First Wave Of Women's Rights Movement

In order to understand a social movement, it is first necessary to understand the different stages that a social movement goes through before decline. According to Jonathan Christiansen, a social movement can essentially be defined by four phases: emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. Using his definitions and examples, I will analyze the first wave of the women’s rights, or feminist, movement and its progression through the typical life cycle of a social movement. Furthermore, I will discuss limitations of Christiansen’s theory in correlation to the women’s rights movement. Christiansen defines the first phase of the social movement life cycle as emergence. In this stage, the social movement is more of an idea than an organized …show more content…
In the case of the women’s rights movement, this includes the list of grievances Stanton wrote to guide their conference and future plan of action. These grievances included the most popular reason behind their activism, the lack of a right to vote. Additionally, this stage consists of leadership emerging and demonstrations or meetings. In the women’s rights movement, this is evident with the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her regularly held conventions during the mid-19th century. The women also regularly held marches, campaigns, and protests, which drew more media attention and thus popularized the issues women were facing. Furthermore, as the discontent that women felt became more well known, more women joined the conventions and thus the …show more content…
In this stage, the social comes to an end for one of four reasons: repression, co-optation, success, or failure. In the case of the first wave of the women’s rights movement, the decline was caused by success in gaining the right to vote. After women received the right to vote with the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920, many distanced themselves from the group and went on with their lives. The majority believed the fight for women’s rights was over and that the women’s rights movement had ended. However, their decline can also be attributed to the fact that many of their other goals and complaints were not clearly defined enough to continue on at the same strength after achieving suffrage. To that end, the remaining goals the women did have were more clear during the second wave of the feminist