Gender and the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

This study outlines how gender relations and gender differences come into play in the civil rights movement -the national movement to transform American race relations in the 1950s and 1960s. Social movement scholarship on the civil rights movement emphasizes dramatic mass mobilizations and charismatic leadership, both distinctively masculine enterprises. This emphasis overlooks the subtle and underappreciated dynamics of gender in shaping cultures of protest and resistance. Consideration of gender and gender roles in the private and public spheres provides a more nuanced understanding of protest strategies and the formulation of resistance in direct action. Gendered patterns related to movement participation, mobilization, leadership, strategies and ideologies also bring into focus how local issues shaped regional variations in civil rights initiatives. Finally, gender symbolism and culture deepen our understanding of non-violent direct action as a moral, emancipatory performance, serving to blur the physical boundaries enacted by civil restraint.

Making Structural Change with Relational Power: A Gender Analysis of Faith-Based Community Organizing

“…Scholars have used gender analyses to examine other change strategies, including the success of public space-oriented work due to more private sphereoriented strategies: "leaders are often mobilized by the masses they will eventually come to lead" (Robnett, 1996(Robnett, , p. 1664. One example of this is the ongoing discourse about the Civil Rights Movement in the US in which the success attributed to the charismatic leading men is challenged by the historical community building activities of women activists (Van Delinder, 2009).…”