In Keeping with Family Tradition: American Second-Wave Feminists and the Social Construction of Political Legacies

Johanna E. Foster

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.14.1.01

Authors

Johanna E. Foster Monmouth University, U.S.A.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.14.1.01

Keywords:

Identity Construction, Political Legacy, Intergenerational Transmission, American Feminism, U.S. Second-Wave Activists, Sociology of Ancestry

Abstract

Through an interpretive lens that borrows from feminist postmodernist perspectives on identity and cognitive sociology, the manuscript utilizes in-depth interview data from 33 women active in the American second-wave feminist movement to explore how aging feminist activists construct their current political identities in relation to the meanings they give to the perceived progressive political identities and actions of their elders. In particular, this study examines the discursive strategies that respondents engage as they link their own feminist consciousness directly or indirectly to feminist, or otherwise progressive, parents and grandparents. Findings reveal three distinct political legacy narratives, namely 1) explicit transmission origin stories; 2) bridge narratives; and 3) paradox plots that add to both the social movement literature on the symbolic dimensions of recruitment, sustainability, and spillover, as well as cognitive sociological literature on the cultural transmission of political capital, in general, and to our understanding of American second-wave activists, more specifically.

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Author Biography

Johanna E. Foster, Monmouth University, U.S.A.

Johanna E. Foster is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political Science and Sociology, and the Director of the Sociology Program at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey (USA). Her major areas of expertise are in the intersections of race, class, and gender inequalities; feminist theories of gender; identity and the politics of social movements; and critical analyses of mass incarceration with an emphasis on women in U.S. prisons.

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