Feminists on the march: A study exploring feminism as collective identity.

In this study, I argue that feminism, as a political construct in empirical work, is best understood as the collective identity of the women's movement. This conceptualization combines insights from the literature on feminist consciousness with the literature on framing and collective identity in new social movement theory. Understanding feminism as collective identity helps to clarify the meaning of gender consciousness, facilitate interpretation of mass-level data, and generate more fitting expectations of the impact of consciousness on political action. Data for the study were gathered from an extensive political attitude survey conducted with a sample of approximately 1,000 demonstrators participating in the 1992 Abortion-rights Demonstration in Washington, D.C. Feminist collective identity is operationalized in the two components of feminist identity and feminist commitment. These constructs, though correlated, are also demonstrated to be discrete. Both components are argued to be processes with differentiation of relative strength rather than criterion classification. Clear distinctions are evident in the determinants of the two components. Feminist identity is found to be most strongly rooted in overcoming negative barriers of strong affective connection to men, attachment to traditionalism, and lack of personal meaning and salience of the movement. Feminist commitment, on the other hand, is found to be most strongly rooted in a deep underlying value of egalitarianism and prior group involvement. The critical import of collective identity is argued to be in its power for motivating and sustaining engagement with the social movement. Multivariate analysis demonstrates that feminist collective identity, through both components, strongly promoted participation on abortion-rights, an issue directly connected to the women's movement. The component of feminist commitment also strongly influenced the breadth and level of multi-issue activism helping to explain the diffusion of participation across substantively connected issues. The study supports the arguments of action mobilization whereby social movements work to create a sense of collective identity that then provides motivation for engagement with the movement. Evidence also supports the idea that diffusion of activism across connected issues is related to the development of collective identity.PhDPolitical scienceSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123290/2/3068974.pd