Changing Political Opportunity: The Anti-Rape Movement and Public Policy

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 367-398

  Gornick, Janet C ^a   Meyer, David S ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85007634995     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600007132     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. Peter K. Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” American Political Science Review 67 (1973): 11-28
2. Herbert P. Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 16 (1986): 57-85
3. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago, 1982)
4. Dieter Rucht, “Campaigns, Skirmishes, and Battles: Anti-Nuclear Movements in the USA, France, and West Germany,” industrial Crisis Quarterly 49 (1990): 193-222
5. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (New York, 1994)
6. Charles Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution (Reading, Mass. 1978).
7. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 85.
8. William A. Gamson and David S. Meyer, “Framing Political Opportunity,” in Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge, 1996), 275-90.
9. Anne N. Costain, inviting Women s Rebellion (Baltimore, 1992)
10. Douglas R. Imig and David S. Meyer, “Political Opportunity and Peace and Justice Advocacy in the 1980s: A Tale of Two Sectors,” Social Science Quarterly 74 (1993): 750-70
11. McAdam, Political Process
12. David S. Meyer, “Protest Cycles and Political Process: American Peace Movements in the Nuclear Age,” Political Research Quarterly 46 (1993): 451-79.
13. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and instability in American Politics (Chicago, 1993), 88-89.
14. Bryan D. Jones, Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1994), 103-30.
15. Costain, inviting Women's Rebellion.
16. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements (New York, 1979).
17. Poor People's Movements, 28.
18. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2d ed. (New York, 1995).
19. Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox and Political Reason (Boston, 1988).
20. Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability.
21. Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley, Women and Public Policies (Princeton, 1982).
22. Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability.
23. Meyer, “Protest Cycles”
24. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York, 1960).
25. Costain, Jnoittng Women s Rebellion
26. McAdam, Political Process
27. Craig J. Jenkins and Craig M. Eckert, “Channeling Black Insurgency: Elite Patronage and Professional Social Movement Organizations in the Development of the Black Movement,” American Sociological Review 5 1 (1986): 812-29.
28. Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago, 1986).
29. David S. Meyer and Thomas R. Rochon, “Toward a Coalitional Theory of Social and Political Movements,” in Rochon and Meyer, eds. Coalitions and Political Movements: The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze (Boulder, Colo. 1997), 237-51.
30. Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability
31. Meyer, “Protest Cycles”
32. Barbara J. Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse (Chicago, 1984).
33. Anthony Downs, “Up and Down with Ecology: ‘The Issue Attention Cycle,’” The Public Interest 28 (Summer 1972): 38-50.
34. Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton, 1982).
35. U.S. Department of Commerce, selected volumes, Statistical Abstract of the United States: The National Data Book (Washington, D.C. 1965-1995).
36. Deborah Carrow, Rape: Guidelines for a Community Response: An Executive Summary (Washington, D.C. 1980), 1-2.
37. It is not clear that the reported rape rate is an accurate or consistent measure of the prevalence of the crime. It is difficult to determine, for example, whether the increased reported rate reflected more rapes or the increased willingness of women to report rape. See, for example, Jeanne C. Marsh, Alison Geist, and Nathan Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform (Boston, 1982)
38. Jim Galvin, “Rape: A Decade of Reform,” Crime and Delinquency 31 (1985): 163-68
39. Gary F. Jensen and Mary Altani Karpos, “Managing Rape: Exploratory Research on the Behavior of Rape Statistics,” Criminology 31 (1993): 363-85.
40. Stone, Making an Issue, 144.
41. Jo Freeman, “Introduction,” in Jo Freeman, ed. Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies (New York, 1983), 1-15.
42. David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, “Social Movement Spillover,” Social Problems 41 (1994) 2: 277–98.
43. Joshua Dressier, Understanding Criminal Laic (New York, 1987), 16-17.
44. Feminist reformers criticized aspects of the MPC's proposed rape laws. The MPC automatically downgraded the crime when there was a prior relationship between a woman and the rapist and required a “fresh complaint” of rape to be made within three months of the incident in order to prosecute. See Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass. 1987): 49-54.
45. Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York, 1979)
46. Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess, Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement (Boston, 1985), chap. 3.
47. On the role of emotion in these groups, and in movements more generally, see Verta Taylor, “Watching for Vibes: Bringing Emotions into the Study of Feminist Organizations,” in Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, eds. Feminist Organisations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement (Philadelphia, 1995), 223-33.
48. June Bundy Csida and Joseph Csida, Rape: How to Avoid It and What to Do About It If You Can’t (Chatsworth, Calif. 1974), 133-34.
49. Suzanne Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement (New York, 1991).
50. Mary Ann Largen, “The Anti-Rape Movement: Past and Present,” in Ann Wolbert Burgess, ed. Rape and Sexual Assault (New York, 1985), 1-13
51. Csida and Csida, Rape: Howto Avoid It, 134; New York Radical Feminists, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (New York, 1974).
52. Estrich, Real Rape
53. Linda A. Fairstein, Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape (New York, 1993)
54. Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform; Cassia Spohn and Julie Horney, Rape Law Reform: A Grassroots Revolution and Its Impact (New York, 1992).
55. NYRF, Rape, appendix IV.
56. Jan BenDor, “Ending Rape: A Concept Essay on Strategies,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women (Summer 1981): 31-34
57. Janet Gornick, Martha Burt, and Karen Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers in the Early 1980s,” Crime and Delinquency 31 (1985): 247-68
58. Mary Ann Largen, “History of Women's Movement in Changing Attitudes, Laws, and Treatment Toward Rape Victims,” in Marcia J. Walker and Stanley L. Brodsky, eds. Sexual Assault: The Victim and the Rapist (Lexington, Mass. 1976): 69-73
59. Mary Ann Largen, “Grassroots Centers and National Task Forces,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women 32 (1981): 46-51
60. Nancy Anne Matthews, Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti- Rape Movement and the State (New York, 1994).
61. Lisa Brodyaga, Margaret Gates, Susan Singer, Mama Tucker, and Richardson White, Rape and Its Victims: A Report for Citizens, Health. Facilities, and Criminal Justice Agencies (Washington, D.C. 1975).
62. Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 247–68.
63. In writing about the student movement of the 1960s, Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N.J. 1989), calls this process of connecting ends and means in microcosm, “prefigurative” politics. The movement against violence against women valued this practice highly.
64. Brodyaga et al. Rape and its Victims; Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 247–68
65. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51
66. Matthews, Confronting Rape.
67. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51.
68. Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York, 1986).
69. Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement.”
70. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975).
71. Myrene G. Pfaff, “Impressions of a March,” Newsletter of the Feminist Alliance Against Rape and the National Communications Network (July/August, 1978): 4.
72. The New York Times Index (New York, 1960-1980), for all its problems, provides a reasonable measure of mainstream attention to a broad range of issues, and as such is used by scholars of social movements and public policy, e.g. Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and instability; Costain, inviting Women's Rebellion Jenkins and Eckert, “Channeling”; McAdam,Political Process
73. David S. Meyer, A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics (New York, 1990)
74. Nelson, Making an Issue. We counted all of the abstracts under the heading “sex crimes” (there is no category for “rape”), omitting those entries that referred specifically to individual crimes such as reports of attacks, arrests, or the progress of specific trials. What remains, aggregated and presented in Figure 2, includes reports of: (1) legal and policy events (discussions of legislation and administrative policy developments); (2) activist events (including protests, campaigns, and organizational news); (3) relevant research; and (4) cultural events (reviews of books, films, and television movies, and subsequent discussions of those products).
75. New York Times, 21 February 1974-1949.
76. Ian Blair, investigating Rape: A New Approach for Police (Dover, N.H. 1985)
77. Brodyaga et al. Rape and Its Victims; Carrow, Rape: Guidelines, 1–2
78. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51
79. Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform; Spohn and Horney, Rape Law Reform.
80. Matthews, Con/ronting Rape.
81. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 47–48.
82. Csida and Csida, Rape: How to Avoid It; Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement,” 1–13
83. Ellen Kaye Scott, “How to Stop the Rapists? A Question of Strategy in Two Rape Crisis Centers,” Social Problems 40 (August 1993): 343-61.
84. Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement.”
85. Brodyaga et al. Rape and Its Victims, 55.
86. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines.
87. Brodyaga et al. Rape and its Victims
88. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, ForcibleRape: A National Survey of the Response by Police, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C. 1977)
89. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, Foreible Rape: A National Survey of the Response by Prosecutors, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C. 1977)
90. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines; Fairstein, Sexual Violence.
91. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, Police, 46.
92. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, Prosecutors, 30.
93. Fairstein, Sexual Violence.
94. Mary Ann Largen, “Rape-Law Reform: An Analysis,” in Ann Wolbert Burgess, ed. Rape and Sexual Assault II (New York, 1988), 271-92.
95. Estrich, Real Rape; Fairstein, Sexual Violence
96. National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (U.S. Dept, of Justice)
97. Forcible Rape: An Analysis of Legal Issues (Washington, D.C. 1978); Spohn and Homey, Rape Law Reform.
98. Leigh Bienen, “Rape III: National Developments in Rape Reform Legislation,” Women's Rights Law Reporter 6 (1980): 171-212. We coded a state as having reformed its law in a given year if its legislature passed one or more changes to the state's rape law during that year.
99. Leigh Bienen, “Rape I,” Women's Rights Law Reporter 3 (December 1976): 45-57
100. Leigh Bienen, “Rape II,” Women's Rights Law Reporter 3 (1977): 90-137
101. Bienen, “Rape III,” 171–212
102. Charles W. Dean and Mary deBruyn-Kops, The Crime and the Consequences of Rape (Springfield, 111. 1982)
103. Jo Dixon, “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws,” in Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Koralewski, eds. Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes,and Prevention (Lexington, Mass. 1991), 161-71
104. Dressier, Understanding Criminal Law
105. Estrich, Real Rape
106. Galvin, “Rape,” 163–68
107. Largen, “Rape Law Reform,” 271–92
108. Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform
109. National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Forcible
110. Julie Homey and Cassia Spohn, “Rape Law Reform and Instrumental Change in Six Urban Jurisdictions,” Law and Society Review 25 (1991): 117-53.
111. Largen, “Rape Law Reform,” 274.
112. Homey and Spohn, “Reform,” 117–18.
113. Estrich, Real Rape
114. Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform.
115. Largen, “History of Women's Movement,” 69–73.
116. Mary Hanemann Lystad, “The National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape,” in Ann Wolbert Burgess, ed. Rape and Sexual Assault (New York, 1985), 14.
117. Donna Myhre and Mary Capps, “Conferences We Have Known,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women (Summer 1981): 35-36.
118. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Sixth Annual Report ofLEAA (Washington D.C. 1974)
119. Matthews, Confronting Rape
120. National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape, Federal Funding Resources: Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence (Washington, D.C. 1979).
121. NCPCR, Federal Funding Resources, 2.
122. Myhre and Capps, “Conferences,” 35.
123. Jackie MacMillan, “LEAA Research—East,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women (Summer 1981): 39-41.
124. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines; Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 247–68
125. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51.
126. Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky, Non-Pro/its for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (Cambridge, Mass. 1993), in a careful study of nonprofit organizations, document the transforming effects that public monies have on the organizational structure, and ultimately missions, of nonprofits.
127. Brodyaga et al. Rape and Its Victims; Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers.”
128. Matthews, Confronting Rape.
129. Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement.”
130. Martha Burt, Janet Gornick, and Karen Pittman, “Feminism and Rape Crisis Centers,” Sexual Coercion and Assault 2 (1984): 8-13.
131. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines, 7.
132. Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 250.
133. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 50.
134. Brodyaga et al. Rape and Its Victims, 137.
135. Matthews, Confronting Rape.
136. New York Times, 5 August 1976.
137. New York Times, 22 August 1976.
138. Matthews, Confronting Rape. 90.
139. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51
140. Matthews, Confronting Rape.
141. Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers.”
142. U.S. Department of Justice, First Annual Report of the Justice Improvement Act Agencies (Washington, D.C. 1980).
143. Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement (Philadelphia, 1995).
144. Notable in Figure 2 is a second peak near the end of the 1970s, reflecting the emergence of a new issue in the “sex crimes” category, marital rape. The 1978 Rideout case marked the emergence of marital rape in the public debate on rape; see also Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change (Philadelphia, 1995). More important, the emergence of marital rape as a public issue signaled a shift in public attention toward domestic violence, and away from violence against women occurring outside the home, including rape. Activists reframed their claims about rape in response to these changes.
145. Matthews, Confronting Rape.
146. Theodore J. Lowi, The Politics of Disorder (New York, 1971)
147. Piven and Cloward, PoorPeople's Movements, 28
148. David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, eds. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century (Boulder, Colo. 1998).
149. Doug McAdam, “Biographical Consequences of Activism,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 744-60
150. Meyer and Whittier, “Spillover.”