In this study, we explore the predictors of gender linked fate with a focus on marital status for different racial/ethnic groups. We argue that marriage alters women’s perceptions of self-interest by institutionalizing their partnerships with men and consequently leading women to feel less connected to other women. We assess our hypothesis using the 2012 American National Election Study. While we find that married white women and Latinas have significantly lower levels of linked fate than unmarried women of the same race/ethnicity, we find no such relationship for black women. We then explore the implications of these findings by examining the role of gender linked fate in explaining political differences among married and unmarried women using mediation analysis. Ultimately, we find that differences in perceptions of linked fate explain a significant amount of the variation in political ideology and partisanship for white and Latina women.
In this article, we examine newspaper coverage of Take Back the Night and SlutWalk sexual assault protests to assess how boundaries around men's participation in feminist events have changed over time, as well as how these changes shape movement messages in the press. Our analysis of Take Back the Night reveals that organizers are more likely to insist on boundaries excluding men's participation, and the coverage often focuses on the public controversy this choice generates. This controversy, however, often provides an unanticipated opportunity for activists to achieve standing and air demands in the press. In a postfeminist political era, there are fewer boundaries for men's participation in SlutWalk and Take Back the Night marches, and reporters and editors focus on a wider array of participants, including those men who are less committed to the feminist purpose of the marches. In these cases, feminist antiassault demands are more likely to get buried.
Free spaces are small‐scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization. Since the term became popular in studies of movements in the 1980s, scholars have sought to better identify the features of particular institutional sites that equip them to spur political challenges. They have also probed the role of free spaces in authoritarian regimes, in right‐wing movements, and in relation to new digital technologies.
Social movement boundaries are fundamentally about deciding who "we" are by defining who we are not. However, newly salient issues in a movement community can shift these boundaries by changing the membership criteria for both insiders and outsiders. Through a comparative case study of two relatively conservative feminist organizations, Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) and Feminists for Life (FFL), I examine how shifting boundaries around abortion rights in the feminist movement led to movement splintering, as organizations struggled and sometimes failed to maintain their relationships in a movement that increasingly defined them as outsiders. This analysis reveals how abortion rights' growing importance to both the feminist movement and the New Right resulted in the realignment of FFL with the feminist countermovement. This process had important consequences for both the organization and the countermovement with which it was realigned. This article contributes to our understanding of how shifting boundaries affect individual organizations, the movements in which they participate, and the relationships between countermovements.
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