ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, “‘Doing Politics’: Women’s Empowerment and Community Activism,” centers on grassroots organizing and community-level action. It also explores national initiatives of groups with little political power and few of the traditional resources to be major players in the policy-making process. Women have long been active in efforts to improve, better, and reform their communities. Empowerment is the principal organizing concept of this chapter. Challenges and resistance to local power structures that individual women and diverse groups of women have undertaken encompass innovative and sometimes dangerous actions, attacking many aspects of their disempowerment. Exploring grassroots women’s activism in their communities expands ideas of power and political engagement. This chapter’s surveying and theorizing about women’s community activism also moves knowledge on political participation drawn primarily from the experiences of middle-class White women to that of working class women and to experiences of women of color and diverse ethnic backgrounds. Our ideas of what is political are greatly broadened.
