Political Generations and the Contemporary Women's Movement *

Most traditional work by political sociologists conceives of social movement activity and politics as pertaining only to the public world and political activity as inherently masculine. Women are virtually invisible in these accounts. That the nature of political and social change is shaped by the organization of gender is a fact obscured in the conceptualizations typically employed. One such concept is political generation. Virtually no scholarly work has been done to analyze women in terms of political generations. Political generations are taken as sex‐neutral phenomena with no hint that the organization of politics is based in the social organization of gender. Indeed, perhaps the major assumption of generational analysis, that generations are formed during youth and its accompanying period of rebellion and change, has not been subject to sustained scrutiny; this model may well capture the male, but possibly not, the female experience. Nevertheless, the generational model might be usefully applied to an understanding of the growth and transformation of the women's movement. When women are put at the center of inquiry, the notion of political generations takes on new meanings, and it raises questions about who, how, and when social groups come to experience similar perceptions and understandings of reality. This analysis begins with a selective summary of the assumptions and directions of generational analysis in social science. Contemporary media use of generational analysis follows with an eye to the ways in which media representation has shaped some women's movement dialogue. Feminist generational thinking is explored as it attempts to account for the history of the women's movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and for the relations of young and old in the contemporary movement. Possible directions for further research and reformulation are suggested.