How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women's Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. State women's suffrage movements are investigated to illuminate the circumstances in which social movements bring about political change. In 29 states, suffragists were able to win significant voting rights prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In addition to resource mobilization, cultural framing, and political opportunity structures, the authors theorize that gendered opportunities also fostered the successes of the movements. An event history analysis provides evidence that gendered opportunity structures helped to bring about the political successes of the suffragists. Results suggest the need for a broader understanding of opportunity structure than one rooted simply in formal political opportunities.Direct all correspondence to Holly McCammon, SO AMERICANSOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW ing attention to the role of social movements, noting simply the presence or absence of movement activity and rarely noting variations in the organizational strength, strategies, and ideologies of movements. In addition, some movement researchers have turned their attention to the systematic study of movements and their outcomes, but the theoretical focus of this work has also been somewhat narrow (Amenta, Dunleavy, and Bernstein 1994; Banaszak 1996; Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly 1998). Movement researchers who examine the success of movements either focus primarily on the strategies of the movements themselves (Morris 1993) or, in examining the context of mobilization, limit their consideration to political institutions and actors, that is, to the political opportunity structure (Amenta, Carruthers, and Zylan 1992; Gelb 1987). We argue that a model of movement success must consider not only the mobilization of the movements but the broad context in which those movements operate, including political and other social dynamics that can affect movement success. We elaborate on this below, but first we point out that a model of the political success of movements must theorize the impact of movements and their contexts on political decision-makers. Bringing about political or policy changein the case of the suffragists, the expansion of voting rights-requires a willingness on the part of political decision-makers to support such change. A model of movement success, then, must specify the circumstances fostering such willingness on the part of political actors.Sociological theories of the state and of policymaking have long recognized the need to theorize the interests and actions of state actors to understand the policymaking process (Alford and Friedland 1985). Yet, ...

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