Power With: Mobilizing Around Identity and Issue

Abstract

History shows that raised consciousness of injustice, inequality and oppression leads to action. Over the last one hundred years there has been a substantial growth in, and participation by, civil society, as greater awareness and consciousness about a variety of socio-economic injustice has resulted in increased action at a local and global level. Women have been at the forefront of many struggles and yet have received little recognition for their contribution to social, economic and political change in movements beyond their struggle for emancipation and the vote. Politics and protest is portrayed as a male domain: women are visible in protest mainly through their participation in feminist or women’s causes. However, women have initiated and been part of many struggles both to women specifically and more generally.