Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State

Examines the changing relationship between women's movements and states in Western Europe and North America.

Examines how women's movements have contributed and responded to changes in state powers and policy responsibility in North America and Western Europe. The scholars contributing chapters to this volume identify changes in women's movements that include a greater engagement with the state, specific policy-making ventures and challenges to national governments.This book examines the relationship between women's movements and states in West Europe and North America, as states have relocated their formal powers and policy-making responsibilities. Since the 1980s, North American and West European states have reduced the scope and volume of their national responsibilities, increasingly employing neoliberal free market rhetoric, and developed transnational economic and political authorities. Simultaneously, second wave women's movements have been transformed. Movements that were revolutionary in rhetoric, autonomous from states, and largely informally organized in the 1970s are, by the 1990s, employing moderate neoliberal rhetoric, entering state institutions as active participants, and creating more formal organizations. Utilizing a common theoretical framework, the contributors examine how movements have influenced the reconfiguration of nation-states and how these changes have influenced the goals, mobilization, tactics, success and rhetoric of women's movements in various Western European and North American countries.