilitated feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Changes in women's participation in public life – indicated by higher rates of women's participation in the labor force and growing numbers of women in higher education – gave women the resources necessary to organize for gender equality (Buechler 1990; Carden 1974; Freeman 1975; Marx Ferree and Hess 1994). There is, however, a logical problem with positing that rising resources facilitated feminist mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s: If women's circumstances were improving during this period, why did they mobilize? If things were getting better, from where did women's discontent emerge?

This is a good question but not the only one to ask. Movement experiences also mattered for feminist mobilizations, since in the United States, feminist movements have historically come from movements organized to fight forms of oppression other than gender oppression (Buechler 1990). Movements for racial/ethnic liberation have been crucial to the emergence of both first- and second-wave white feminism and the feminist movements of women of color, both in the United States and in other countries (see Ray 1999, for example, on Indian women's movements).