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Women, Gender, and Nonviolence in Political Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2002

Karen Beckwith
Affiliation:
The College of Wooster

Abstract

Although “the ties between women's rights movements and nonviolence have been deep and enduring,” women's movements are not the only movements to rely upon nonviolent collective action. The Indian nationalist movement with Gandhi innovated with passive resistance; the U.S. black civil rights movement employed nonviolent civil disobedience as its major collective action; and peace and environmental movements in the 1980s and 1990s have employed nonviolent tactics. The ties between women's movements and nonviolence, however, are notable insofar as nonviolent tactics predominate in the collective action repertoires of women's movements (Rucht forthcoming). Because nonviolent tactics prevail, they are more visibly connected to those movements.

Type
Features
Copyright
© 2002 by the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

This article is based on data from interviews and archival documents. Partial support for this research comes from an American Political Science Association Research Grant; the Henry Luce III Fund for Distinguished Scholarship, the College of Wooster; and a National Science Foundation Grant (#SES-9224413). The Program for Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival (PONSACS) at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, where I was a Visiting Scholar, was a helpful location for developing the arguments in this article, and I am grateful to Doug Bond, Amanda Flohr, and Ted McDonald for their support. Discussion and debate with Sidney Tarrow, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Mary Margaret Fonow, and Lee Ann Banaszak helped to shape my thinking about issues of women's movements and nonviolence; I am indebted to them for their contributions and their challenges.