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This paper addresses our desire to learn more about effective practices with film and our aspiration to promote a more inclusive curriculum. Specifically, we consider how the film Iron Jawed Angels impacted students’ understanding of the American women’s movement, particularly the fight for suffrage by the National Women’s Party, and examines the questions: (a) How can feature films be used to incorporate a close examination of the women’s movement into the curriculum? (b) How do students make sense of the women’s movement when it appears in a feature film during classroom activities? For most students, the film appeared to call important attention to women’s history. The results suggest that feature films with females as main characters or with a narrative based primarily on female perspectives can be used to promote engagement with women’s issues and to promote the inclusion of female perspectives in the secondary curriculum. However, we also found important differences between how female and male students responded to the film.

Responses to the Gallup poll on support for the women's movement, reported in the last issue, reflected women's ambivalence to women's organizations compared with men's less equivocal support.

This study uses the concept of standing, or legitimacy, to bridge the disciplinary divide between social movement and communication scholarship on activism. Here, the authors examine whether activist standing in 269 broadcast news stories sampled between 1970 and 2012 across five social movements – Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, Immigrant Rights, Occupy Wall Street, and Tea Party – is undermined by (1) the mix of visuals included in media coverage and (2) activists’ social statuses at the intersection of gender, race, and age. The authors find that broadcast media undercut the standing of activists in some social movements more than others. Occupy activists faced the most challenges to their standing because they were more likely to be shown as angry, young protestors wearing anti-government costumes and engaged in nonnormative protest behavior than activists associated with other movements. In contrast, Tea Party movement activists, who also made anti-government claims during the same relative time frame, were not cast in a similarly negative light. The authors also find that activist standing is diminished and enhanced at the intersection of gender, race, and age. For example, the social movements with the most racial diversity – the immigrant rights and Occupy movements – were also shown as the most deviant and deserving violent repression in coverage. The authors conclude the study with a discussion of the importance of interdisciplinary research and a call for additional research on the movement–media relationship.

This chapter examines the conditions under which social movements demobilize. Political process theorists have long argued that hostility in the external environment often leads to movement decline, while others have suggested that some degree of hostility will mobilize constituents. Data drawn from the periodicals of two first-wave feminist organizations, the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party, are used to document the changes in the two organizations’ levels of collectivism between 1910 and 1930. Analyses show that whether and to what extent movement organizations respond to favorable or hostile external environments depends on internal organizational dynamics. Specifically, single-issue organizations respond more quickly and acutely to changes in the external environment than their multi-issue counterparts. Thus, despite past research that has touted the benefits of organizing around a single issue, this chapter documents a potential downside: the difficulty of sustaining long-term collective mobilization.

Purpose – To answer two related questions, namely, why women in general are excluded from peace-building processes and why women in Israel are excluded from peace-building processes and have to create their own organizations?

Methodology/approach – This is narrative prospective research paper. First, the research focuses on international gender theories regarding participation of women in peace-building processes, and then on the particular situation of women in Israel and their need to form peace movements and organizations of their own.

Findings – The research revealed that Israeli women's absence from the official negotiations with the Palestinians as well as women's exclusion from other peace-building processes is part of a global phenomenon. Given the fact that women have been missing from the Israel's official negotiations with the Palestinians since 1987 when the first Intifada began, and their plight is not addressed, women need to create their own peace movements and organizations for voicing their unique value for the benefit of society at large.

Research limitations – An update of the research should be conducted every two years to check changes in findings.

Value of the paper – The chapter highlights the significance of women's inclusion in peace building. It describes women's exclusion from the peace process in Israel although they have been extremely active and were recognized internationally and stresses the need for a gendered society to end the Palestinian–Israel conflict.

In this chapter, I revisit an important debate about dalit feminism that took place in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly, a leading publication in India, from 1995 to 2000 (Datar, 1999; Guru, 1995; Rege, 1998, 2000). Reexamining this debate in the context of contemporary dalit and savarna feminist activism, I show that while the debate was key in making visible (1) the heretofore unmarked savarna nature of autonomous feminism and (2) the male domination of dalit politics, in the decades following the debate, dalit politics remains primarily male, and autonomous feminism while cognizant of and in conversation with dalit feminism is not necessarily transformed by dalit standpoint. Further, dalit feminism itself while visible nationally and transnationally has focused at home largely on “difference,” from savarna feminism without adequately addressing the differences among dalit subjectivities in neoliberal India, limiting the possibilities of radical, coalitional politics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the history of Black women as critical civic agents fighting for the recognition of their intersecting identities in multiple iterations of the feminist movement.

Utilizing Black feminism and intersectionality I explore the many ways in which Black women have fought against multiple forms of oppression in the first, second and fourth wave feminist movement and organizations in order to fight for their rights as Black women citizens.

Black women in the past and present have exhibited agency by working within such multiple civil rights movements to change the conditions and carve out inclusive spaces by working across differences and forging multiracial coalitions.

This paper serves as a call to action for social studies classroom teachers and teacher educators to rethink how we remember and teach feminist movements. I also explore how we can use this past to understand and advance the conversation in this present iteration of the women’s movement to work across differences in solidarity toward equal justice for all.

In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).

This chapter analyses the strategies employed by women and youth political activists in Iran in the context of changes engendered by the neo-liberal policies pursued by successive governments since the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

The analysis in this chapter is based on semi-structured interviews conducted by the author with women and youth activists in Iran in 2015. This qualitative data is contextualised within a theoretical discussion of the nature of the Iranian state, the impact of neo-liberal policies, and debates surrounding gender and neo-liberalism.

Contrary to the view of politics in Iran as a battle between hard-line religious fundamentalists and moderates, this chapter argues that it is not the religious nature of the state but its neo-liberal policies that have made it more difficult for women and youth activists to mobilise against the exclusionary policies of the state. In response activists in Iran have developed and articulated strategies of resistance to and accommodation with the Islamic Republic’s neo-liberal project.

The chapter breaks with prevailing socio-cultural analyses of women’s rights in Iran and provides a critique of prevalent ideas of women’s rights as innately connected to liberal and specifically neo-liberal forms of politics and governance.