ABSTRACT
For at least 25 years, analysts have written about the decline of the women’s movement and the advent of a ‘post-feminist’ era. It is said that the mass mobilisations and innovative collective actions of the 1960s and 1970s have given way to complacency (or maybe exhaustion and despondency). Other writers, however, have argued what is being witnessed is the process of movements developing ‘abeyance’ structures which allow them to scale down, maintain a core of supporters and hibernate during unfavourable periods. A state of readiness is preserved, giving movements the capacity to contribute to later waves of protest.1
