Help Wanted NOW: Legal Resources, the Women's Movement, and the Battle Over Sex-Segregated Job Advertisements

This article further develops the “political process” model of social movements by analyzing historical transformations in the women's movement and equal employment policy in the mid-to-late 1960s. Confronting the model's tendency to treat social movements exclusively as a dependent variable, I outline an interactive political process framework. My framework considers not only how movements are enabled and constrained by the broader political environment, but also how challengers in turn actively reshape that environment. I also revisit the political process model's core concept of “political opportunity structure” by exploring legal rules and institutions as key elements of a movement's opportunity structure. I apply this framework specifically to initial legal battles over sex-segregated help-wanted ads and formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Historical evidence suggests that NOW was both the recipient and creator of political opportunities embedded in equal employment law, and that mobilization of legal resources is one way in which social movements interact with and transform their broader political environment.