Annotated list of popular movement literature

Women's movements

Gerda Lerner: The creation of patriarchy, Oxford University Press 1986 resp. The creation of feminist consciousness, Oxford University Press 1993

Part 1 describes how agriculture and the state gave rise to patriarchy. Part 2 describes how women between about 1000 and about 1800 try to create their own space and identity mainly by expressing themselves as mystical Christianity.

Renate Bridenthal (ed): Becoming visible. Houghton Mifflin 1998

Introduction to the women’s movement subject. Women’s conditions and resistance from antiquity to the present captured in around twenty essays with different focuses. Here there are e.g. paragraphs on the importance of women to the early Christian church, how the rise of industrial society dequalified women, and the contradictory relationship of women’s movements to the welfare state as a principle. NOTE an earlier book with the same title by the same editor but with completely different content is also available. It seems thicker but duller; I recommend the newer book.

Wilma Dunaway: The double register of history, Journal of World System Research VII:1, 2001

Describes how women are given the thankless role of making men’s labor profitable by working for it for free, thereby ensuring that capitalists do not have to pay for essential recreational expenses. According to Dunaway, the essence of women’s subordination.

Malcolm I. Thomis & Jennifer Grimmett: Women in protest 1800-1850, Croom Helm 1982

Women’s movements before the “women’s movement”. In particular, the underclass; for example bread revolts, women’s trade unions, etc. Despite only a few pages, it manages to be both comprehensive and detailed. However, it only deals with England, which makes it a bit limited.

Shirley Elson Roessler: Out of the shadows -- Women and politics in the French revolution, Peter Lang Publishing 1996

Makes up for the shortcomings of the above by depicting how women’s bread revolts in Paris gave the French Revolution its impetus and nerve and formed the background against which various power-hungry coteries had to relate.

Jane Rendall: The origins of modern feminism, Macmillan 1985

Depicts the emergence of the late nineteenth century women’s movement out of Christian charity and the anti-slavery movement. That is, how middle-class women’s participation in such social activities forced them to question men’s monopoly on political rights. Explains why the women’s movement was initially an Anglo-Saxon affair: that’s where there was a plethora of free church movements with charitable tendencies plus a gigantic middle class whose women were doomed to idleness unless they got involved in social issues.

Richard J Evans: The feminists, Croom Helm 1977

About how women organize against patriarchy in different countries in Europe (with settler colonies). Mainly points to the differences between the middle-class dominated and evangelical Northwest and the rest, but has the great advantage of putting the main emphasis on what was of mass movement and relegating the “big names” to a periphery. Also shows how the decline after 1910 was for the most part due to the fact that class issues then became more important, why the middle class women joined up behind the power.

Olive Banks: Faces of feminism, Martin Robertson 1981

About women’s movements in England and the United States. Banks follows how two traditions -- the egalitarian tradition of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the religious tradition of early 19th-century revivals, with the latter clearly predominating -- have collaborated and conflicted, creating the women’s movement tradition. The late 19th century suffrage movement was e.g. almost entirely a creation of Christians in search of moral perfection says Banks. She also shows interesting connections between women's movements and other movements in a detailed but not nitpicky way. Not least, she places the conflict between “equality feminists” and “diversity feminists” in a historical context.

Barbara Caine: English Feminism 1780-1980, Oxford University Press 1997

More detail on the English case.

Barbara Ryan: Feminism and the women's movement, Routledge 1992

More detail about the American. In particular, about the mobilization that led to suffrage in 1920, which was far more extensive than the more circumscribed English.
Charles Sowerwine: Sisters or citizens. Cambridge University Press 1982
On the impossibility of organizing a French labor women’s movement at the end of the 19th century, due to the fear of “splitting the working class” (and, incidentally, on the impossibility of organizing a women’s movement at all, for fear of “splitting the republic”). Sowerwine talks about how the women at the forefront of the labor movement even refused to support women’s right to organize in unions when machist men chased them out.

Richard Evans: Comrades and sisters. Wheatsheaf Books 1987

About the more fortunate German case which was successful because women were not allowed to become members of parties and were therefore forced to build their own social democratic organizations, with great impact. Once prohibition was lifted in 1907, they too were absorbed into the male-dominated organizations and lost their bite.

Christina Kelley Gilmartin: Engendering the Chinese revolution. University of California Press 1995

An account of the most powerful women’s movement ever seen -- how young women organized farmers’ wives and daughters, prevented forced marriages, and untied bound feet until the old men panicked and staged a coup d’état in their defense in 1927. Then it was over, but the Chinese Revolution included, in any case, the goals of the women’s movement among their own, even if the women were not allowed to organize separately in the future.

From the 60s

Monica Threlfall (ed): Mapping the women’s movement. Verso 1999

A review of the “second wave” of the women’s movement after 1970 in a number of (industrial) countries. Depicts how everywhere it is primarily the career demands of the middle class that are most easily pushed through -- except in Italy where women’s and labor movements were more intertwined and trade union demands have been more successful.

Flora Davis: Moving the mountain. University of Illinois Press 1991

US women’s movement history since 1960 in 500 pages. Here is everything about this motley movement, despite many details you still get an overview, and there are even reflections on why it went wrong when it did. For example, Davis questions whether it was so smart to devote so much energy to lobbying and lawsuits at the expense of popular movement politics and leave this side to the opponents of the women’s movement.

Torry Dickinson: Preparing to understand feminism in the twenty-first century, Journal of World-Systems Research 4:2, 1998

An article about differences and similarities between women’s movements in the center and periphery. Not least points out the much greater connection to provision that the movement has in the Southern countries.

Amrita Basu (ed): The challenge of local feminisms. Westview Press 1995

The appearance of women’s movements in different countries and cultures with emphasis on the South. Much is quite dry, but still rejects two prejudices -- that the women's movement is the same everywhere and that they have nothing to do with each other. The emphasis is on how the majority, i.e. the poor women, have been able to soak up things from Western feminism that they have benefited from and ignored the rest in their quest to survive for the day.

Bonnie Smith (ed): Global feminisms since 1945, Routledge 2000

A little fewer but in return fuller stories than the above. Enjoyable are e.g. Miriam Louie’s story of how the women’s movement in South Korea was born out of the militant women’s textile workers’ union, Zohreh Sullivan’s story of how the strict separation between women and men in Iran created a space for women to organize, much in the same way as in the German labor movement a century ago, and Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes’ account of how middle-class feminists in Brazil lost women’s movement hegemony to slum women who demanded power for water and sewage.

Jane Jaquette (ed): The women's movement in Latin America. Westview Press 1994

Describes how women’s movements organized resistance to Latin America's military dictatorships by challenging state terrorism and economic ineptitude in fairly apolitical terms; this was possible because women were “invisible” and therefore not possible for the military to access. As well as a bit about the ambiguity that women once again sacrifice themselves for the whole.

Raka Ray: Fields of protest -- women’s movements in India, University of Minnesota Press 1999

The “second wave” women’s movement in India, exemplified by Calcutta and Bombay. Perhaps a narrow focus in a country that is mostly rural, but the book is actually an illustration of the concept of “political field” and explains why the movement looks so different in each city -- trade union demands in the Communist Party-dominated Calcutta, gender politics demands in the politically divided Bombay.