ABSTRACT
If there is anything on which students of social movements agree, it is that a series of social, economic, and even cultural changes, no matter how dramatic, does not by itself give rise to a social movement. The considerable changes in the status and opportunities of American women described in the previous chapter were nonetheless important. They produced the conditions that made it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a women’s movement after suffrage, but at the same time created conditions that by the 1960s made it impossible to ignore women’s second-class status. But social movements, which are organized efforts to change social arrangements, are different from broad currents of social change that take place without the intention of producing a specific outcome.
