Should We Stay or Should We Go? Local and National Factionalism in the National Organization for Women

While the National Organization for Women (NOW) has endured over time, it has faced significant internal factionalism. In this article, I ask why some of these factions resulted in schisms, while other factions persisted in NOW over time. This is a critical question for understanding how organizational location and factional collective identities combine to produce different outcomes when internal conflict breaks out. My analysis of interview, archival, and secondary data indicates that organizational location influences factions’ independent collective identities, shaping what they want and their perceptions of opportunities to change their organization. Compared to national level factions, local factions also lack the ability to use NOW’s hierarchical structure to their advantage in their effort to stay. This sheds lights on the distinct patterns of factionalism and schism in formalized groups.     

Shifting Boundaries and Splintering Movements: Abortion Rights in the Feminist and New Right Movements

Social movement boundaries are fundamentally about deciding who “we” are by defining who we are not. However, newly salient issues in a movement community can shift these boundaries by changing the membership criteria for both insiders and outsiders. Through a comparative case study of two relatively conservative feminist organizations, Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) and Feminists for Life (FFL), I examine how shifting boundaries around abortion rights in the feminist movement led to movement splintering, as organizations struggled and sometimes failed to maintain their relationships in a movement that increasingly defined them as outsiders. This analysis reveals how abortion rights' growing importance to both the feminist movement and the New Right resulted in the realignment of FFL with the feminist countermovement. This process had important consequences for both the organization and the countermovement with which it was realigned. This article contributes to our understanding of how shifting boundaries affect individual organizations, the movements in which they participate, and the relationships between countermovements.     

Women’s Agency in Gender‐Traditional Religions: A Review of Four Approaches

The concept of agency is useful for feminist research on women in gender‐traditional religions. By focusing on religious women’s agency, scholars understand these women as actors, rather than simply acted upon by male‐dominated social institutions. This article reviews the advantages and limitations of feminist scholarship on the agency of women who participate in gender‐traditional religions by bringing into dialog four approaches to understanding agency. The resistance agency approach focuses on women who attempt to challenge or change some aspect of their religion. The empowerment agency approach focuses on how women reinterpret religious doctrine or practices in ways that make them feel empowered in their everyday life. The instrumental approach focuses on the non‐religious positive outcomes of religious practice, and a compliant approach focuses on the multiple and diverse ways in which women conform to gender‐traditional religious teaching. This article concludes by discussing the future direction of scholarship.