Cycles of protest: Impact of the contemporary anti-war movement on the U.S. women's movement

This dissertation shows that through participation in the anti-war movement, the U.S. women's movement has increasingly integrated global issues into its agenda, adapted its repertoires to target an increasingly global polity and transformed its frames to embrace global language and imagery in a manner that is analogous to social movements' adaptation to the development of the nation-state (Tilly 1995). The globalizing of the U.S. women's movement is the result of participation in a broad and global cycle of political protest that brought together disparate streams of women's organizing in the U.S. (as well as non-gender specific organizing) around a shared set of objectives and frames. The resulting collaborative process provided the opportunity for frame transformation and repertoire adaptation to meet the changing political opportunity structure and cooperate with disparate social movement organizations. This project is concerned with changes within and across movements overall. In order to examine entire movements, this dissertation utilizes a mixed methods approach to combine individual level, organization and coalition level data. The dissertation chapters progress from individual level to movement level analysis; employing both qualitative and quantitative methods at each level. This dissertation focuses on key women's peace and women's rights organizations to examine differences in frame preference, repertoires and agendas between the two groups of organizations. This project argues that the differences that do remain complement one another so that one group of organizations more successfully draws individuals into the movement while the second set maintains involvement over the long-term. This dissertation concludes with an application of these overall trends to theorize about the implications for women's organizing in the long-term.