Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (review)

Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State brings together leading scholars in the field to examine shifts in the interactions between women's movements and states from the 1970s to the 1990s within North America and Western Europe. Drawing comparisons across countries, policy domains and time, the book analyzes how women's movements influenced and were shaped by state reconfiguration. As the editor's introductory chapter suggests, state reconfiguration involves four structural shifts in state authority: downloading to lower levels of governments, uploading of authority to international bodies, lateral loading (i.e., the delegation of authority to non-elected agencies), and offloading of services through cutbacks and privatization.

Contributors' analyses are guided by these themes and analytical framework, but vary theoretically. For example, David Meyer portrays feminist activists as strategic actors, explaining variation in their demands and strategies over time and across countries in terms of their political conditions. Other scholars, such as Alexandra Dobowlsky, Carol Mueller and John McCarthy, place greater emphasis on the role of identity politics in shaping feminists' political behavior. Overall, contributors' findings suggest that while state-movement interactions varied considerably across countries, they generally became more institutionalized with moderate wings of the women's movement and middle class women gaining concessions, while radical wings and poor women suffered political setbacks and became more marginalized over time.

Deiter Rucht argues that the women's movement became more institutionalized and moderate over time compared to other types of social movements because its central demands were more compatible with the framework of liberal democracy than those of other movements and because both state actors and feminist activists learned the political advantages of compromise. Rucht's broad generalizations contrast with other, more nuanced analyses in the book that look at variations within and across states in the trajectory of state-movement interactions over time. For example, Mueller and McCarthy's chapter emphasizes how feminist organizations' adaptation to state reconfiguration in North America and Western Europe depended on their internal culture. Other authors point to the importance of broader power configurations for shaping the nature of feminists' demands on the state. For example, as Jane Jenson and Celia Valiente point out, the contemporary women's movement in Spain, where left parties were relatively strong and remained distinct from other parties, coupled its demands for parity in political representation with demands for social rights. By contrast, in France where there was greater overlap between right and left parties and the parity movement was cross-partisan, the women's movement did not combine these two types of demands.

Contributors emphasize how both state restructuring and the moderation of feminists' demands has negatively affected poor women. This point is made most strongly by Mary Fainsod Katzenstein. Katzenstein analyzes how U.S. middle class feminists' strategies, shaped to take advantage of equal opportunity laws, reinforced inequalities in women's citizenship rights across class. She argues that, "feminist activism among middle class women was able to survive the state's reorganization and political retrenchment in large part because middle class feminists have become insiders and were able to make their power felt through workplace and institution-based associational politics." (pp. 204-5) The same was not true for poor women whose rights deteriorated as the state engaged in offloading.

While contributors mainly emphasize the negative effects of state reconfiguration on women's rights, they do point to benefits that some women have accrued from it. For example, Lee Ann Banaszak argues that women's movements sometimes gained from downloading when political conditions were favorable at the local level. R. Amy Elman points out how women's shelter movements benefited from offloading by gaining contracts from the state even as this put greater pressure on activists to moderate their claims. Karen Beckwith suggests that women tend to make electoral gains when reconfiguration is more extensive because it increases political uncertainty. Such gains tend not to occur at the national level, however, where many of the...