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Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement.
Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 486 pp. $59.95.
Feminists and formal organizations are often not easily combined. In the United States, politically active women have a long history of suspicion toward the hierarchical authority structures and specialized divisions of labor that are hallmarks of modern bureaucratic organizations. In the nineteenth century, many women active in the abolition, suffrage, and spiritualist movements advocated "no-- organizationism" as a principle, "comparing organizations to Chinese foot binding" (Braude, 1989: 164). And for all the differences between this "first wave" of American feminism and the second, which gained momentum in the 1960s, this hostility toward formal organization endured. In group after group, individuals were criticized and even expelled for acting "as if" they were leaders (or acquiescing when the mass media treated them as spokespersons); tasks were rotated or even assigned by lot; and members maintained a watchfulness for any and all symptoms of formal organization, at times overlooking the ways in which organizational power accrues through informal mechanisms, particularly interpersonal networks (Freeman, 1974; Echols, 1989).
But despite these enduring misgivings, feminists do organize, often prolifically. In Feminist Organizations, Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin have collected twenty-five essays that vividly document the organizational creativity of the women's movement of the past three decades. The movement's capacity for organizational innovation persisted not only despite but often because of the discomfort of many feminists with formal organization. This discomfort, rather than any definite organizational archetype, is perhaps the defining feature of almost all the feminist organizations described in the volume. Stemming from recurring tensions between a committed critique of...