ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a research study which looked at the governance of seventeen organisations which form part of the organised women’s movement – eight ‘traditional’ organisations which came out of ‘first-wave feminism’ around the beginning of the twentieth century; eight which came out of ‘second-wave feminism’ in the 1970s and one, the Fawcett Society, which, going back as it does to 1866 but having managed to convert itself into a very modern campaigning organisation, acts as a bridge between the two categories. In this study I have interpreted the term ‘governance’ in quite broad terms ‘to embrace all the functions performed in organisations by the members of their governing bodies’ (Cornforth and Edwards, 1998: 2), including their relationships with paid staff, rather than specifically as the performance of boards, although the latter, of course, is a recurring theme. The research1 explored three broad questions:
• What are the criteria against which to measure the successful governance of women’s organisation?
