Women's Movement Analysis

Women’s movements have contributed to shaping welfare states’ policy provisions and ideological rhetoric of family politics, women’s citizenship rights, and the relationship between work and family. In her introductory chapter, Katzenstein explores the national and institutional logic behind the politics of women’s movements in different countries. A feminist movement’s relationship with and the relationship among organizations (party alliances), gender consciousness, and state actions are crucial determinants of its success, in terms of policy outcomes. These multi-faceted intertwined relationships point out that feminist movements are successful in political systems with the most or least strong left parties. Hobson and Lindholm bridge the literatures of social movement perspectives and the power-resources framework in their analysis …show more content…
Women faced similar circumstances and animosity against working married women in both countries during the 1930s. However, feminist movements in Sweden and the US have had different outcomes since then, largely due to different positioning of their discourses. In Sweden, women linked married women’s rights to work to larger social issues of declining population and increase in births outside marriage. They were able to frame mother’s rights as citizen’s rights and therefore, married women’s rights to work came to be understood simply as a citizen’s rights to work. This posed no threat to existing labor movements and their agenda and the Swedish feminist movement was able to form alliances and achieve “women-friendly” or egalitarian welfare policy provisions. On the other hand in the US, women framed the same issue as strictly economic needs, resulting in their exclusion from labor union and mobilizations. As a result, American women were not only pitted against the state but also male workers, resulting in no satisfying policy provisions for female