Missed Opportunities: Social Movement Abeyance and Public Policy

Social movements can continue in hostile political climates by adapting abeyance structures, that is, disengaging from active challenge to the state on policy matters to focus instead on preserving enduring values and identity. But doing so can be politically costly. In this article we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the political outcomes of movement abeyance, drawing from recent work on political opportunity structure and policy domains. We present a more developed model of social movement abeyance, which includes not only retreat from political engagement, but also the fragmentation of a broad movement coalition, and use this model to examine the women's movement in the 1980s. We then look at the costs of movement abeyance on two policy areas: family leave and fetal protection. Partly in response to a hostile national political climate in the 1980s, the women's movement adopted a less visible public profile. This may have allowed women's groups to maintain their identity and values, but choices activists made to survive in hostile times had longer term consequences in terms of lost policy influence. We conclude with a discussion of the interaction of political opportunities and movement abeyance.