Abstract
If social movement organizations have a hard time maintaining activists’ commitment, that challenge is multiplied in coalitions. In Push Back, Move Forward: The National Council of Women’s Organizations and Coalition Advocacy, Laura R. Woliver offers a look into the one of the largest movement coalitions and examines its struggle to balance the interests of more than 100 membership groups. She applies a wide swath of feminist and social movement literature to make sense of fifteen years of NCWO meetings, dozens of interviews with leaders and activists, and participant observation in more than forty demonstrations and other events. The book provides a fascinating tour of issues NCWO’s groups have tackled over the last two decades and embeds these stories in the context of the organizational diversity, and often uncertainty, of the broader coalition.
Early in the book, Woliver reviews the importance of and often distinctive nature of women’s activism, particularly at the local level. She pays particular attention to the work of black organizers, homeless advocates, and local health advocates, who are filling vital needs in grassroots communities. While highlighting the importance of narrowly focused community groups, she argues that local groups served as critical precursors to women’s national collective activism. National coalitions are vital for demonstrating the power of the broader movement but can often overshadow the work of the individual groups and their grassroots activists. All of this group diversity creates tensions over the right way to approach even common problems, and Chapter Three delivers a useful discussion of how the coalition managed the inherent tensions of non-profit status among activist groups. Non-profit status is an official designation of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), allowing movement groups to raise tax-exempt funding. Tax exemption comes with strings attached, however, often limiting the claims and activities of groups to education, rather than advocacy. The line between these types of work is blurry, and Woliver argues that activists feel pressure to be overly cautious because they never quite know where the boundary lies. In the NCWO, organizational leaders highlighted the history of conservative attacks on ACORN, an organization targeted and dismantled for non-profit status violations. This cautionary tale haunted activists, threatening to stall their agenda at critical moments. Yet, at the same time, the risk of not having non-profit status is that these groups are pressed out of the ability to raise money in ways that affect legislative agendas. This dilemma plagues individual groups and is compounded by the compromises needed in coalition work.
An organizational coalition is nothing if not the struggle to find exactly what common ground unites so many disparate parts. Chapter Four offers a useful discussion what connected the women of the NCWO across various divides, including both class and race. In thinking through these issues, Woliver offers a history and analysis of the Augusta National Golf Club gender segregation protests, spearheaded by NCWO chair Martha Burk. Focusing on high-end golf clubs was a gamble—Burk was criticized for focusing on the narrow interests of elite women—and Woliver defends the protest as a part of a larger story of linked fate among women. Where any woman is excluded, derided as less worthy than a man, and kept from power, all women have a stake in the fight.
This general theme is carried over in Chapter Five, which addresses an NCWO campaign to capitalize on the gender gap in politics and the organizational efforts to get women’s vote out. In particular, she details the Church Ladies campaign, designed to leverage the powerful position black women tend to hold in their church and broader communities. By focusing attention on this particular demographic for voter turnout efforts and meeting their needs for voting, organizers hoped to pull in their network of influence as well. While it was a part of a national campaign, local groups were critical in completing feminist groundwork. Woliver notes that the specific groups involved were anxious to make sure that those on the ground got the credit for the work, rather than credit accruing to those at the national level.
The final section of the book offers an extended discussion of how the American social safety net, particularly in its historical organization, has hurt women as both dependent spouses and as workers in their own right. For example, the kinds of work done primarily by black women—domestic labor and agricultural labor—were historically excluded from laws mandating minimum wages. Chapter Seven shows how these inequalities can shed light on the debate around reforming Social Security in the early 2000s, as well as the gendered effects of the 2008 financial meltdown. Woliver details the NCWO’s role in the fight to make sure that women’s interests were represented across multiple economic reform struggles. The book closes with a discussion of the NCWO’s work on global feminism projects and the challenge to use American resources to help liberate women everywhere while not imposing a western view of what that liberation should look like.
The book provides a useful overview of the many fronts the feminist movement was fighting and how these issues were tackled within one coalition. Its central strength is providing succinct summaries of various episodes of feminist engagement. But, for all of the years devoted and interviews conducted for the data collection, at the end of the book readers still don’t know much about the coalition itself. Woliver uses fairly general terms in describing the challenges of coalitional work, but the book is largely devoid of the specifics that would make the NCWO come to life for the reader. There are tantalizing hints of organizational discord—was it member groups, for example, who were critical of Burk’s decision to focus on the Augusta National Golf Club, and how did that fight actually play out?—but Woliver tends to gloss over those details in order to focus on the external fights. The story of the book, then, is about how the coalition did the best it could do, given the external foes it faced. That’s a story worth telling, but I wanted at least a bit more of the coalition's internal life.
This book would be an excellent fit for a survey course in gender inequality or feminist movements. Because it is structured around particular moments of gendered conflict in American history, it would offer an excellent catalyst for classroom discussions about what unites and divides women, as well as whether their interests can be met in a single coalitional structure.