5.5 Shifting Power
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”- Frederick Douglas, 1857 [Website]
Recall from our earlier discussion about intimate partner violence that a survivor-led social movement, sometimes called the “Battered Women’s Movement,” successfully changed how communities respond to IPV by introducing, not only new laws but new ways of thinking about IPV, like the Wheel of Power and Control (figure 5.1). With all this success, why is IPV still a serious social problem? Why are so many people still trapped in violent relationships? New laws and new ideas about violence in relationships are important steps towards ending IPV, but as long as unequal systems of power exist that rely on violence to enforce heteronormative gender norms, as do White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, Heteropatriarchy, and Capitalism, IPV will be with us.
So far, this chapter has explored how gender works to create power within unequal systems of power. In this section, we will learn about the drivers of social change. We will pay special attention to coalitional social movements that build collective power to bring about social change.
Social Change
All societies change in response to changing conditions. New technology, changes in population, changes in the environment, and changes to social institutions, like governments and religions, are common drivers of social change. For example, changing technology during the industrial revolutions of previous centuries and the current cyber-revolution have radically transformed the way people work, our educational systems, our family structures, our communities, and our relationship to the earth and its resources.
Sociologists study social change from a variety of perspectives. Karl Marx, for example, was concerned with theorizing about the conditions necessary for a large-scale social change from capitalist to socialist economies. His theories form the foundation of conflict theory, covered in Chapter Four. Recall that conflict theory identifies social inequality as a driver of social change. Sociologists who study gender look at relationships between social change and gender roles, gender identities, and gender inequality.
Changes in gender roles during and after World War Two is a rich case study for understanding how gender roles can change. During the war, the majority of people serving in the U.S. military were men. During the war, women’s participation in the workforce increased by 50% because the essential jobs that middle-class men vacated were taken up by middle-class women (Rose 2018). With this came a significant increase in women’s incomes. As women began to take over the jobs traditionally considered the domain of men, it was no longer a social taboo for middle-class women to work outside the home and earn money.
This change in gender roles was only temporary, however, and masculine social dominance was maintained after the war, as women were laid off from those jobs, and many had no choice but to retu