Which three structural issues did the second wave of the womens movement work to address

The women's movement has made the world aware of the importance of gender in the world's labor markets. However, definitions and methods of enumeration still leave out a large section of the female work force. Even where women are included as part of the labor force they face highly segregated labor markets. Since about 1980, globalization and structural adjustment programs have negatively impacted labor movements that seek gains for workers. However, in the process of dealing with change, international trade unions have realized the importance of organizing women workers especially in the areas of agriculture and the informal sector. These are areas of growth of the labor movement for women in the future.

Sex and Sexuality

The women's movement spent the 1960s campaigning for reproductive rights like access to abortion and contraception, and the 1970s lesbian feminist movement brought greater attention to women's rights to sexual pleasure with other women. Adrienne Rich denounced feminism for assuming a standard norm of female heterosexuality (Rich, 1980). By the late 1970s, feminists began to emphasize the violence and danger associated with heterosexual sexuality and the late 1970s and early 1980s saw feminist legal theory gripped by the ‘sex wars.’

Debates divided many feminists into two opposing positions, often labeled as radical and sex positive. According to the radical feminist point of view, under conditions of patriarchy, sex and sexuality intrinsically perpetuated violence against women. According to a sex-positive point of view, sex and sexuality were sites of personal pleasure and political possibilities for subverting patriarchal definitions of femininity.

The ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s took shape around an emerging antipornography movement, underpinned by radical feminism and its theory of gender oppression. Radical feminists, such as MacKinnon and Dworkin, campaigned for the use of censorship and other legal prohibitions in order to outlaw pornography and reduce sexual violence against women. Pornography was seen to shape the cultural devaluation of women, define women's sexuality, and eroticize violent relations of domination. Sex-positive feminists reacted to this legal campaigning by decrying sexual repression, calling for greater sexual freedom, and defining sexuality as a site of political resistance.

Sexual practices and the meaning of consent were focal points of disagreement. For radical feminists, pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, and sexual role-play like butch–femme relationships amounted to the repetitive entrenchment of male dominance. For example, MacKinnon argued that heterosexuality “institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission” (1989: p. 113). In contrast, sex-positive feminists supported consensual sexual practices and they criticized radical feminists for repressing sexual desire and stigmatizing sexual minorities. Carlin Meyer argued for a brand of sex-positive feminism that could theorize sexuality as a space for autonomous and liberating choices (Meyer, 1994), while Robin West called for theories of sex as valuable to women's subjective well-being (West, 1987).

Questions about consent also underpinned these debates. For radical feminists, there could be no authentic consent or agency in a world of choices defined by male dominance and violence. In contrast, sex-positive feminists viewed women as capable of consenting and exerting agency and they criticized radical feminists for defining women's identities as effects of male domination (Abrams, 1995). However, this work was slow to percolate into legal theory. Katherine Franke commented that feminist legal theorists, “have done a more than adequate job of theorizing the right to say no, but we have left to others the task of understanding what it might mean to say yes” (Franke, 2001: p. 181).

The heated debates about sex and sexuality in the 1980s generated both divisions and new political formations. Gayle Rubin argued that feminism had little to say about sexuality, notwithstanding its expertise on gender-based subordination (Rubin, 1992). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick said that gender and sexuality were distinct analytic axes – and distinct intellectual arenas (Sedgwick, 1990). Their argument for a new intellectual terrain, beyond the sex/gender distinction, gave birth to the field of queer studies.

Through engagement with queer theory, feminist legal theory has moved toward an increasingly antiessentialist understanding of sex and gender and a more diverse account of sexuality. Theorists, including Judith Butler, opined that people were born with a biological sex, but acquired a self-conception of gender through processes of socialization (Butler, 1990). This insight severed the ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’ from the socially contingent, so that the socially produced could be legally and politically challenged. Queer theorists argued that sexuality was also socially produced and culturally constructed. Queer legal theorists challenged the law's reliance on a male/female binary. They argued that a multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities exist along a spectrum. In recent years, some trans legal advocates have celebrated the legal permission to move across the male/female divide, while others argue for a world that accepts the ‘in-between’ reality of the trans-gendered, intersexed, bigendered, and androgynous (Cowan, 2013).

While sexual minorities and dissidents achieved some equality gains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the story of progress nevertheless rests on an economy of normal and deviant, included and excluded. Campaigners applauded the legal recognition of same-sex marriage as a victory for formal legal equality, but others saw the same-sex marriage project as yet another instance of the yearning for recognition by a state, and with it, the attribution to the state of power to police everyone's sexualities (Spade, 2011).

2 Theoretical Contours

Insomuch as the women's movement initially understood itself to be a ‘spiritual’ movement (Christ and Plaskow 1979, Spretnak 1994), feminist theology could be said to have been inherent to feminism. Women's exclusion from societal power structures was, feminists surmised, fundamentally linked to women's exclusion from socio-religious symbol systems. As Daly observed wryly, where ‘God is male, the male is God’ (1985b)—a sentiment seconded by Spretnak, who observed that ‘(t)he long-standing justification in Western culture for regarding the male as the norm…has been the implicit acknowledgement that men are the same sex as God’ (1994). This insight into the culturally constitutive nature of the religious imagination, a critique supported by Feuerbach's definition of religion as projection (The Essence of Christianity 1957), led feminist theologians to attempt to interrupt the cultural absolute of male socio-political power by displacing male religious images and by interrupting their sacred storylines. (Consequent to this insight and owing to feminists' own interest in ‘changing the divine subject’ so as to authorize women's power thereby, women's theological enterprise has sometimes been named ‘feminist thealogy’—‘thea-’ being the feminine of the Greek masculine ‘theo-,’ meaning ‘God.’ See Goldenberg (1979).) Given the incarnational relation between religious symbol and cultural power relations, among feminist theologians' first tasks was the critique of the masculine images by which religions have referred to the sacred as God, Father, Lord, King, Son, etc., and to humanity as ‘sons’ or ‘men of God.’ Not only do such images exclude women as religious and political subjects, these images—feminist theologians were convinced—led to the abuse and violation of women and children. ‘Women's experience,’ feminist theology's epistemological locus, referred to women's shared experiences of living under the purview of this exclusive male engendering of power. Specifically, such images religiously legitimated the practice of dominative power in relation to all that the system conversely objectified. Hence, women experienced this ‘dominion of God’ as ‘domination’—specifically as battering, rape, poverty, the dislocation and domestication of our lives, etc.

Citing instead texts such as Genesis 1:27 (‘So God created humankind in (God's) image,…male and female…’), Galatians 3:28 (In Christ, ‘there is no longer male and female…’), and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit upon ‘all flesh’ (Joel 2, Acts 2), feminists asserted women's unmediated relationship to the sacred, claiming thereby women's theological authority, the validity of women's spiritual experience, and the theological subject matter of women's daily lives. Authorized by Spirit, feminist theologians began a critique of male clerical and ecclesiastical leadership, of the male authorship and interpretation of the canon, of the functional closure of revelation vis-a-vis the sacred canon. Feminist theology not only supported, but was identified actively with the Women–Church movement and the movement for women's ordination—accomplished in Reformed Judaism as well as within many Protestant (e.g., Presbyterian, Lutheran, American Baptist, United Methodist) and Anglican–Episcopal Christian circles. Yet the problem for women in the religions of ‘the sacred book’ remained: sacred texts have been written by and for men and have circulated for centuries in closed circuits of male interpreters. Where females did appear in these texts, feminists soon surmised that men had ‘used (these) women to think with’ (Karen King). Further, the religious sacraments of these communities have often worked to delegitimate even that which was prescribed as ‘women's work,’ e.g., in the church birthing becomes baptism, feeding becomes eucharist. Faced with the question of whether sacred texts and existing religious institutions had the symbolic resources to promote women's well-being, some women, beginning in the early 1970s and onward, have left and invested themselves in the recovery of goddess and wiccan spiritualities, traditions which have supported human embodiment (Eller 1993). Among those women who (also) stayed related to the existing monotheistic religions, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ was employed to generate a critical distance from canonical texts. By invoking ‘suspicion,’ Biblical scholar Schüssler-Fiorenza discouraged women from expecting to discover truth ‘in’ a text conceived by men and encouraged feminists instead to deduce the ‘truth’ of scripture by a text's ability to raze systems of domination and exploitation (1984). Another feminist strategy for creating an authority base has been the recovery of the hidden histories of women, both in canonical texts, e.g., Wire's rhetorical positioning of Paul's otherwise anonymous discursants as The Corinthian Women Prophets (1990), and in Christian communities throughout the centuries, e.g., Ruether and McLaughlin's Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1979). Nevertheless, Trible's Texts of Terror (1989) reminded feminists that, given the patterns of ‘inferiority, subordination and abuse of the female in ancient Israel and the early church’ (3), e.g., Hagar, Tamar, and the daughter of Jephthah, women's tragic stories do not always yield to a positivist reconstructive resolution. Along with the recuperative labor of feminist Biblical and historical theologians, women have attempted to re-imagine the sacred, a project that has outraged some denominational leaders and led to heresy charges against some women. First, recovering feminine images of the divine from scripture, e.g., Sophia, Wisdom, Spirit, feminists have then applied themselves to rethinking ritual and theology based upon these images. Among academic theologians, McFague's (1987) Models of God developed the metaphors of God as Mother, Lover, and Friend so as to promote a change of consciousness—from a consciousness founded upon the theological notion of transcendence as separation from and ascendance over women and nature, towards a consciousness of belonging to the ‘evolutionary ecosystem of our cosmos’ (9). In She Who Is Johnson (1992), proposed a Christian trinitarian model of Spirit–Sophia, Jesus–Sophia and Mother–Sophia—a constructive project aimed at thinking women into the economy of divine love, while also thinking divine sociality in terms of the lives of women.

As feminist theology developed, feminists, observing that traditional theology reflected only men's spiritual experience, undertook a reconstruction of the central doctrines of their respective communities. Whereas Christian theology had, following Augustine, psychically repressed the corporeal body, senses, emotions, and relations, feminists made the body—women's minds, wills, desires, and relationships—the central site of revelatory encounter and salvific experience. Whereas God had been conceived as absolutely transcendent, feminists have insisted on divine immanence—hence, the transition from invoking the divine as ‘God’ to ‘Spirit.’ Similarly, if according to the androcentric imagination creation was said to have transpired by divine fiat or to have come about through artisanal handicraft, i.e., God as ‘Creator’ or ‘Maker,’ feminists have spoken of the divine ‘birthing’ the world, of the world as ‘God's Body’ (McFague 1993, Jantzen 1984) and of humans as cocreators of cosmic process.

Finally, whereas for Christians Jesus' crucifixion has been seen historically as the occasion for sacrificial grace entering in to right a recalcitrant and wayward world, feminists have questioned positioning a human injustice as an ontological necessity and have gravitated toward two other views. First, feminists, rather than memorializing a unique individual from the historical past, reconstrued christology as the prophetic practice of justice and egalitarian relations within the on-going Jesus-community. Second, some feminists have shifted the christological focus away from crucifixion and towards incarnation. The use of the incarnational metaphor, pervasive in contemporary feminist philosophical theory, resonates with the histories of Christian women who have asserted their subjective agency in and through this analog, e.g., Prous Boneta and Guglielma of Milan (Ruether and McLaughlin 1979).

Organizations

Individuals form groups to concentrate their political power. The process of group formation is not without its difficulties. A movement's constituent organizations can vary greatly in terms of their structure, resources, goals, strategies, and tactics.

Within social movements, “organizations devote considerable time to constructing particular versions of reality, developing and espousing alternative visions of that reality, attempting to affect various audiences' interpretations, and managing the impressions people form about their movement” (Benford, 1993:678). Since these are interpretive matters, they are subject to negotiation and contention. An important factor in the formation of social movement organizations involves the development and maintenance of a distinct collective identity.

Melucci (1995) defines collective identity as a concept that invites researchers to examine “the formation of a ‘we,’” and highlights the ways that individuals and organizations make sense of their actions by focusing on “the processes though which a collective becomes a collective” (43). In seeking to describe the process by which individuals become members of a social movement organization, studies of collective identity sensitize traditional conceptualizations of solidarity and commitment, showing how this social accomplishment affects individual participants, movement organizations, and movements at large. Developing and maintaining a distinct sense of group membership and purpose is particularly important for social movement organizations because this feeling of belonging serves as a resource for the recruitment of potential adherents, provides a bulwark against burnout, enhances individuals' self-esteem, and propels their common sentiment toward social efficacy.

It is well established that framing activities (Snow et al., 1986) that enhance collective identity (Taylor and Whittier, 1992; Melucci, 1995) are a crucial part of mobilization. While engaged in framing activities, however, social movement organizations frequently disagree both internally and among each other over their representational repertoire. Contentious interactions happen behind the scenes, as well as in movement-produced blogs and other public forums, when all of the movement actors involved cannot be brought into the same frame. Goffman called this type of interaction a frame dispute (Goffman, 1974). When nuclear disarmament movement activists argue over whether or not the peace movement ought to pursue total disarmament, push for unilateral disarmament, or insist on a bilateral freeze on weapons production, this constitutes a frame dispute. It should come as no surprise that participants in social movement organizations frequently disagree as to which kinds of frames should be deployed. These internal disagreements can occur within a social movement organization (intraorganizational frame disputes) or between two or more organizations within the same movement (interorganizational frame disputes) (Benford, 1993). Studies utilizing the concept of frame disputes provide a backstage view of the intramovement development and maintenance of collective identity through discourse.

Kubal (1998) distinguishes between two different “regions” of framing activity, utilizing a modified version of Goffman (1959) arguments in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Kubal analyzed the frames that antitoxic activists employed in both the “front” region and the “back” region, finding considerable variation in the activists' claims depending on whether they “were presented for universal public consumption” in the front region or were limited to “organizational meetings, personal conversations, personal interviews, and within-movement literature” in the back region (543). In the back region, activists often characterized the environment as a victim, disparaged their opponents, and used more radical rhetoric. In the front region, however, humans were more often portrayed as victims, adversarial claims were aimed at a proposed incinerator, and activists used rhetoric that emphasized individual agency.

Kubal (1998) concludes that these regional differences in framing are necessary in order to expand the boundaries of movement identities, since “In the back region, activists must motivate ideologically similar adherents to fight political battles with real people. Conversely, in the front region activists must reach out to and recruit an ideologically dissimilar bystander-public” (547). This regional division of interpretive labor, according to Kubal (1998), “may allow social movement groups to transcend the common tensions between radical and moderate political activity” (550). Benford (1993) also noted that frame disputes sometimes generate a division of interpretive labor across a movement, finding that this division of labor allows the movement to reach a more diverse audience of potential adherents and sympathizers. Organizations become interdependent on each other because of the framing expertise that each group possesses; each fill a niche of the overall movement's framing activity. However, if one of these organizations ceases to exist, there is a chance that the discursive labor they undertook on behalf of the movement will suffer.

Popular accounts of the women's movement described the death and rebirth of this kind of activism following the institution of suffrage, but Taylor (1989) research showed how the movement had not died, but rather continued on through the use of “abeyance structures”:

In an abeyance phase, a social movement organization uses internally oriented activities to build a structure through which it can maintain its identity, ideals, and political vision. The collective identity that it constructs and maintains within a shared political community can become an important symbolic resource for subsequent mobilizations.

Taylor (1989:772).

This research contributed to the findings of resource mobilization theory in the sense that they showed how social movement organizations can provide structure and, importantly, continuity during times of decreased movement activity. Taylor's research would later be used to refute claims of spontaneity in social movement activity, a phenomenon originally emphasized by scholars working in the earlier collective behaviorist tradition (Killian, 1984; Fominaya, 2015).

Social movements are often perceived to be monolithic phenomena. Thus, an ongoing concern in the study of social movements regards a phenomenon that Turner and Killian (1972) referred to as the “illusion of unanimity.” This phenomenon refers to situations where agglomerations of individual behavior are perceived as coherent group behavior. Though this phenomenon was originally described in the context of crowds, Turner and Killian also point to its utility for our understanding of social movements. When media report about “the” peace movement or “the” environmental movement or “the” labor movement, they usually mean one or more organizations that are regarded to be representative of the movement at large. A movement's constituent organizations may take on many different structural forms, and organizations also frequently perform different roles for the movement at large. While some organizations may be viewed as central players, other organizations may be regarded as fringe contributors to the cause. Thus, multiple peace movements have been organized around various issues, with different goals and strategies for achieving those goals. Complexity may necessitate the application of multiple wings of expertise and mobilization from within a movement, thus, especially vexing social problems may benefit from the formation of social movement coalitions (Meyer and Corrigall-Brown, 2005). One branch of research related to social movement coalitions addresses “spillover” effects, which examine movement–movement interactions as well as interactions between movements and other entities (Meyer and Whittier, 1994). These effects can occur during periods of intense mobilization or during periods of relatively infrequent mass protest and hostility toward activists.

Such times provide special impetus for movement-movement linkages as beleaguered activists and organizations pool their strength against powerful opponents. But social movement spillover also flourishes during periods of widespread upheaval, such as the late 1960s, when highly mobilized challenges feed off each other and the boundaries between social movements blur.

Meyer and Whittier (1994:293).

The usual targets of social movements are changes in social norms or social policy, but the study of spillover effects emphasizes the indirect effects of activism.

Research on participation in social movements often differentiates between factors that pertain either to individuals and organizations. These factors are, of course, not entirely mutually exclusive. The concept of collective identity complicates this neat distinction and provides a rich analytical touchstone through which many ongoing concerns relating to identity, cognition, and emotion that were detailed in this section might be addressed. Just as there are certain factors that affect individual participation in movements, so also are there factors that tend to influence the participation of organizations, particularly in terms of structure, resources, goals, strategies, and tactics. Analytical attention to social movement participation does not absolve researchers of the responsibility to consider the influence of emergence on participation, and the influence of both emergence and participation on subsequent outcomes. Studies that embrace complexity provide valuable insights about the influence of social movements on society and lead the field toward a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of social movements generally.

1 Affecting International Development Policy

The UN was established in 1945 with its 50 members drawn largely from industrialized countries. By the mid-1960s, a majority of the UN members represented developing countries of Asia and Africa. Their concern with economic development propelled this new dimension into global politics. The first UN Development Decade 1960–70 emphasized infrastructure and industrial projects and was modeled on the successes of the Marshall Plan for redevelopment of a devastated Europe. Former colonial countries, which had often resisted granting independence, sought to maintain their trading advantage with former colonies by supplying funds and personnel to assist in modernization of these countries. Other industrialized countries as well as the former USSR and the Eastern Bloc offered bilateral assistance to selected countries. Respective UN agencies established programs in health, agriculture, employment, and education; the World Bank provided loans at low interest rates. Since some were much better positioned than others to benefit from these programs, the immediate result of these vast infusions of funds was increased inequality of income within the countries.

Concerned with this trend, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) reacted to the UN Report on the World Situation by passing a resolution in 1963 tying social and economic issues together. Social issues clearly applied to women, since women delegates at the UN were often leaders of women's organizations in their own newly independent countries that were demanding a voice in planning at home, they supported a 1963 UN General Assembly resolution calling for women to be appointed to those bodies preparing national development plans (Jayawardene 1986, Snyder and Tadesse 1995) (see Colonization and Colonialism, History of; National Liberation Movements).

The debates about development priorities were reflected in the Second Development Decade 1970–80, with its emphasis on basic human needs. The refocus of development programming from macrodevelopment toward outreach to people was critical as it allowed advocates for women in development to document the distinct ways that economic development affected women as opposed to men. Poor women everywhere perform economic activities, from farming to microenterprise to household production; because income data excluded subsistence and exchange activities, women's roles were invisible to planners who subsequently ignored or undercut women's livelihoods. Impetus for including women in development planning emerged, as do so many ideas whose time has come, from three distinct directions: from women in the UN, from women in Washington, DC, and from national women's organizations in developing countries.

Feminist Research: Objectives and Methods

Following the development of the women's movement across the world during the 1960s and 1970s, the scholarly framing of specifically identifiable feminist research methodology and research objectives emerged during the early 1980s to the 1990s (Eichler, 1987; De Vault, 1990; Wolf, 1996; Reinharz, 1992). Feminist research has since adhered to specific ways of researching that have supported the objectives of the women's movement and scholarly feminism in its ever-transforming manifestations. Feminist research has been characteristically concerned with the oppression and exclusion of women; identity and difference; the value of subjectivity and personal experience; setting itself apart from reductionist scientific research; women's ways of knowing; and listening to and hearing women's voices.

Reinharz (1992) viewed feminist research as methods used in research by self-identified feminists; as research published in feminist journals; and as research methods externally recognized as feminist research. This may exclude feminist researchers who approach their research with a feminist agenda, but do not necessarily identify as feminist (Dankoski, 2000: p. 7). Reflecting a postmodern framework, Lather (1988) suggested that feminist research puts the social construction of gender at the center of research inquiry. A further differentiating feature of feminist research is that it ‘moves the researcher into the role of change agent,’ using research findings ‘to influence or change the lives of those studied and of other members of the group’ (Cummerton, 1986: p. 95). Harding argues that the focus of feminist research is not on methods, but on the way feminists do research. She observed that they “listen carefully to how women informants think about their lives and men's lives, and critically to how traditional social scientists conceptualize women's and men's lives' and tend to focus on activities previously thought of as insignificant” (1987: p. 2).

Due to the diverse epistemological differences in feminist research, it is impossible to propose a singular definition. However, feminist researchers are primarily concerned with understanding why inequality between men and women exists and why there is the overall domination of men over women. The point on which the different feminist approaches disagree, however, is about where to find the answers to these questions and how to proceed in transforming women's lives through liberation from oppressions and inequalities (Letherby, 2003).

The pluralisms of feminisms are politically important to feminist researchers as they challenge a singular, universal feminism or feminist approach as an essential aspect of contemporary feminist thought. The various strands of feminism include liberal, radical, lesbian, liberationist, Marxist, socialist, ecofeminist, standpoint, third world, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and postmodern (Hannam, 2007; Reinharz, 1992: p. 6). These theories or political identities are often associated with a struggle between the structuralist and poststructuralist or modernist and postmodernist-based feminisms, reflecting the persistently, debated nature of feminist thought and practice. Broadly, the key difference between modernist feminist theory and postmodernist feminist theory is around how to explore the ways women exist or are placed in relation to men.

For structuralist feminists, the solutions are in targeting the structures that oppress women and maintain their inequality, from the interpersonal to the broad structure of the patriarchal state and the law. Therefore, structuralist feminists seek to establish universal truths about women's oppression. For poststructuralist feminists, the struggle is over meaning and the power of meaning that is primarily conveyed through language or discourse and is based on the fluid concept that there is no single truth or generalizable experience of being a woman. Therefore, the strategic approach to change is in the theorization and critique of discourse, knowledge, truth, reality, rationality, and the idea of the socially constructed subject (Sands and Nuccio, 1992). This approach has led to the primacy of individual narratives in social work practice and research, which in turn, has raised concerns for structuralist feminists because it ignores collective communities that are so integral to many women's lives (Dominelli, 2002: p. 35).

Despite these debates, and the generalized trend to frame feminism within the more general terms of gender, gender equality, and gendered society, rather than a focus on women per se, key feminist concerns persist. Such concerns are at the core of feminist social work research and are based on ways of understanding broader social injustices and inequalities between men and women by taking a women-centered or gender-aware approach. This includes a strong adherence to taking into account key intersections of difference such as class, disability, ethnicity, race, sexual preference, or religion.

4 The Two-wave Model of Feminist Movements

Most scholarship on the development of women's movements conceptualizes two waves of activism, the first in the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century and the second since the 1960s. Evans (1977) explores a variety of feminist movements in Europe, the United States, and Australasia during the first wave, charting the shifting aims of the movements from economic and educational to moral and then political. Evans concludes that the feminist movements of the first wave declined along with the liberalism with which they were so closely associated by the early twentieth century. But there is more continuity in the existence of women's movements than this model suggests. In fact, movements grew outside the Euroamerican arena precisely when scholars think of the decline of feminism in the aftermath of World War I. It may still be useful to think of two peaks or waves of feminist activism, as long as we remember that not all movements followed the same trajectory and that feminist movements did not die out between the two waves (Rupp and Taylor 1987). Nevertheless, it is clear that feminist movements burst forth with renewed vigor in the 1960s and 1970s in association with civil rights, student and left-wing movements, and movements of national liberation. Often divided on questions of ideology, strategy, goals, and membership, these late twentieth-century movements mobilized around a broad range of issues, from reproductive rights to sexual and economic exploitation to violence against women. Feminist movements both conceptualized women as sharing basic experiences of oppression, asserting that ‘sisterhood is global,’ and increasingly came to emphasize differences among women on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, nation, and so on. This was true both within national feminist movements and even more so on the international stage.

In the United States, scholars identify two wings of the second-wave women's movement: the women's rights branch, consisting of older professional women organized in bureaucratic national groups working for change within the existing system, and the women's liberation branch, made up of younger women associated with the civil rights and New Left movements who organized small collective groups on the local level and worked for a radical transformation of society (Freeman 1975; Ferree and Hess 1994). The women's rights branch, dominated by the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, originally worked for legal and public policy reform, while the women's liberation groups pioneered consciousnesss-raising as a strategy for change and engaged in dramatic ‘zap’ actions to protest such things as the institution of marriage and beauty pageants and the stock market. Yet over time the distinctions between the two wings dissipated.

The political contexts of different countries in the late twentieth century have been critical in shaping feminist movements and in facilitating or constraining success in moving toward feminist goals. In Western Europe and the United States, feminist movements have had the most success in policymaking where the Left is either very strong, as in Sweden, or very weak, as in the United States (Katzenstein and Mueller 1987). Likewise, in India, the women's movement in Calcutta, which is dominated by the communist party and has a strong left culture, functions more as a political party, while the movement in Bombay, where there is more political competition, takes on more autonomous forms of organizing, including the formation of groups receptive to Western ideas (Ray 1999).

9.18.6 Prevention

Efforts to prevent CSA go back to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly thereafter, concerns about protecting adult women from sexual abuse were extended to child populations. Thus, the 1980s saw a proliferation of programs geared toward protecting children from molestation.

Research suggests that primary prevention programs based on the acquisition of relevant safety skills hold the most promise (Wurtele & Miller-Perrin, 1992). One such program, Safety with strangers (Gipson et al., 1984), consists of a series of slides, with accompanying audio tape, that depicts 20 situations in which a stranger approaches a child. Scenes and verbal prompts were derived from interviews with incarcerated child molesters in an effort to present realistic stimuli to the target audience, primarily grade school children in a classroom setting. The perpetrators depicted reflect the demographic characteristics of convicted child molesters. As such, they feature primarily Caucasian men (although some women and minorities are included), ranging in age and style of dress, thus addressing Doyle's (1995) concern that “Children often think that a ‘stranger’ is an ugly man” and are not taught to be “on guard against woman or good looking, charming men” (p. 166).

Scenes include playing alone in the yard, becoming separated from parents in a store, and visiting the local video parlor. Verbal inducements range from bribes (e.g., “Come over to my house and I'll let you play with my kittens.”), to trickery (e.g., “Your mother is in the hospital—hurry, come with me!”) and physical threats if the child does not comply. Children then actively role play their response to these situations, with feedback and prompting from the program administrator. Correct responses include ignoring or saying no to the stranger, exiting the situation, and reporting the incident to a trusted adult.

Recognizing that CSA perpetrated by strangers constitutes the minority of cases relative to those perpetrated by family members, acquaintances, and caretakers, other programs address this possibility by teaching children to identify inappropriate advances regardless of their relationship to the perpetrator (e.g. Wurtele, Saslawsky, Miller, Marrs, & Brichter, 1986). In addition, these programs explicitly acknowledge the sexual nature of the situation. Rather than requiring children to discriminate good and bad touching based on emotional or physical pleasure, Wurtele (1987) suggested that children be taught not to let “any one bigger or older” (p. 12) than themselves look at or touch their private parts and vice versa. Wurtele's recommendation seems well grounded in that a study found that CSA survivors described some pleasurable aspects of the contact, at least in the early stages (Briggs & Hawkins, 1995). Once sexually-threatening situations have been identified, similar role-play methodology is used to teach children to resist these attempted violations.

Consumers must be aware that, unlike the CSA prevention programs reviewed above, many are available that have not been empirically tested. Furthermore, several criticisms have been made of those subjected to empirical scrutiny. For example, dependent measures have largely consisted of knowledge tests, rather than direct observation of behavioral skills, particularly in real-life situations. In addition, rates of CSA among treated versus nontreated children have yet to be ascertained. A second criticism is that programs are often not developmentally sensitive which may render them ineffective. In fact, some researchers contend that expecting preschool children to protect themselves from potential abuse is unreasonable (Peterson, 1993). However, Wurtele (1990) demonstrated improvements in knowledge and skills which lasted up to a month when she adapted her program to four-year-old preschoolers. Wurtele also addressed another criticism that participation in such programs will produce deleterious side effects. On the contrary, she encountered no programrelated behavior problems according to either teachers or parents, and parents did not report increased fear in their children subsequent to participation in the program.

While skills-based primary prevention programs hold promise, they are limited in their impact considering the broader context in which abuse occurs. Researchers warn about imparting a false sense of security to child participants and their parents, recognizing that successful prevention efforts must reach beyond intervention with the children themselves (Wurtele & Miller-Perrin, 1992). Winett, King, and Altman (1989) have suggested that problems in prevention be approached simultaneously on multiple levels of analysis. While individual interventions may have merit, their effects might be enhanced by interventions targeting small groups such as the family, community systems, and sociocultural institutions. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin (1992) invoked a similar ecological model in their consideration of CSA, calling for a comprehensive prevention response which emphasizes person–environment interactions. Furthermore, they stressed the importance of secondary prevention which entails recognition of prodromal signs and symptoms that abuse has or is occurring, along with early intervention to terminate the trauma. Secondary prevention efforts seem crucial, considering that survivors who endured prolonged abuse suffer more serious consequences than those subjected to isolated instances of abuse or abuse of brief duration.

Focusing on the family system, Wurtele and Miller-Perrin (1992) suggested that primary prevention programs be extended from the classroom to the home, with parents implementing strategies such as those presented in the school. Parents are also advised to discuss sexuality and the potential for abuse in a direct and open manner with their children, disarming the secrecy which many perpetrators use to their advantage. These authors stressed the importance of CSA prevention programs occurring in the context of sound and accurate sexual education. Taking a different tack to primary prevention, Peterson (1993) reviewed studies in which regular home visits by various health care personnel resulted in fewer instances of parental physical abuse among at-risk families. Perhaps a similar strategy, designed to increase parental accountability, might reduce the chances of sexual abuse occurring as well.

With regard to secondary prevention, parents might become more vigilant for warning signs of sexual abuse. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin (1992) list behavioral, emotional, and physical indicators of sexual abuse by developmental level. Hernandez (1995) provided evidence that both male and female adolescents experiencing CSA manifest eating-disordered behavior. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin provide information concerning age-appropriate sexual knowledge as another means of detecting potential abuse. For example, preschool children who use correct terminology for genitalia or girls who are knowledgeable about penile erections prior to age 12 may have acquired this information through abuse experiences. Another way in which parents can minimize the impact of abuse, once it is detected, involves their subsequent reaction to the child. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin provide guidelines regarding appropriate and inappropriate verbal, emotional, and behavioral responses. Indeed, many children who bring their abuse to the attention of an adult are met with negative reactions (e.g., Briggs & Hawkins, 1995). Doyle (1995) warns that “The phrase ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ is manna to perpetrators” (p. 167), and stresses the importance of responding to children's reports of abuse in a nonpunitive manner.

On a community level, primary prevention programs might continue to be sponsored through school settings as well as other community bodies such as churches and day care settings. In addition, well-publicized, organized community involvement might deter would-be perpetrators from acting on their intentions. Of course, community members who have contact with and authority over children must be carefully screened regarding their potential to perpetrate abuse. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin (1992) strongly suggest background checks for staff and volunteers in youth organizations as well as foster care and juvenile detention settings.

Secondary prevention efforts in the community might parallel those described for parents. That is, various professionals throughout the community might be taught to better recognize the early signs of abuse and to communicate their concerns in ways that facilitate entry into appropriate treatment. Wurtele and Miller-Perrin (1992) contend that such resources are underutilized, citing several barriers such as fears associated with reporting CSA and lack of support from professional supervisors and agencies.

Introduction

In the 1970s, with the growth of the women's movement in the Western world, advocacy about violence against women emphasized reforming the criminal justice model so that it would be responsive to cases of intimate partner and familial violence. In the United States, that campaign culminated in the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994, which for the first time provided federal funding for emergency women's shelters, hotlines, and other social services. The VAWA, as reauthorized in 2013, includes protections for immigrant women, LGBT populations, and Native American survivors of gender-based abuse.

In 1995, the UN Fourth World Conference on Women issued a precedent-setting articulation of women's human rights. Known as the Beijing Platform, this document is considered by many to be the clearest and most compelling argument to date, for seeing women's rights as ‘human’ rights. With the globalization of the women's movement have come data-collection initiatives that aim for international comparability (WHO, 2006; Johnson et al., 2008; DHS Macro, 2014), as well as ongoing refinement of the definition of global violence to women, which now includes ‘cultural’ forms of violence, such as female genital mutilation (FGM). The discourse on ‘women's agency’ in relation to global violence is increasingly understood as inseparable from community.

Introduction

Feminist psychotherapy has its roots in the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s. Over the past 50 years, it has evolved substantially and has increasingly transformed psychological practice. For example, the American Psychological Association's (APA, 2007) Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Girls and Women reflects feminist values and reveals ways in which egalitarian and social change values have been incorporated within basic assumptions about optimal psychological practice. Rather than being a specific set of theories or techniques for working with clients, feminist therapy can be described as a superordinate structure or framework that orients a practitioner's worldview and assumptions about what matters in competent and empowering practice with individuals, especially those persons whose experiences have often been marginalized within the culture. Brown (1994) noted that “what makes practice feminist is not who the clients are or the specific techniques used, but how the therapist thinks about what she does” (p. 2).

A feminist psychotherapist draws from a range of nonsexist psychotherapy approaches that can be integrated with feminist values. Thus, feminist therapists are typically technically eclectic, drawing from a diverse range of theoretical orientations such as cognitive behavioral, humanistic, psychodynamic, and family systems approaches. For example, a feminist psychotherapist may describe her or his approach as a feminist multicultural narrative approach, a feminist existential approach, or a multicultural feminist cognitive therapist.

Feminist psychotherapists are informed about the social justice issues within their environments, and continue to refine the meaning of feminist psychotherapy and practice in a changing world. The work of feminist therapists is often integrated with diverse interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., political science, sociology, philosophy). Feminist therapists define their roles as therapists, advocates, and social change agents who support the holistic empowerment of persons with whom they work.