Personal Life and Politics: How the Personal is Political ...



Chapter 12

Personal Life and Politics

Gemma Edwards

[A] Introduction

‘Personal life’ and ‘politics’ are often studied as two distinct areas in sociology. In fact, on examining their subject-matter, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are opposites. Studying ‘the personal’ leads us to look at the ‘private sphere’ of particular, emotional relationships between family and friends. Studying ‘the political’, on the other hand, leads us to look at the ‘public sphere’ of general, rational relationships between states and citizens.

In reality, however, the boundaries of our social lives are not so exact, and as we have already seen in Vanessa May’s chapter, personal life transgresses both private and public spheres. Contemporary examples of this are not hard to come by: think of the men who – as fathers – dress up as superheroes and scale Parliament to demand access to their children. You would be hard pushed to argue that their personal troubles are not shaped by politics. And you would be as equally hard pushed to argue that politics is not, in return, shaped by the new challenges posed by their personal troubles.

It is this mutual intersection between personal life and politics that I take up in this chapter. The examples I could use to examine this intersection are many and varied. Here, I argue there is good reason to start with the case of ‘social movements’. I examine how second wave feminism – and the ‘new’ social movements more widely – have transformed personal life into a ‘stake’ and a ‘site’ of political struggle, and, suggest furthermore, that political struggle is also rooted in personal life. I show that in the case of personal life and politics, opposites attract.

[A] The opposition between the personal and the political

To understand personal life do we need to explicitly talk about politics? After all, in political philosophy personal life and politics were traditionally placed in ‘separate spheres’. Personal life was associated with the ‘private sphere’ and politics with the ‘public sphere’. This goes as far back as Aristotle, who put politics in the public world of men, and the family household in the private world of women (Mansbridge and Okin, 1995, p. 272). These spheres invoke a whole range of other opposites therefore, like those between men and women, and rationality and emotionality (Okin, 1989). This is because these spheres have been divided up on the basis of the different types of relationships and interactions that they involve. The private sphere is constituted by particularized, emotional relationships, such as those between family and friends that we study under the rubric of ‘personal life’ – and the public sphere by generalized, rational relationships, such as those between states and citizens that we study under the rubric of ‘politics’. It is also important to note that in much social theory, politics – which is fundamentally about relationships structured by power – has been placed in ‘public spheres’ of the state and the economy rather than private spheres of everyday interpersonal relations (Fraser, 1989). As we have already seen in Vanessa May’s chapter, however, it is necessary to critically engage with the way in which the boundaries between private and public have been drawn.

Feminist social theorists have shown, for example, that these boundaries are highly problematic, not least because they are rooted in the gendered assumptions of ‘malestream’ theory (see Elshtain, 1981; Pateman, 1988). They argue that the notion of ‘separate spheres’ is an ideological construct, rather than a natural one, because the public sphere has been defined in opposition to the private sphere – it is not the family household, and it is not emotion, and it is not women. In fact, the separate spheres argument was often used as justification in political philosophy – from Aristotle to Rousseau – as to why women could not be ‘citizens’ on the same basis as men. What do the gendered assumptions of separate spheres mean therefore? Well, we could argue, that rather than the personal and political being ‘opposites’, the whole theoretical notion of separate spheres is itself a product of politics in the first place – it is a product of the unequal power relationships between men and women.

It is also necessary for us to challenge the picture that the separate spheres argument draws of personal life as entirely ‘private’ and thus without relationships structured by power (see Fraser, 1989). Most contemporary sociologists would concede that our personal lives are inherently ‘political’ in the sense that they – more often than not – involve inequalities of power. Families are not always ‘sanctuaries’ that offer protection from the outside world, but can involve domination, exploitation, violence, and the reproduction of inequalities (Greer, 1970). And friendships too – as Katherine Davies’s chapter in the present volume shows – can have a ‘dark side’ to them, where people can exploit and be exploited rather than adhere to mutual reciprocity. ‘Private’ life is also influenced in a variety of ways by the public sphere, for example, by government policies and public debates about how people should live. Think of the important changes in personal lives that have been enabled by changes in the law – the right of women to file for divorce, the introduction of same-sex marriage, and policies on adoption, to name but a few that have already been mentioned in Carol Smart’s, Anna Einardottir’s and Jennifer Mason’s chapters. In fact, many of the changes in personal life that are examined in this book cannot be comprehended without an awareness of the ways in which personal lives are politically constituted, and politically constrained, in a myriad of ways.

In reality, therefore, the boundaries of our social lives are not as easy to draw as the theory of public/private spheres would suggest. If most contemporary sociologists would accept this, then how has this change come about? How have theorists moved from placing the personal and the political in opposite categories, to acknowledging their deep intersection? It is my contention that to tackle this question we should start by looking at the example of social movements – by which I mean collective actions for social and political change. In particular, I suggest that we need to look at the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. It was, after all, these ‘second wave’ feminists who announced to the world that ‘the personal is political’ and inspired the kind of feminist theorising that critiqued the notion of separate spheres. In the next section we begin to unpack the feminist slogan to find out exactly how ‘the personal is political’.

[A] The personal is political

The Women’s Liberation Movement – established in 1969 in the United States and 1970 in Britain – is a very good place to start when considering the ways in which the personal and political are interrelated. Perhaps more than any other social movement of its time (with the exception of the Gay Liberation Front), feminists explicitly centred their struggle on the notion that ‘the personal is political’.

This idea had been present to some extent in the ‘first wave’ feminist movement concerning women’s suffrage. Female campaigns for the vote challenged the notion of ‘separate spheres’ by arguing that women’s participation in the public sphere was absolutely vital for the nation. The suffragists, for example, were clever in turning the idea of separate spheres in favour of votes for women by suggesting that women were ‘experts’ in affairs like family and childrearing, and therefore had ‘special skills’ that male citizens lacked when it came to matters like education.

The challenge to separate spheres took place on a much more fundamental level with ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1970s. By this time, the argument was not only about admitting women to public life on an equal footing with men – for instance, by campaigns for Equal Pay for Equal Work – but for a redefinition of ‘politics’ itself. Feminists did this by arguing that relationships of power were not limited to the institutions of the public sphere, but were present in all aspects of life. This included the private – even sexual – relationships between men and women. In fact, the private sphere and the public sphere were interconnected to the extent that the domination of women within the family and heterosexual relationships helped to ensure their subordination within public spheres of work and institutional politics (Walby, 1990). Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) posed the question, ‘is it possible to regard the relation of the sexes in a political light at all?’ Her answer was that it depended upon ‘how one defines politics’. If we define politics as ‘power structured relationships’ (Millett, 1970) that allow some groups to dominate over others, then the systematic domination of men over women in all areas of life – referred to as ‘patriarchy’ – could be defined as a ‘political’ issue. The private as well as the public is, then, inherently political.

This realization had important implications. The first was that aspects of private life could now be placed on the political agenda. This was because women’s ‘private’ problems were not necessarily due to personal failings, but to patriarchy. In the ‘consciousness raising’ groups of the Women’s Liberation Movement, small groups of women would meet to discuss their ‘private’ troubles – with sex and contraception, with marriage and childcare, with work and housework, and with feminine beauty and appearance. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) had urged sociologists to locate the ‘private troubles’ of individual biographies within the context of wider ‘public issues’ and this is what the women within these groups did. It was C. Wright Mills therefore who inspired the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. In the wake of the separation between private life and politics, this was, however, controversial. Carol Hanisch commented that whilst it was sometimes accepted that women needed further rights relating to work and pay, ‘they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called ‘personal problems’ into the public arena – especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance and abortion’ (Hanisch, 2006, p. 1). Consciousness-raising also made another important link between the personal and political. Through these groups, political knowledge and action was to arise from, and be grounded within, women’s personal experience. Women were encouraged to understand their problems in the context of unequal power relationships with men. And they did not need to understand complex political philosophy to grasp this; all they needed was to reflect upon their personal lives.

Another important implication of seeing the personal as political was that solutions to personal troubles required a collective movement to change things (Hanisch, 1970). This meant that aspects of personal life, like identities and lifestyles, became the sites as well as the stakes of political struggle. Feminists, for example, rejected the dominant meanings attached to being a woman, or being ‘feminine’, or being a wife and a mother, and constructed alternative identities. Individual efforts to transform the self produced a ‘collective culture’ which gave women an alternative way of knowing, representing and relating to themselves and to men (Rowbotham, 1997). In America and Britain, feminist magazines like Ms and Spare Rib acted as conduits for this alternative culture, challenging conventional gender norms and sex-roles. Feminists produced alternative music, art and poetry. They dressed differently, and argued that the way in which everyday language was used mattered (Spender, 1980). Leading British feminist, Sheila Rowbotham, reflected that ‘it seemed as if politics and culture had melted into one’ (Rowbotham, 1997, p. 398).

Feminist politics also inspired radically different lifestyles by challenging the nuclear family, and gave rise to diverse living arrangements like communes. Lesbianism was further suggested as an alternative way of living outside of male dominated heterosexual relationships, and the ‘political lesbianism’ of groups like the ‘Leeds Revolutionary Feminists’ in the UK suggested that men should be bypassed altogether, ‘not because of sexual preference but as a political duty’ (Rowbotham, 1997, p. 431). This ‘separatist’ contingent of women’s liberation led to tensions within the movement, and highlighted that the experiences and agendas of women varied by sexuality; tensions that were also mirrored by class and ethnic differences.

Social movements, like feminism, seem therefore to have been of vital importance in bringing about academic and societal awareness of the intersection between personal life and politics. But why is it that these types of movements emerged in Western societies in the 1970s? To address this question we need to turn to theories of ‘New Social Movements’.

[A] Theories of New Social Movements

The idea that aspects of personal life – like identity and lifestyle – are ‘stakes’ in political struggle has been seen as a unique feature of the social movements which dominated the political scene in Western countries in the 1970s and 1980s. These included the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements already mentioned, but also student movements, environmental and peace movements, and various self-help groups, like anti-psychiatry. They were referred to by European social theorists like Melucci (1985) in Italy, Habermas (1981) in Germany, and Touraine (1974) in France, as the ‘New Social Movements’.

Three key reasons were given for the ‘newness’ of these movements. Firstly, they seemingly had ‘new’ political concerns, which were different from the ‘old’ class politics of the labour movement. For example, they were not concerned with ‘material’ issues like wages, but with ‘postmaterial issues’ like culture, identity and lifestyle that cut across social classes. Secondly, they did not operate within the conventional political system but on the margins of society, and involved previously marginalized groups like students and women. And, thirdly, they had a new way of ‘changing the world’. They did not form large bureaucratic organizations like the trade unions, but instead small, informal, and decentralized networks – like the feminist consciousness-raising groups – which were embedded in everyday life. And, by and large, as we also saw with feminism, members of these movements engaged in politics by trying to live their everyday lives differently. They would ‘change the world’ by changing themselves first.

Theorists of the New Social Movements (hereafter NSMs) argued that they arose as a reaction to a new set of social conflicts that characterized Western capitalist societies from the late 1960s onwards. Alain Touraine (1974), for example, related the rise of the NSMs to historical transformations in capitalism, which in the 1970s led to the emergence of a ‘post-industrial’ society. In post-industrial societies, he argued, the ‘key conflict’ had shifted from the class conflict between capitalists and workers (which had characterized industrial societies), to postmaterial conflicts concerning culture and identity. The NSMs were, for Touraine, the ‘new historical agents of change’ in postindustrial societies; they had taken over the mantle from the working class previously identified by Marx. But where exactly did these postmaterial conflicts come from? And why did they create ‘political stakes’ out of personal lives?

Alberto Melucci (1985) offers us an interesting explanation, and one which seems to capture well the distinctive nature of NSMs like feminism. Postindustrial societies, argued Melucci, are moreover consumer societies (please refer to Chapter 10 by Dale Southerton for an in-depth discussion of consumer culture). They rely not upon the production of material goods, but upon the production and control of meaning (or what sociologists could more generally call ‘symbolic resources’). Meaning and culture are part of the system of producing and selling goods in advanced capitalist societies, as reflected in the efforts of advertisers to make their products appeal to consumers by drawing meaningful associations between the product and a certain (desirable) identity and lifestyle. Consumer societies are therefore ‘mass symbolic systems’ which allow for the construction of multiple identities and lifestyles. This process of construction is, however, subject to domination and control. In fact, for Melucci, the struggle over symbolic resources is the key conflict of Western capitalist societies. Meaning and information have become ‘stakes’ to be fought over in battles to establish, affirm or reject the dominant definitions of personal and collective identities. The way to engage in political struggle for members of the NSMs is, therefore, to mount a symbolic challenge to what Melucci called the ‘dominant logic’ of society by living life differently. This is why for Melucci, the NSMs operate within what he called ‘submerged networks of everyday life’ rather than bureaucratic organizations. Melucci talked of the NSMs as offering people ‘the possibility of another experience of time, space’ and ‘interpersonal relations’ (Melucci, 1985, p. 801).

Jürgen Habermas’s (1981, 1987) explanation of NSMs is different, but it also focuses upon the way in which culture and identity have become the focus of political struggle in Western capitalist societies. Habermas pins the shift from material to postmaterial conflicts on the welfare state. He argues that the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies had brought about a ‘class compromise’ by offering workers money in compensation for their grievances at work, alongside a range of benefits for illness and unemployment. These measures effectively integrated the working class into the capitalist system and pacified the conflicts between capital and labour that had driven the labour movement. The existence of the welfare state did not however mean an end to social conflict, but merely a shift in where conflict occurred in society. When the welfare state grew, Habermas (1987) argued, it cast a web of bureaucratic relations over personal life. Everyday private lives (which are part of what Habermas called the ‘lifeworld’) were increasingly ‘taken over’ by the state and economy (which Habermas called ‘the system’). A good example of this is the way in which the state moved activities like education and care for the elderly away from the family and coordinated them instead through formal bureaucratic institutions such as schools and care homes. The state also interfered in the private sphere by administering a host of benefits to families like maternity pay, sick pay, and child benefit. The result was what Habermas (1987) called a ‘colonization of the lifeworld by the system’. ‘Colonization’ was problematic because it introduced the money and power of the ‘system’ (that is, the state and the economy) into personal life. Increasingly for example, education and care homes are not only state-bureaucratic institutions but also organised on market principles and run for profit. By taking over areas of private life, the state and the market have redefined people’s roles and identities, and their relationships to one-another. This has produced what Habermas (1987) calls ‘symbolic conflicts’ surrounding identities and lifestyles.

Habermas sees the NSMs as a reaction to colonization and the symbolic conflicts it raised. The majority of NSMs, like anti-nuclear, peace, anti-psychiatry and self-help groups, were attempting to defend their existing identities and relationships from becoming redefined by state bureaucracies and markets. Habermas sees feminism, however, not as a defensive reaction to colonization like other NSMs, but as an attempt to seize hold of the new opportunities for reconstructing identities and lifestyles on a more equal basis; opportunities which have been opened up by the state interference in the family. Once the state had explicitly intervened to shape private life in various ways, it became clear that traditional identities and ways of living were not natural or fixed, but subject to political constitution and thus open to political re-constitution. For Habermas then, there came a point in history in the 1970s when politics and economics started to transgress their boundaries and infiltrate private lives. The effect was to politicize personal life, and infuse it with power in a way that it had not been before. On this point, Habermas’s theory has been criticized by feminists like Nancy Fraser (1995), who argue that he fails to capture the way in which power has always been present within the private sphere of personal relationships.

The theories of New Social Movements we have looked at here are useful because they help us to capture exactly what was so distinctive about the politics of movements like feminism. NSMs seemed to be responding to a new set of ‘postmaterial’ social conflicts. NSM theories offer a number of potential reasons as to why identities and lifestyles became the focus of political attention at a certain stage in the development of Western capitalist societies. Melucci’s explanation, in particular, also helps us to understand the way in which NSMs engaged in politics, and why they suggested that change had to happen in the context of everyday life and personal relationships. Living differently, speaking differently, relating differently – all of these were in themselves symbolic acts of resistance. On the other hand, theories of NSMs have also been criticized for overstating their case. Labour movements of the past and present were not, for example, devoid of identity and lifestyle concerns (Edwards, 2004). And moreover, the Women’s Liberation Movement can hardly be described as entirely ‘postmaterial’. In this respect, Jean Cohen (1995) has criticized Habermas for failing to acknowledge the enduring material concerns, like unequal pay, that were also at the heart of the feminist campaign.

[A] The political is also personal

So far we have looked at social movements to highlight the ways in which ‘the personal is political’. They have shown us that in order to understand personal life we need to understand the ways in which it intersects with politics. In this section I want to argue that the same is also true the other way around – in order to understand politics we need to understand the influence of personal life on political behaviour. Social movements continue to be a good example to use here because sociologists have shown that people’s personal ‘social networks’ – by which I mean the web of kinship and friendship relations in which their lives are embedded – have a crucial role to play in forming their political attitudes and behaviour.

A good deal of the research on social movements looks at the important question of participation. How is it that some people come to be involved in political activism? Many people in the 1970s were generally sympathetic to feminism, but only a minority actually became actively involved in the movement. This is typical of social movements generally. Today, many people say that they care about the environment, but only a minority are members of groups like Greenpeace, and even less will actually turn up to a demonstration against tree felling, or road building. One way to address the question of why some people become involved and not others is to concentrate upon individual political attitudes. We could ask for example how people came to hold the kind of values that lead to political activism. What starts as a question about the individual however quickly turns into a question about people’s interconnections. This is because personal social networks have a great deal of influence over the development of political attitudes and behaviour. People do not become political (or apathetic) in isolation, but in the context of their everyday interactions with significant others.

A good example is the classic study of voting behaviour conducted at Columbia University in the United States in the 1940s called The People’s Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). Against the image of voters as isolated rational actors who, on their own, calculate the costs and benefits of various parties, the Columbia study showed that people actually make up their minds about politics within the context of their close personal relationships. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet (1948) found that people’s political values and choices were influenced by the others with whom they interacted on an everyday basis, especially those they were intimate with. They argued that the people in our personal social network tend to be quite similar to ourselves – an effect called ‘homophily’ which you came across in Katherine Davies’s chapter. This means that we only tend to talk about politics with people who already share similar characteristics and political dispositions, and who therefore reinforce our political attitudes. In these circumstances, we are probably very clear about what we think and who we want to vote for. Even conflicting information from the media becomes further ‘mediated’ by our personal contacts so that it confirms, rather than challenges, our group position.

These findings have been supported by other research which suggests that political values are directly influenced by personal relationships. This influence can come via political socialization in the family, or because the household tends to be the primary place in which politics is discussed and views formed (Zuckerman, 2005). Interestingly, Nina Eliasoph (1998) has argued that apathy – a form of political disengagement – is also reproduced in everyday personal interactions. She found that because people do not talk about politics with their friends, they find politics less and less relevant to their lives. The influence of personal relationships on political behaviour does not, however, have to be direct. Ronald Burt (1987) argued that alongside ‘contagion by cohesion’ – by which he means direct socialization – there is also ‘contagion by equivalence’. This means that rather than being directly influenced in your political attitudes by others, you tend to decide upon what you will do by looking at what other people in your social circle do – especially those who you consider to be ‘like you’. Significant others act as ‘reference points’ therefore for our own political behaviour. A more recent study conducted in the Netherlands concluded however that the socialization effect of intimate relationships had more influence upon people’s political choices than reference groups (Nieuwbeerta and Flap, 2000). Nevertheless, the point can be made that political values and behaviour are not the result of individual decision making, but of the mediated decision-making of people embedded within personal social networks.

Research on social movements has also found that personal networks of kinship and friendship are very important when it comes to recruiting people to political activism (Passy, 2003). Individual level factors are once again insufficient for explaining participation (Snow et al., 1980). In fact, whether there is a prior personal connection to somebody already in the movement turns out to be one of the best predictors of participation. For example, in a classic study by David Snow, Louis Zurcher and Sheldon Ekland-Olson (1980) in the United States, it was found that the majority of the university students surveyed (63 per cent) had been recruited to political movements through their ‘social networks’.

***

Box 12.1 The social network of Emmeline Pankhurst

What role do family and friends play in political activism? Is it accurate to say that family and friends ‘pull you in’ to activism? Or that some families are ‘political’ families? These questions have been the focus of a historical research project by sociologists at the University of Manchester[i]. The researchers looked at the role of social networks in the political activism of British Suffragettes (1903-14). They looked in particular at the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903 to campaign for votes for women. The project employed the methodological technique known as ‘Social Network Analysis’ (SNA) (see Scott, 2000) and used a computer programme called UCINET (Borgatti et al., 2002) to map and analyse Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘personal network’ of family and friends before she founded the WSPU. They also traced the key leading members of the WSPU between 1903 and 1914 when it ceased.

[pic]

The diagram above – which looks rather like a thick spider’s web because it depicts a very dense network – shows Emmeline Pankhurst’s personal social network before she founded the WSPU in October 1903. The diagram has also added in the people who became key leading members of the WSPU at some time between 1903 and 1914. We can see by the red squares that several of Emmeline Pankhurst’s existing family and friends became leading activists (note in particular her three daughters Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela, who each had an important role to play in the campaign for women’s suffrage). We can also see by the yellow triangles that most of the other leading members of the WSPU at one time or another in the campaign were friends of existing friends. Indeed, only four leading members - shown by the green diamonds - had no prior personal connection to Emmeline Pankhurst. The results of this exercise suggest that the core of this political group (the rank-and-file being a different matter of course) has largely grown out of an existing personal network of family and friends.

*** End of Box ***

Why is it, then, that personal social networks are so influential when it comes to participation in politics? Doug McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen (1993) address this question in their research on the participation of white college students in the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. This project was part of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and involved college students travelling to Mississippi to help register black voters and run Freedom Schools. Students had to apply in advance to participate in the project, and by the time it started, some had dropped out. McAdam and Paulsen’s research followed up on the differences between the students who went on Freedom Summer and those who were ‘no shows’. They argued that the key factor was the extent to which the student had close personal relationships that were supportive of their involvement. The ‘no shows’ reported much less support from their family, friends and peers. This made participation very difficult, according to McAdam and Paulsen, because we depend upon close personal relationships to sustain what they call ‘salient identities’, that is, the predominant image we hold of ourselves as particular kinds of people. Participation in high risk activism does not only risk personal safety, it also risks salient identity. The activist effectively ‘comes out’ as committed to a politically controversial cause, thus altering the image that family and friends have of who they are. McAdam and Paulsen suggest that if family and friends do not support the ‘new’ identity of the activist then it can make it very difficult for them to sustain their sense of self whilst remaining politically active. This helps to explain why those who recorded more hostility from their friends and family dropped out of the Freedom Summer project.

There is one final way in which political activism and personal life are connected which I will mention here. I have already suggested that pre-existing ties with friends and kin explain to a large extent how people come to be involved in social movements. Friends and family influence your political values, but may also ‘pull you in’ to political activities that they are already involved with. And often, social movements recruit not individuals but ‘blocs’, like a group of friends or a family unit (Obershall, 1973). This is especially true for social movements that depend upon the trust and reciprocity of close personal bonds to operate – and I am thinking here of movements that employ tactics of political violence. In the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, for example, people were often recruited by friends and family, and consequently had especially strong bonds of solidarity because of the overlap between political and personal relationships (White, 1989). Also, whilst people may come to political activity via friends and family, they also make friends and family out of political activity. Close-knit and intense interactions with political comrades can forge bonds that are akin to kinship and friendship. In her study of the Italian Red Brigades, a left wing terrorist movement in the 1970s and 1980s, Donatella della Porta (1992), for example, found that underground political groups became like surrogate families for those involved (please see Katherine Davies’s and Jennifer Mason’s chapter for a discussion of the porous boundary between different categories of relationship such as ‘family’ and ‘friends’). In extreme cases of political involvement therefore, the political and the personal become one.

[A] Concluding remarks

This chapter has examined the ways in which personal life intersects with politics. We have seen that the opposition in political philosophy between ‘the personal’ and ‘the political’ is a false one. Instead, we need to look beyond ‘separate spheres’ to the ways in which personal life and politics interact. In order to do this, the chapter has concentrated upon the example of ‘social movements’. It has argued that social movements are a good place to start when considering the intersection between personal life and politics, not least because it was the Women’s Liberation Movement that first suggested that ‘the personal is political’. Women’s Liberation was part of a wider set of movements, however, which emerged in Western countries in the 1970s and involved a turn towards identity and lifestyle as ‘stakes’ in political struggle. We looked at the reasons for this shift by considering ‘New Social Movement’ theories. Finally, we turned the ‘personal is political’ on its head to look at some of the ways in which the ‘political is also personal’. We found evidence to suggest that political attitudes and behaviour are routinely embedded in personal social networks. Friends and family have a crucial role to play in political activism, and friends and family are also forged in the course of political activism. This chapter has put forward a number of arguments therefore to suggest that in order to understand personal life we must look at politics – and in order to understand politics, we must look at personal life.

[A] Questions for discussion

1. What did the Women’s Liberation Movement mean in 1970 when they declared that ‘the personal is political’? Is this slogan still relevant today?

2. Does politics influence who you are and how you live? If so, in what ways?

3. To what extent do theories of ‘New Social Movements’ adequately explain the politicization of personal life and identity?

4. In what ways can participation in politics be shaped by a person’s social network?

[A] References

S. Borgatti, M. Everett and L. Freeman (2002) UCINET for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis (Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies).

R. Burt (1987) ‘Social contagion and innovation: Cohesion versus structural equivalence’, American Journal of Sociology, 92(6), 1287-335.

J. L. Cohen (1995) ‘Critical social theory and feminist critiques: The debate with Jürgen Habermas’ in J. Meehan (ed.) Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (London: Routledge).

D. Della Porta (1992) ‘Political socialization in left-wing underground organizations. Biographies of Italian and German militants’ in D. Della Porta (ed.) International Social Movements Research: Social Movements and Violence - Participation in Underground Organizations, volume 4 (Greenwich, CO: JAI Press).

G. Edwards (2004) ‘Habermas and social movements: What’s “new”?’ in N. Crossley and J.M. Roberts (eds.) After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review).

N. S. Eliasoph (1998) Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

J. B. Elshtain (1981) Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

N. Fraser (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press).

N. Fraser (1995) ‘What’s critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender’ in J. Meehan (ed.) Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (London: Routledge).

G. Greer (1970) The Female Eunuch (London: Paladin Grafton Books).

J. Habermas (1981) ‘New social movements’, Telos, 49, 33-7.

J. Habermas (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume II: System and Lifeworld (Cambridge: Polity Press).

C. Hanisch (1970) ‘The personal is political’ in S. Firestone and A. Koedt (eds.) Notes from the Second Year - Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists (New York: Pamphlet published by S. Firestone and A. Koedt).

C. Hanisch (2006) ‘The personal is political: Introduction’, .

P. F. Lazarsfeld, B. Berelson and H. Gaudet (1948) The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).

J. Mansbridge and S. M. Okin (1995) ‘Feminism’ in R. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds.) A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell).

D. McAdam and R. Paulsen (1993) ‘Specifying the relationship between social ties and activism’, American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 640-67.

A. Melucci (1985) ‘The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements’, Social Research, 52(4), 789-816.

K. Millett (1970) Sexual Politics (New York, NY: Doubleday).

C. Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

P. Nieuwbeerta and H. Flap (2000) ‘Crosscutting social circles and political choice: Effects of personal network composition on voting behavior in the Netherlands’, Social Networks, 22(4), 313-35.

A. Oberschall (1973) Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).

S. M. Okin (1988) Justice, Gender and the Family (New York, NY: Basic Books).

F. Passy (2003) ‘Social networks matter. But how?’ in M. Diani and D. McAdam (eds.) Social Movements and Social Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

C. Pateman (1988) The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

S. Rowbotham (1997) A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (London: Viking Penguin Books).

J. Scott (2000) Social Network Analysis: A Handbook (London: Sage).

D. Snow, L. Zurcher and S. Ekland-Olson (1980) ‘Social networks and social movements’, American Sociological Review, 45(5), 787-801.

D. Spender (1980) Man Made Language (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

A. Touraine (1974) The Postindustrial Society (London: Wildwood House).

S. Walby (1990) Theorising Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell).

R. W. White (1989) ‘From peaceful protest to guerrilla war: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army’, American Journal of Sociology, 94(6), 1277-1302.

A. Zuckerman (ed.) (2005) The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press).

-----------------------

[i] The Covert Social Movement Networks study was conducted by Nick Crossley, Gemma Edwards, Rachel Stevenson, and Ellen Harries in 2009-10 at the University of Manchester.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download