Gender and Social Movements

by Bahati M. Kuumba

Do men and women experience participation in social movements differently? Are gender roles reproduced or undermined during a struggle for liberation? In this brief text examining gender roles in social movements, M. Bahati Kuumba shows how liberation struggles are viewed through women's eyes and how gender affects women's mobilization, strategies, and outcomes in social movement organizations. Using two well-known examples, the American civil rights movement and the South African national liberation movement, Kuumba documents the circumscribed roles of women, the unheralded role of movement leaders such as Ella Baker and Frances Baard, and how gender affected movement activities and results. Gender and Social Movements is the ideal text to introduce a sophisticated view of race and gender into social movement courses.

Genres: Feminism, Sociology

Paperback

First published September 5, 2001

Reviews

[Celeste · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book compares the civil rights movement in the United States with the Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. The author uses these two case studies to demonstrate the ways in which women's involvement in and leadership of social movements gets erased from public memory. While the general general concept of the book was interesting and I learned a few details of these movements that I didn't know before, overall the book was repetitive and not written in an engaging way. Kuumba seemed to be more interested in critiquing mainstream sociological theory by demonstrating how a gendered analysis complicates theory than she was in actually saying very much about the two social movements in her case study. Consequently she used the same examples over and over again to discuss different sociological theories. If you are interested in sociological theory than you may find this book more helpful than I did.