Myra Marx Ferree

• University of Wisconsin–Madison

Framing the intersectionality of social movements as a matter of organizations and identities neglects the macro-level at which diverse forms of inequality work together. Liberal democracies, once revolutionarily new political formations, rested on an equally revolutionary understanding of male domination based not on descent but economic arrangeme...

Meanings and movements in the new millennium: Gendering democracy. Pp. 419-428 in Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans (eds), The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. How democracy works depends to a large degree on what democracy is framed as mean...

Universities are sites of both elite knowledge production and reproduction of intersecting gendered inequalities. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) ‘Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers’ (ADVANCE) programme uses universities’ role as self‐reflective knowledge producers to design ch...

Joan Acker extended her 1990 brilliant and path‐breaking article, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies', to address the intersectional effects of gender, race and class as ‘inequality regimes' in her 2006 article of that name. This research picks up her challenge to see embodied workers holding jobs in organizations structured simultaneously and interactivel...

Joan Acker extended her 1990 brilliant and path-breaking article, “Gender, Jobs, Bodies,” to address the intersectional effects of gender, race and class as “inequality regimes” in her 2006 article of that name. This research picks up her challenge to see embodied workers holding jobs in organizations structured simultaneously and interactively by...

Joan Acker extended her 1990 brilliant and path-breaking article, “Gender, Jobs, Bodies,” to address the intersectional effects of gender, race and class as “inequality regimes” in her 2006 article of that name. This research picks up her challenge to see embodied workers holding jobs in organizations structured simultaneously and interactively by...

This paper delineates areas of research for the emergent sociology of expertise. We review how expertise has been studied in the sociology of professions, sociology of work, and sociology of science and technology, and we show the contribution that intersectionality can make in understanding processes of gendering expertise.

Myra Marx-Ferree on Primates of Park Avenue.

We examine how global pressures for competitiveness and gender equality have merged into a discourse of ‘inclusive excellence’ in the twenty-first century and shaped three recent German higher education programmes. After placing these programmes in the larger discourse about gender inequalities, we focus on how they adapt current global concerns ab...

This paper explores the intersections of gender equality politics with liberal and neoliberal reform projects in universities. Ongoing struggles over governance of higher education provide the context to assess the challenges and opportunities gender equality advocates find in both academic capitalism and globalizing liberal modernity. Focusing on...

Based on in-depth interviews with policymakers and archival data, we examine the policy debates over court reform in family law and criminal law in Chile after the democratic transition. We introduce the concept of “gendered expertise” to capture the set of competences and claims organized around perceived gender differences and mobilized through g...

The Symbolic Representation of Gender: A Discursive Approach. By Emanuela Lombardo and Petra Meier . Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2014. 225 pp. $119.95 hardcover. - Volume 11 Issue 3 - Myra Marx Ferree

Paying attention to the history of the concept of intersectionality is essential if it is to be used to illuminate rather than disguise the dynamic politics of multiple inequalities in particular sites. The European borrowing of an originally US-centered term raises interesting questions of the kind of political work it is intended to accomplish. T...

Intersectionality has become a very popular term in academic, policy and activist circles. We understand intersectionality as a theoretical project concerned with elucidating the relationships between different principles of inequality and oppression. We identify three conceptual moves that distinguish intersectionality from other theoretical frame...

This concluding chapter summarizes the major contributions of this book and connects them to the unfinished agenda of creating a feminist view of human security. It highlights the distinction between just talking about gender and intersectional discourses that integrate gender with other forms of social injustice and address them more holistically....

The nature of human security is changing globally: Interstate conflict and even intrastate conflict may be diminishing worldwide, yet threats to individuals and communities persist. Large-scale violence by formal and informal armed forces intersects with interpersonal and domestic forms of violence in mutually reinforcing ways. Gender, Violence, an...

Although the changing context of mobilization is often interpreted as reflecting economic, technological and other material shifts in opportunities, the ways that meanings are discursively produced and anchored in political relationships among states, movements and publics are also critical features of this context. Using the example of bringing wo...

The challenge feminist scholarship posed to family studies has been largely met through the incorporation of research on gender dynamics within families and intersectional differences among them. Despite growing attention to gender as performance and power in more diverse families, the more difficult work of understanding the dynamics of change amo...

In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered....

This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of ‘‘policy feedback’’ investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstandin...

This article traces four contested identity claims that carry gender meanings into politics and express the gendered tensions awakened along specific dimensions of institutional change across the past twenty years. The cultural definition of the German nation in the face of immigration, the integration of the German state in a transnational project...

Die kritische Rahmenanalyse hat gezeigt, dass Konzepte selbst dann verschiedene Bedeutungen haben können, wenn sie mit denselben Worten beschrieben werden (Verloo 2007). Intersektionalität ist einer dieser umstrittenen Begriffe innerhalb des feministischen Denkens. In diesem Beitrag versuche ich zu klären, was Feministinnen eigentlich meinen, wenn...

As European nations grapple with when and how to extend inclusive citizenship to their Muslim minorities, the parameters of Muslim women's citizenship have jumped to the forefront of feminist concern. Much of the debate internationally has revolved around veiling, but we argue that this is only one element of how ethnic, religious, and other differ...

It is always welcome to have a smart, committed feminist engage seriously with big questions of social and political theory, all the more so when her work takes the variety of writings considered "radical feminist theory" seriously enough to make them a central part of her project without simultaneously limiting herself only to those works. Zerilli...

In this article we examine the debate preceding the most recent war in Iraq to show how gendered framing can compromise the quality of debate. Drawing on a sample of national news discourse in the year before the war began, we show that both anti-war and pro-war speakers draw on binary images of gender to construct their cases for or against war. S...

The European Union is an unprecedented effort to reshape political relations within as well as across national boundaries. By setting out the acquis communitaire, a common set of principles of governance, as the guideline for membership, the EU formulates a certain ideal for a modern, democratic member state. Strikingly, these principles include a...

Movements of Women and FeminismWomen's Movements and Social Movement TheoryConclusion

This paper presents a model of the mobilization of people into movements that is compatible with a resource mobilization perspective on social movement organizations as the unit of analysis, but substitutes a cognitive social psychology based on attribution theory and the sociology of knowledge for the incentive model typically used in this perspec...

Male and female subjects rated female victims of misfortune after observing videotapes of the victims detailing their injuries to doctors. Contrary to predictions of just wortd theory, subjects derogated culpable victims more than innocent victims. When observers identified with the victim, through political ties, derogation was reduced. It was con...

Considering Angela Merkel as a female candidate raises questions of the extent to which political leadership has become degendered in recent decades. Three issues of gender and politics are considered here: the changes in expectations for women in public life, the shift in defining what is a "woman's interest" and how women may represent such inter...

Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States . By , , , and . Cambridge , UK : , 2002 . xx + 350 pp. $60.00 cloth, $23.99 paper . Pro‐Life Activists in America: Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action . By . Cambridge , UK : , 2002 . x + 278 pp. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper . Bearing Right: How Conse...

If the concept of repression is to be useful when the state is not the primary target of social movement action, it needs to conceptualize how changes in values, perspectives, culture, norms, expectations and behavior in the public at large are contested through political interaction in civil society. Although non-state actors can sometimes use vio...

Faced with declining fertility rates, media in Britain are reacting with anxiety about cultural annihilation. To look at how nationalism inflects concerns over biological and cultural reproduction, the authors analyze coverage of falling fertility and rising immigration in Great Britain in major newspapers in 2000-2. They find pronatalist appeals t...

Web sites are a part of the organizational practices of women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and thus a new source of data about their identities and responses to the structure of political opportunities. Using network analysis of Internet links between the Web sites of 30 transnational women's organizations and content analysis of all post...

Cultural resonance and movement success are not the same, and not all movement speakers seek success in terms resonant with in- stitutionalized discourses—some instead choose to be radical. Quan- titative comparison of German and U.S. newspapers in the period 1970-94 shows how differences in discursive opportunity affect both the strategic use of f...

Tables and figures Foreword Friedhelm Neidhardt Preface Glossary Part I. Introduction: 1. Two related stories 2. Historical context 3. Methods Part II. Major Outcomes: 4. The discursive opportunity structure 5. Standing 6. Framing Part III. Representing Different Constituencies: 7. Representing women's claims 8. Representing religious claims 9. Rep...

The American debate over abortion is unusually volatile—but not because Americans pit the rights of women against those of fetuses. Americans actually invoke the issue of rights less often than do the far less confrontational Germans. What makes the American debate so rancorous?

What qualities should the public sphere have to nurture and sustain a vigorous democratic public life? 1 More speci¢cally, who should be participating and on what occasions? What should be the form and content of their contributions to public discourse? How should the actors communicate with each other? What are the desirable outcomes if the proces...

Seminars for developing women's political activism in Russia provided the basis for field observations and surveys of participants and leaders in the emergent Russian women's movement. The seminars provided an elite sample of activists, including those who were long-term participants in the zhensovety those newly mobilized in Western-influenced, ex...

Seminars for developing women's political activism in Russia provided the basis for field observations and surveys of participants and leaders in the emergent Russian women's movement. The seminars provided an elite sample of activists, including those who were long-term participants in the zhensovety, those newly mobilized in Western-influenced, e...

In der amerikanischen Forschung wird unter dem NSB-Ansatz eher eine bestimmte Richtung der Untersuchung kollektiven Handelns, als die Analyse einer bestimmten Gruppe empirisch identifizierbarer sozialer Bewegungen verstanden (z.B. Buechler 1995). Oft wird diese Perspektive den ‚amerikanischen ‘Ressourcen-Mobilisierungs- und Politischen-Prozeß-Ansät...

A wave of change swept through abortion politics in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe, restrictive regulations on abortion were liberalized to a greater or lesser degree (Dahlerup 1986; Glendon 1987). Response to these changes over the past 25 years varies considerably. Both In both Germany and th...

From the perspective of gender theory, the intersections among gender, class, and race make it difficult, if not impossible, to assign political issues and identities to just one social movement. Instead, the negotiation of movement ownership of issues and identities occurs through interaction among social movements, including interactions that cre...

We investigate the relationship between marital satisfaction and the family division of both paid and domestic work, and we assess whether value preferences for the gender division, the balance of power, and perceptions of equity and empathy mediate this relationship in a random sample of 382 two-earner married couples. Using a path analysis, we fi...

Methodology is often a point of contention in gender-based salary studies. Although this debate seems at first to be merely about technical issues, it also has an important conceptual dimension. We argue that there are two competing implicit conceptions of discrimination, one institutional and the other individual, that underlie many such debates....

In their contribution on the American reception of the European NSM debate, Myra Marx Ferree and Silke Roth discuss the reactions and criticisms of American social movemet scholars to this approach. They conclude that the use made by American social movement research of concepts such as collective identity and crisis diagnosis has been primarily in...

Economic stratification and social class occupy a central position in sociological discourse as the core organizing features of modern societies. Yet such economically centered models of stratification often disregard factors like physical violence and the intra-household distribution of resources that shape power and autonomy for all group. Using...

Sociological research looks particularly at social structures, that is, persistent patterns of human behavior arising from and impacting on collectivities. Thinking of gender as a social structure rather than an individual trait shifts the analytic focus to include multiple levels of interaction (macro, meso, micro) and the varied processes in whic...

The economic and political transformation of the German Democratic Republic rapidly became a process of unification with the Federal Republic of Germany, a process that has had a disproportionately negative effect on women. Particularly in the economic realm, women have suffered greater than average losses of jobs and of benefits, leaving many wome...

The women's movement in East Germany went through three phases—emergence, white-hot mobilization, and demobilization—in rapid succession. These stages are analyzed with regard to the resources, political opportunities, and personal meanings of feminism that activists had available. The postunification crisis of the movement is used to examine issue...

The process of German unification has been a series of political surprises. Before the chain of events of summer and fall 1989 that led to the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, few could have predicted the “change of direction” (die Wende) of the government that followed. Fewer still would have suspected how quickly the overthrow of Honecker an...

The process of German unification has been a series of political surprises. Before the chain of events of summer and fall 1989 that led to the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, few could have predicted the “change of direction” (die Wende) of the government that followed. Fewer still would have suspected how quickly the overthrow of Honecker an...

Recent data on the division of domestic labor is examined, suggesting that the inevitability of a “second shift” for wives in dual-earner couples may be overstated. The allocation of paid work more to husbands and housework more to wives creates a combined work week that is, on average, balanced but gender specialized. However, there is also import...

By examining the 5,413 illustrations provided in 33 introductory sociology textbooks published between 1982 and 1988, we explored the way textbook publishers in sociology pictorially construct images of gender and race. Individuals in a picture are coded for race and gender identity; each picture is coded for location in or outside the United State...

Feminist scholars continue to stress that families are neither separate from wider systems of male domination nor automatically solidary and altruistic in their own right. However, feminist explanations of how families operate and contribute to maintaining women's subordination have shifted in the past decade from those that emphasize sex roles and...

Public opinion surveys since 1965 find that black respondents are less in favor of legal abortion than white respondents. Using the 1982 NORC General Social Survey, we replicate and expand one of the few studies (Combs and Welch, 1982) that examined the structure and determinants of prochoice attitudes of blacks and whites. Our major findings are (...

Large-sample surveys often fail to find a difference in self-reported satisfaction between housewives and employed women. Several explanations that have been offered for this failure are explored here in greater detail. The suggestion that the ease of housewives' lives is experienced as a benefit compensating for fewer satisfactions in other areas...

Working-class women's reactions to the women's movement are frequently discussed, but there is little empirical research on the issue. The present study examines the dimensions of support in two planes: the particular issues that engender favorable or unfavorable reactions, and the characteristics of women who are generally supportive or hostile to...

Heute sind ungefähr 52% aller Frauen in den USA als erwerbstätig anzusehen. (1) Diese Zahl schließt 43% der Mütter mit Kleinkindern zu Hause und 57% der Ehefrauen mit schulpflichtigen Kindern ein. Die meisten außerhäuslich arbeitenden Frauen sind als Sekretärinnen, Kassiererinnen, Fabrikarbeiterinnen und in ähnlichen Tätigkeiten beschäftigt. Die bi...

The perception of working class women as especially traditional and domestic has tended to obscure the real currents of change within the working class. Their support for feminism has been underestimated because it has been assumed that they lack the personal discontent with traditional roles on which the movement is based. Working class women were...

Although Goffman's influential treatment of stigma has prompted researchers to generalize from studies of reactions to certain negatively evaluated characteristics (e.g., physical handicaps) to others (e.g., sex), it is argued that such generalizations ignore an important dimension of difference. Social stigma involves membership in a devalued grou...