From: �What Are Social Movements and What Is Gendered About Women's Participation in Social Movements? A Sociological Perspective,� by Benita Roth http://womhist.binghamton.edu/socm/intro.htm

������������� The efforts by feminist scholars to think about women�s movements and women in movements make clear that while self-consciously feminist movements are a relative rarity, women�s movements are numerous, and women�s participation in mixed-gender movements is and has been ever-present�� However, [a] �lack of theoretical distinction between women�s movements and other kinds of movements in the making of definitions masks very real differences in the experience of activism for women on the ground, especially (but not only) when they work together with men.

Women have made their own movements or have been part of mixed-gender social movements because women are never just women. They are members of social classes; they are workers; they belong to racial/ethnic/national/sexual communities seeking expression, seeking inclusion, and redress from authority. But it has also been the case that� women have found both making their own movements and organizing within mixed-gender groups to be difficult because of their gender. The first problem, and the one common to women in their own movements or in mixed-gender movements, is the construction of the public sphere, and therefore the political sphere, as male. While the possibilities for� social movement activism were generated by the changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization, those two processes also fueled the ideology of �separate spheres�--the identification of public life as the proper realm of the �male�� and domestic life as the proper realm of the �female.� A woman in public political life transgressed her proper space, and transgressed her proper role. As such, separate spheres ideology raised the question of whether women could� legitimately protest in public at all, instituting a burden on women�s political participation not shared by men, who were assumed to be acting properly as men in �doing� protest politics.

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In mixed-gender settings, social movement participation is different for women precisely because of gender role expectations, specifically the responsibilities that women have in reproducing daily life�.In short, the economy of social movement activism rests on women�s energies in a way that replicates gendered divisions of labor in the larger society.

Moreover, although social movement communities make boundaries between themselves and the rest of society,� structural social inequality finds its way into oppositional communities (Roth 1998). Gender inequality does not go away just because women mobilize with men on behalf of interests they have in common, and this endemic inequality becomes all the more problematic when women, in the course of social movement activism with men, discover the interests they might have as women.� Inadvertently or on purpose, women often find themselves working toward their own liberation as women as they extend meaningful categories of liberation to cover liberation from gender oppression. But they do not always bring their male comrades with them on the journey, and when women activists make noise about women�s issues, they are most often asked to �backburner� their demands--to put their concerns aside in the name of the greater cause, whether it be the strike, the revolution, ending the war, fighting AIDS, or overturning racial/ethnic discrimination. Issues constructed as common to men and women tend to be seen as simply �issues,� unmarked by gender; women�s issues are only that, specific to women and not seen as benefitting men. Backburnering works because women activists are invested in struggles that benefit men and women in communities; women often make the decision to sacrifice their ��narrow� concerns for the good of the group.