ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine two social movements as they involved young women seeking to create new paths in Wellington, New Zealand in the 1990s: the Young Women’s Division of Soka Gakkai International New Zealand (SGINZ), a lay Buddhist movement; and the radical lesbian feminist movement. I was an active participant in both movements, thus the chapter is autoethnographic, distilling insights from the perspective of a Complete Member Researcher (CMR). For each movement, I analyse the motivations for young women’s involvement, the type of revolutionary change sought, and the approach to organisation. I determine that the lesbian feminist movement of the 1990s was ‘of its time’: a flotilla lashed temporarily together to explore and create landing spaces in barely charted waters. It unleashed an outpouring of radically transgressive energy that transformed young women’s lives and the social landscape, but it struggled to support all its members in the face of internal schisms. The Young Women’s Division of the Soka Gakkai International, in contrast, existed within a tightly designed organisational structure based on deep historic roots that carefully directed participants’ energies to enhance their self-development, grow the organisation, and transform wider society. The SGINZ did not confront political oppression head-on, but rather gave young women opportunities to undertake their ‘human revolution’ with a view to contributing to social change. The overlap of the membership of these two groups suggests that individuals may be drawn to more than one model. Looking back, from a relatively near future, it is clear that social movements work in mysterious ways, with at times unexpected results.
