Qualitative Sociology, Vol.21, No. 4, 1998
Feminist Methodologyin SocialMovements
Research
Verta Ihylor
Feminist social scientists have developed distinctive principles of inquiry that
depart from the positivist ideal of the detached, value-free scientist and are
consistent with the feminist goal of rendering women's experiences visible and
challenging gender inequality. In this article, I show how my research on the
postpartum depression self-help movement illustrates five features of feminist
methodology: a gender perspective, accentuation of women's experiences,
reflexivity, participatory methods, and social action.My intent is to demonstrate
how attention to the epistemological and methodological questionsposed by
feminist researchers produces new standards of evidence that allow us to
recognize the gendering of social movement processes and theory.
KEY WORDS: feminist research; social movements;women's self-help.
Despite considerable interest in women's movements, scholars of social
movements have been relatively unconcerned with the vexing epistemologi-
cal and methodological problems posed by a growing body of writings that
advocate the use of feminist methods in research. On the one hand, this
is not surprising. For just as there are diverse views among feminists about
the best strategies for achieving gender equality, feminist scholars hold di-
verse views about the kinds of knowledge feminists are to produce (Harding
1986; Hawkesworth 1989; Nielson 1990; Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1991;
Collins 1991), the appropriate methods for doing feminist research (Stanley
and Wise 1983; DeVault 1990; Fonow and Cook 1991; Cancian 1992; Reinharz
1992; Risman, Sprague, and Howard 1993), and even whether there is such
Direct correspondence to Verta Taylor, Department of Sociology, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 North
Oval Mall, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1353; e-mail: vat@ohstsoca.
sbs.ohio-state.edu.
357
c 1998 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
a thing as a distinct feminist methodology (Grant, Ward, and Rong 1987).
On the other hand, social movements research is one of the areas in which
a strong tradition of qualitative research persists, and many of the questions
feminists raise about the knowledge production process in social research
can be seen as general criticisms of the scientific method and the strong
pressures toward quantification and away from contextualized knowledge
that signal scientific precision (Nielson 1990; Lather 1991; Denzin and Lin-
coln 1994; Agger 1998).
I must confess that, even though most of my research has focused on
women's movements, at first I was skeptical about the relevance of feminist
methodology for social movements research. Feminist scholarship begins in
the recognition that the positivist model of science is merely one model of
reality, that science is shaped by human beings and filtered through human
consciousness, and that traditional positivist science reflects and reinforces
dominant culture and values (DuBois 1983). As a qualitative researcher, I
saw the distinction between feminist and qualitative methods as a false di-
vide because the post-positivist qualitative research tradition attempts to
respond to some of the same dilemmas of subjectivity versus objectivity,
local knowledges versus context-free generalization, and action versus the-
ory that feminist research does. Then a body of quantitative research by
feminists revealed that it is possible to separate method, epistemology, and
methodology in a way that makes it possible to distinguish between feminist
research methods and the same methods practiced in accordance with al-
ternative theories (Jayaratne and Stewart 1991; Steinberg and Haignere
1991; Steinberg 1996). By accentuating the connections between theory, re-
search, and experience, this work demonstrated that quantitative research
can also challenge the impersonality, elements of inequality, and excessive
rationalization associated with conventional social science methods. In an
essay that attempts to move beyond the debate over whether qualitative
methods are more feminist than quantitative methods, Gottfried (1996:5)
identifies a common theme in feminist research: "Feminism as method sees
the representation of women's experience as the beginning and often the
end of the production of knowledge claims." If feminist scholarship begins
by asking questions informed by women's exclusion in the world and from
the standpoint of a personal life that has yet to be taken seriously by others,
the aim of feminist research is to expand science and culture to create
knowledge that makes a difference in the world. Ultimately feminist meth-
odology aims to outline an approach to research consistent with feminist
aims of challenging gender inequality and empowering women. It is in this
sense that I place the project that I am about to describe squarely within
the context of the developing tradition of feminist methods in social move-
ments research. My intent is to show, however, that producing feminist re-
358 Taylor
search can be as unsettling to the researcher as it is to the conceptual
categories that frame the research.
In this article I use my experience studying the postpartum depression
self-help movement to describe the process of doing feminist research on
a social movement. Only a handful of social movements researchers have
explicitly acknowledged using feminist methods (Thorne 1978; Mies 1983,
1991; Ryan 1992; Brown and Ferguson 1995; Reinelt 1995; Whittier 1995;
Taylor and Rupp 1991, 1996; Beckwith 1996; Naples 1996; Taylor 1996;
Naples and Clark 1996; Robnett 1997; Fonow forthcoming). Scholars in-
terested in advancing principles of feminist inquiry (Nielson 1990; Reinharz
1992), nevertheless, point to Jo Freeman's (1975) landmark study of the
1960s women's movement as an example of the multimethodological, ex-
periential, contextual, involved, and politically relevant nature of feminist
research. It was nearly a decade after Freeman's book was published, and
well before a voluminousliterature appeared on feminist research methods,
that I had a rare opportunity to launch a feminist research project.
At first it seemed as though the research chose me, instead of the
reverse. The director of the Office of Program Evaluation and Research
of the Ohio Department of Mental Health approached me about doing a
sociological study of postpartum depression. Although the topic seemed a
bit far afield from my ongoing interest in feminism and women's move-
ments, learning that Dagmar Celeste, an ardent feminist and then wife of
Ohio Governor Richard Celeste, was behind the study sparked my interest.
During her husand's political campaign, Celeste had spoken frequently in
public forums about the crisp whiter day six months after their sixth and
last child was born when, at home caring for the new baby and playing
games with her three other young children, her "speech turned into riddles
and rhymes, [her] body could not sit, stand or lie still, and [her] mind was
racing at ever-increasing speed while [her] soul was terrified." Hospitalized
for two months and treated through a combination of psychotherapy and
antidepressant and antianxiety medications, Celeste had come to define
what happened to her as postpartum depression. Celeste had revealed,
however, that in seeking treatment, she had discovered that the medical
establishment did not consider postpartum illness a legitimate psychiatric
disorder. In the nineteenth century, there was fairly universal consensus on
the existence of postpartum illness, which accounted for approximately 10
pecent of hospitalizations. Charlotte Perkins Oilman's literary masterpiece
The Yellow Wallpaper recounts the anguish of her depression followingchild-
birth. Over time, however, the condition disappeared from the medical lit-
erature on the grounds that it reified women's biological differences from
men. In 1952, postpartum illness dropped out of the psychiatric nomencla-
ture with the publication of the first edition of the American Psychiatric
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 359
Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Subsequently, every
edition of the DSM, the official handbook of mental illness, has excluded
psychiatric illness connected to childbirth as a distinct diagnostic category
on the grounds that "there is disagreement about the importance of child-
birth as the precipitating factor" (Hamilton and Harberger 1992:18).
Dagmar Celeste had been an avid feminist since the 1960s, had re-
cently earned a bachelor's degree in women's studies, and maintained
strong ties not only to local and state feminists but to other progressive
groups on the national scene. Working through the Director of the Ohio
Department of Mental Health, who was also a nationally recognized femi-
nist lawyer and major player in the radical branch of the women's move-
ment in central Ohio in the 1970s (Whittier 1995), Celeste convinced the
department to fund a sociological study of postpartum depression. As a
staunch feminist, Celeste wanted two assurances. First and foremost, the
study was to be carried out by a team of feminist researchers who would
focus on the sociological aspects of postpartum illness. Second, the princi-
pal investigator would act as a feminist advocacy researcher (Steinberg
1996), which meant not only conducting research that contributes to social
change but working on policy initiatives that benefit women and families
affected by postpartum illness. The important point is that how I got in-
volved in studying the postpartum support group movement helps to ex-
plain how I came to view the problem of postpartum illness through a social
movement lens. Celeste, along with a woman in Santa Barbara, California,
and another in New Jersey, both of whom were also long-time activists in
the feminist movement, were spearheading the formation of a national self-
help movement around the issue of postpartum illness.
In this article, I show how attention to the epistemological and meth-
odological questions posed by feminist researchers shaped my study of the
postpartum self-help movement. After providing a brief overview of the
movement, I organize the discussion around five features that most writers
would agree are the core of a distinctive feminist methodology: a focus on
gender and gender inequality, a spotlight on the everyday experiences of
women, reflexivity as a source of insight, an emphasis on participatory
methods, and a policy or action component (Fonow and Cook 1991; Can-
cian 1992; Reinharz 1992). Of what use are these practices unless they allow
us to identify and rectify problems in conventional frameworks? The goal
of those who advocate feminist research is to make women's experiences
visible, render them important, and use them to correct distortions from
previous empirical research and theoretical assumptions that fail to recog-
nize the centrality of gender to social life. I conclude, therefore, by dis-
cussing how a feminist research approach not only allowed me to recognize
360 Taylor
the gendering of social movement processes and theory, but also to ques-
tion feminist criticisms of women's self-help.
THE POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION SELF-HELP
MOVEMENT
The social movement that participants refer to as "the postpartum de-
pression self-help movement" consists of two separate but interacting na-
tional social movement organizations, Depression After Delivery (D.A.D.)
and Postpartum Support International (P.S.I.). Both groups formed in the
mid-1980s out of the experiences of women who suffered serious postpar-
tum psychiatric illness and were able to find sources of treatment and sup-
port that confirmed their self-diagnoses. The movement gathered steam
between 1986 and 1988 through sweeping publicity that began with the
founder of D.A.D.'s appearance on the "Phil Donahue Show." Widespread
media attention, especially to the possible link between postpartum illness
and infanticide, helped Depression After Delivery grow into a network of
more than 250 support groups tied together in some cases by state or re-
gional-level associations. Today the movement operates through a "warm
line" that links women with support groups, national and regional confer-
ences, newsletters and publications, and a network of lay and professional
leaders and experts whose perspective on postpartum illness is sanctioned
by the movement. Its membership consists mainly of women who have suf-
fered major depression or psychosis connected to childbirth, a small num-
ber of husbands of women who have endured major depressions and
psychoses, and a handful of medical and mental health professionals and
researchers interested in the treatment and study of postpartum disorders.
Consistent with the mainly white and middle-class composition of the or-
ganizations that historically have made up the feminist movement in the
U.S. (Buechler 1990), participants in the postpartum support group move-
ment come from the white, educated, upper-middle class thought to make
up the demographic base of the new social movements (Klandermans and
Tarrow 1988; Kriesi 1989). This constituency calls attention to the move-
ment's structural origins among white middle-class women struggling to bal-
ance work and family roles as their participation in paid employment has
caught up with that of African American, single, and working-class women
(Hochschild 1989; Reskin and Padavic 1994; on role strain and postpartum
depression, see Taylor 1987).
The three main strategies of the postpartum depression movement-
direct service, consciousness-raising, and lobbying--wereborrowed directly
from the women's health movement of the 1970s. Support groups supply
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 361
information, material aid, and emotional support to women and their fami-
lies. In the postpartum self-help movement, women find support and com-
munity not only through face-to-face groups, but also through indirect
channels such as telephone networks, self-help reading and talk shows, and
pen-pal networks, all of which serve to confirm shared experiences and
open windows on new identities (Giddens 1991). Just as important as the
services they provide, support groups create a social space in which par-
ticipants can develop experientially based explanations of and solutions to
their problems as alternative or supplement to professional knowledge.
Self-help groups also provide preventive education to populations at risk
and educate medical, mental health, and legal professionals, as well as poli-
ticians and the public at large, about the needs of women and their families.
Finally, activists in the postpartum support movement engage in a variety
of institutional change strategies, such as pressuring medical and mental
health professionals to treat postpartum illness as a legitimate psychiatric
disorder, lobbying for legal recognition of a postpartum psychiatric defense
in cases when women are charged with killing their children, demanding
health insurance coverage for postpartum illness as a complication of preg-
nancy, and advocating new experimental treatments, such as progesterone
treatment and the use of antidepressants in pregnant and nursing women
(for a more complete description of the movement, see Taylor 1996).
THE FEMINIST RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
There is remarkable agreement among feminists that five features
make up the core of feminist methodology. It is important to keep in mind
that these elements were derived from reviews of existing research by femi-
nist scholars and should be viewed as a summary of extant practices rather
than as a rigid model of the way feminist research should be done. While
I had used some of these strategies in my prior work on women's move-
ments, the postpartum project was my first attempt to deploy all five fea-
tures of feminist research.
Gender and Inequality
The most essential feature of feminist research is its attention to gen-
der and gender inequality. The history of my postpartum depression project
shows how central gender and gender inequality were to the research from
the outset, although like most feminist research I sought to combine femi-
nist theory with disciplinary theories (Reinharz 1992:249). The seeds were
362 Taylor
planted in the spring of 1982 when the director of the Office of Research
and Evaluation of the Ohio Department of Mental Health, herself a soci-
ologist, convened a meeting with feminist social scientists on the Ohio State
University campus. It was at this meeting that I learned that Dagmar Ce-
leste was eager for the department to sponsor a study of the social aspects
of postpartum illness. Although the media had used Celeste's psychiatric
history to question her emotional stability when her husband ran for office,
her commitment to research on postpartum illness was motivated more by
her own feminist convictions than by her husband's political aspirations.
As a result, when the research director of the Ohio Department of Mental
Health insisted that she would not sponsor a project without a guarantee
there would be no interference with the research, the governor's office set
only one condition: the study was to be carried out by a feminist researcher.
Celeste was adamant in her insistence that the study take a critical stance
by questioning conventional definitions and explanations of postpartum ill-
ness found in the medical and psychiatric literature. Reviewing this litera-
ture I found that empirical studies of postpartum illness were rare. Early
medical literature on postpartum disorders focused principally on hormonal
explanations, heredity, and personality (Hamilton 1962). A newer body of
psychological writings paid more attention to psychological and social fac-
tors by placing childbirth and postpartum disorders squarely within a social
stress research tradition (Atkinson and Rickel 1984). Not only had there
had been no studies to date of the sociological aspects of postpartum ill-
ness, there was no attention to the role that gender processes might play
in relation to the meanings postpartum illness has for those who experience
it as well as for the professionals who manage its definition and treatment
(Nixon 1985).
Thus began a project that employed a team of four to six graduate
research associates, generated several different kinds of qualitative data,
and took me nearly ten years to complete. Since the beginning of the re-
search, I was fortunate to have had the support of the sponsoring agency
in designing a project in accord with the emerging standards of feminist
research. The Ohio State University Department of Sociology, Center for
Women's Studies, and Office of Research and Graduate Studies also sup-
plied one-fourth of the approximately $100,000 total funding for the pro-
ject. Although the research did not start out as a study of a social
movement, I ended up conceptualizing the project in this way because I
found it the most meaningful and valid way to think about the struggle
taking place over postpartum illness. I have sought in this research to de-
scribe postpartum illness and women's self-help from women's own point
of view and to provide an explanation of the postpartum self-help move-
ment that links it to gender inequality. My contact with activists made it
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 363
clear that women were not simply seeking to medicalize and essentialize
women's personal experiences of motherhood. Instead, they were using this
issue as an opportunity not only to question the male-dominated medical
establishment but to resist the orthodox white and middle-class view of the
selfless, devoted, glowing mother and to convey the variety of women's ex-
periences of motherhood. In my preliminary interviews with activists I
found that women tended to use the term "postpartum depression" not in
the strict clinical sense, but rather to communicate a complex of distressing
emotions that violate gendered emotion norms pertaining to motherhood.
1b gain insight into the emotional expectations that apply to new moth-
ers, I began the data-gathering process by examining the popular and pro-
fessional discourses on childbirth and mothering. The sample included 100
items from the prescriptive literature, including popular magazines, best-
selling books, and manuals on childbirth, parenting, and motherhood pub-
lished between 1975 and 1994. I also examined scientific and medical
publications on postpartum psychiatric illness, including a sample (35) of
the most commonly used medical and nursing textbooks published between
1975 and 1994. Finally, I drew from interviewswith 56 medical and mental
health providers--including obstetricians and gynecologists, pediatricians,
psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and clergy--to uncover
discrepancies between actual medical and mental health practices and the
conception of postpartum illness presented in formal medical discourse.
If there was a single finding that confirmed my decision to study this
problem from a social movement perspective, it was the fact that I discov-
ered in analyzing these data sources an emerging feminist discourse about
postpartum illness. And this discourse, which contested dominant medical
views, was produced by activists associated with the burgeoning postpartum
self-help movement.
A second rationale for a social movements approach also became ap-
parent very quickly. My research itself was intertwined with the emergence
of the movement. Not only did Dagmar Celeste's activism on behalf of
postpartum illness precipitate my interest in the topic, but the participatory
methods shaped the course of the movement. For example, I frequently
spoke at movement-sponsored conferences and provided research reports
used to draft speeches for Dagmar Celeste. The media put the spotlight
on my research locally and nationally, as for example, when Jane Brody's
"Personal Health" column on postpartum depression in the New York Times
referred to my research and concluded by listing the telephone number of
Depression After Delivery, one of the two main self-help organizations.
Research and activism interacted symbiotically. Tb the extent that activists
in the movement were searching for new understandings of women's prob-
lems, it is difficult to assess the extent to which my research, which framed
364 Taylor
postpartum illness in terms of gender inequality, influenced the collective
action frame of the movement. But certainly feminism has played an im-
portant part in the mobilization and course of the movement. For this rea-
son, I also made gender central in charting the course of the movement
by using this case to explore the relationships among gender, the ideas and
strategies of contemporary women's self-help movements, and feminism.
Experience
The women's movement historically has mobilized out of women's
most fundamental everyday experiences of gender oppression and chal-
lenged society to look at the world through women's eyes (Ferree and Hess
1994). In the academy, feminists from all the mainstream disciplines have
argued in the same vein that the topics and theoretical frameworks of the
social sciences all too often have been male-centered and need to be reex-
amined and reconceptualized in light of women's experiences (Stacey and
Thorne 1985). Empirical feminist research seeks to validate, give voice to,
and understand the experiences of women and men who have been mar-
ginalized or ignored in traditional research. While this, at first, led to the
privileging of qualitative methods, in recent years feminist researchers have
placed greater emphasis on understanding women as subjects in their own
right rather than treating them as objects of research. This has opened the
door for quantitative researchers to use feminist techniques at the same
time that it has clarified the way qualitative studies also can support in-
equality (Sprague and Zimmerman 1989). Feminist scholarship, whether
qualitative or quantitative, involves bringing the researcher into the matrix
of knowing in order to know the the issues, blind spots, politics, and com-
mitments that might impede the researcher's ability to listen to and hear
voices unlike one's own.
At first, I was interested primarily in women's experiences of post-
partum illness for what they tell us about the meanings of gender, moth-
erhood, and the female self. Rather than begin with medical definitions
of postpartum illness, I sought to understand the complexity and range of
women's emotions in their own terms. The cornerstone of the initial re-
search was fifty-two open-ended, in-depth interviews conducted between
1985 and 1989 with women who self-identified as having suffered "emo-
tional problems" in the year following the birth or adoption of a child.
For purposes of comparison, a team of four interviewers (including myself)
also interviewed a second group of 50 women who had given birth to or
adopted a child within the previous two years and were not asked to iden-
tify their emotional response as a criterion for being interviewed. To locate
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 365
the interviewees, the research team posted notices at home birthing cen-
ters, day-care centers, physicians' offices, hospital maternity units, social
service agencies, restaurants, a citywidebaby fair, and in local newspapers
in an attempt to reach a diverse group of women. The 300 women who
responded were somewhat older white women with higher levels of income
and education than American mothers in general, even though we made
numerous attempts to construct a diverse sample of interviewees in terms
of class, race, and sexuality. The final sample included traditional nuclear
families, single parents, lesbian parents, and adoptive parents (for a more
detailed description of the demographic characteristics of the interviewees,
see Taylor 1996:36).
I chose the semi-structured interview method because of its compati-
bility with my commitment, as a feminist scholar, to allowing women to
describe their experiences in their own terms, to developing more egalitar-
ian relationships with interviewees, and to encouraging interviewees to in-
troduce new research questions based on their own lived experiences. To
facilitate rapport, the majority of interviews were conducted in the inter-
viewee's homes, and members of the research team provided childcare in
many instances. The interviews lasted between one to four hours and were
tape-recorded. A loosely structured set of questions guided the interviews,
although in reality they were more like structured conversations. The ob-
jective was to encourage women to elaborate on their experiences in order
to allow the emergence of unanticipated issues. In accordance withfeminist
interviewing principles, we avoided treating the mothers as objective in-
struments of data production through various strategies intended to estab-
lish non-hierarchical relations with the women, such as providing
information and resources when women asked for it, using interactive
strategies to prod discussion, and allowing ourselves to become personally
involved with interviewees in several instances (see Oakley 1981 for a dis-
cussion of feminist interviewing strategies).
These interviews were supplemented by 56 semi-structured interviews,
conducted between 1985 and 1989, with medical and mental health provid-
ers, and by an analysis of the self-help and medical and scientific discourse
on childbirth, postpartum illness, and motherhood published between 1975
and 1994. These data opened my eyes to the renegotiation of motherhood
taking place through the discussion of postpartum illness in the popular
advice literature and to the challenge women are posing to the discourses
and practices of medicine and mental health that do not accurately reflect
women's own experiences of motherhood. Even if women tend to subsume
their problems under the generic label "postpartum depression," the feel-
ings and signs of postpartum illness from the standpoint of new mothers
are much broader and cluster around the four basic emotions of guilt, anxi-
366 Taylor
ety, depression, and anger. Women's stories make it evident that, at least
for some women, the emotional experiences of motherhood are almost the
antithesis of the dominant white middle-class model of mothering--that of
a caring relationship almost entirely in women's hands. The women inter-
viewed for this study made it clear that it was not the reactions of physi-
cians, nurses, and medical providers that led them to assess their feelings
as a sign of postpartum depression. Indeed, only a handful ever discussed
their emotions with health providers. To the contrary, most of these women
view themselves as victims of an unresponsive male-dominated medical es-
tablishment that failed to hear their "cries for help." Rather, they hear
confirmation of their feelings in the voices of other women who, as part
of a submerged network of self-help groups, share their personal experi-
ences of postpartum illness through self-help reading, parenting and baby
magazines, television talk shows, childbirth education classes, parent edu-
cation courses, and mutual support groups. This led me to question the
usefulness of labeling and medicalization theories of women's mental health
that treat women primarily as passive victims of medical and psychiatric
diagnosis and practice for understanding posptartum illness (Oakley 1984;
Schur 1984; Lunbeck 1994). Instead, I drew from Thoit's self-labeling ap-
proach to relate women's negative emotions to the contradictory meanings,
or the emotion norms of motherhood, as described by the interviewees and
debated in popular, self-help, scientific and medical writings on postpartum
illness.
When, in the course of my research, a self-help movement focused on
postpartum depression began to emerge in Ohio, this opened the door for
me to begin thinking about women organizing around postpartum illness
as a means of resisting and challenging the dominant construction of moth-
erhood that is so pivotal to women's subordination. As my research ques-
tion expanded to the postpartum self-help movement, the data-gathering
shifted to activists involved in the self-help campaign, the two major self-
help organizations--Depression After Delivery (D.A.D.) and Postpartum
Support International (ES.I.)--and the variety of forms of support that are
the heart of women's self-help. Between 1990 and 1991,1 conducted sem-
istructured tape-recorded interviewswith 29 participants (24 women and 5
men) in the postpartum support group movement, including the leaders of
both D.A.D. and RS.I. in accordance with the same feminist principles de-
scribed above. To get a broader picture of the movement, in 1994 I mailed
an open-ended survey to D.A.D.'s 220 telephone support contacts around
the country. That I identified myself as a member of both national self-help
groups and an activist in the movement undoubtedly helped obtain a 60
percent response rate.
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 367
Reflexivity
The objectivity assumption--orthe notion that there is an independent
reality to be known separate from the subjective knower--is integral to the
textbook definition of science. The equivalent epistemological presumption
in feminist-based inquiry is reflexivity, which is the idea that subjective ex-
perience, including actions and feelings that derive from the researcher's
own social location, influences the production and interpretation of re-
search (Collins 1989; Richardson 1990; Fonow and Cook 1991; Ellis and
Flaherty 1992). This element of feminist research stems from the belief
that all methdologies are, to a degree, shaped by the interests and position
of the researchers who deploy them (Bonacich 1989). Particularly relevant
to feminist inquiry is the notion of standpoint epistemology, or the idea
that women's status as a subordinate group enhances the production of
knowledge. Women's marginality, it is believed, provides a kind of double
vision of being both an insider and outsider that sensitizes the feminist
researcher to both the dominant worldview and women's own subordinated
perspective (Hartsock 1983, 1996; Collins 1989). Who we are, according to
this view, is spoken into existence in every aspect of the research endeavor.
It took me a long time to write Rock-a-by Baby, the book based on
my research on postpartum illness. Although the reasons are intellectual
as well as personal, completing the project led me to agree wholeheartedly
with Susan Krieger (1991), who writes in Social Science and the Self that
our arguments are always based to a certain extent on our own experiences.
Researching the postpartum self-help movement admittedly has changed
the way I think about the nature and significance of feminism. At the same
time, the changes that took place in my life while I was completing this
project influenced the direction of the study almost as much as the delib-
erate research strategies.
At first postpartum depression seemed an unlikely subject for me.
True, my dissertation was about mental health and focused on the emer-
gence of an indigenous network of mental health services when a tornado
tore through Xenia, Ohio, in 1974. But I had not worked on the sociology
of mental health for 10 years. I had just coauthored a book on the Ameri-
can women's movement in the doldrum years of the 1940s and 1950s. Little
did I know at the outset that my research on postpartum depression would
tie together my earlier and current interests. For in listening to women's
voices and observing their collective efforts not simply to have their per-
sonal needs met but to question the larger system of gender relations and
to agitate for changes in the medical and legal systems, I began to see a
part of the women's movement I had not noticed before. This research, as
it turned out, made more connections than I ever would have imagined to
368 Taylor
my work on women's movements, which has focused on women's commu-
nities as sources of feminist protest and as sites where women are negoti-
ating new understandings of what it means to be a woman (Taylor and
Whittier 1992; Taylor and Rupp 1993).
Over time, I also realized that this research was about my own ex-
perience of depression which struck in the midst of the project. My dark
cloud came after several months of debilitating pain that led me to have
a total hysterectomy at the age of 41. Almost immediately, I began expe-
riencing hot flashes, and within a matter of weeks after the surgery I was
anxious, unable to concentrate, and couldn't sleep. Over the course of the
next three months, I was hospitalized two more times, once for compli-
cations resulting from the surgery and once in cardiac intensive care, a
result of the stress of recovery and a family history of early death from
heart disease. Finally, a full-blown clinical depression set in, and I was
unable to eat, sleep, leave my house, or even read a book for nearly six
months. During the same period, my step-father was diagnosed with can-
cer, and he died four months later. Life seemed hopeless and not worth
living until I finally agreed reluctantly, after three months of psychother-
apy and only as an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization, to take the
antidepressants my female physician had prescribed. Within a matter of
days, I was back on my feet and in six months found that I was able to
stop taking the medication.
Up to that time, the depression I had been studying had been more
academic than real. As a feminist, I had been critical of the turn toward
recovery and self-help taken by the modern women's movement since the
1980s. As a sociologist, I have long been skeptical that helping individuals
will do much to change the social structures and institutions I believe are
reponsible for people's real suffering. And as a typical American, I was
dubious about turning to medication to solve my unhappiness. I vividly re-
member that about a year after I recovered from the depression, I gave a
talk about my research on postpartum depression at a local hospital. What
I had to say must have reflected the changes taking place in my thinking.
For Dagmar Celeste, who happened to be in the audience, approached me
and said, "I thought you understood our problem before. Now I can see
you really understand what it is like to be depressed."
While the book I wrote based on the research is not in any way a
memoir of my own experiences, a central tenet of feminist research is the
recognition that the social location and standpoint of the author shapes
one's observations and interpretations. Although I relied on theories and
arguments that come from the disciplines of sociology and women's studies
to understand postpartum illness, I undoubtedly projected a great deal of
myself onto this topic. There is another reason I discussed my own de-
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 369
pression. It seemed voyeuristic to lay bare the lives of the depressed
women I studied without articulating the meaning of depression in my
own life. In this vein, some readers may wonder why I have chosen to
use the names of self-help activists in the text. The fact is that most of
the self-help activists I interviewed are public figures who not only are
accustomed to being quoted in the media, but would consider confiden-
tiality an impediment to the movement's aim of bringing the problem of
postpartum illness into the public domain.
If over the course of my research, I also came to understand depres-
sion in a more personal way, I have also come to terms with my own de-
cision not to bear and raise children. I have never been sure exactly how
or when I came to the conclusion that I did not want to be a mother. But
being reflective about both the self and other in research made me aware
that my own childlessness, in part, motivated my desire to understand the
significance of motherhood in the lives of the women in my study (see also
McMahon 1996). It is perhaps a sign that women's self-definitions revolve
less around motherhood than they once did that the women I got to know
while doing this study never questioned my decision. Nor did they challenge
my ability to understand and write about their lives because I never moth-
ered a child. Ironically, the greatest resistance came from a feminist col-
league whose suspicion about my status as a non-mother created such
self-doubts that, once again, I found myself immobilized. One of the un-
anticipated bonuses of using participatory methods was that several of my
research participants helped resolve this impasse by reading initial drafts
and validating my analysis.
Participatory Methods
If the textbook model of scientific inquiry describes research as a one-
way process in which the researcher elicits and receives data, feminist con-
ventions are almost the reverse. Feminists advocate research techniques
designed to break down the false separation and hierarchy between the
researcher and the researched. This includes not only participating in the
activist community being studied but empowering the community by en-
couraging their involvement in the research process (Cancian 1996; Naples
and Clark 1996). 1b this end, I sought the advice of self-help activists in
designing the study, identifying interviewees and obtaining other data
sources, and interpreting results. In addition to the individual level data, I
relied upon three additional sources of information obtained through eth-
nographic methods that provided a point of entry into the self-help com-
munity. First, D.A.D. and P.S.I, generously opened their files to me,
370 Taylor
providing access to organizational documents, personal correspondence,
surveys of their membership, copies of D.A.D.'s quarterly newsletter Heart-
strings from 1987 to 1995, and files of 30 infanticide cases maintained at
D.A.D. national headquarters. Second, I watched, taped, and obtained writ-
ten transcripts of television talk-shows and news programs that featured
self-help activists. Finally, I conducted fieldwork on the movement from
1988 to 1993. I attended local and regional conferences and training ses-
sions, board meetings of national D.A.D., the annual conference of Post-
partum Support International, quarterly meetings of Depression After
Delivery Ohio, and spent endless hours on the telephone, eating meals,
and socializing with members of these groups. Often the boundary between
my life and the field site seemed to disappear, as when I provided support
during my vacation at the beach to an activist and friend who had been
hospitalized after a recurrence of postpartum psychosis. On another occa-
sion, as a result of a referral from P.S.I., I found a source of help for a
young man who teaches on my own campus. His wife suffered such a severe
depression following the birth of their second child that their marriage was
about to dissolve. While I always presented myself as a researcher, I have
been influenced by feminist writings that value openness, reciprocity, and
empathy between the researcher and the person studied (Smith 1979; Col-
lins 1989; Krieger 1991; Oakley 1991). I therefore spoke openly with in-
terviewees about my own experience of depression, my feminism, and the
fact that I am not a mother myself.
Another way that feminist participatory research departs from con-
ventional scientific investigation is through the use of strategies that in-
volve activist community organizations in designing the study and
analyzing the results. In developing the social movements phase of the
project, I relied heavily upon the advice of a group of lay and professional
volunteers interested in postpartum illness who convened at the Ohio gov-
ernor's residence in August 1989 to launch a statewide network of support
groups in Ohio. The collaboration did not end there. I frequently sought
the advice of participants in my interpretation of their experiences. At
times, I treated movement activists as key informants, for example, when
I asked a physician to read my account of the medical debate over post-
partum conditions or when I asked Jane Honikman, founder of P.S.I., to
validate my reading of the feminist origins of the movement. Frequently,
I sent preliminary copies of papers to participants to make certain I was
not imposing my views on the women. When Rock-a-by Baby was published,
nearly everyone I had interviewed who was affiliated with the movement
received a complimentary copy of the book, and some women wrote
lengthy letters of gratitude.
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 371
I used discussions with interviewees and presentations to support
groups not merely to present research findings but also to share theoretical
and research skills that have been useful to the movement. My goal was
to render women agents involved in interpreting their own problems rather
than to become another "expert" involved in creating knowledge that
might misinterpret women's postpartum experiences. Not surprisingly,my
research has found its way into the speeches and popular and scholarly
writings of numerous self-help activists. On nearly every occasion when I
have given presentations on my research at academic institutions inside
and outside the state, I have been surprised to discover self-help activists
in attendance, and they generally participate vocally in the question and
answer period. Certainly not all self-help activists see the movement in
the same light that I do, and some women have disagreed with my inter-
pretation, but at least my research has not remained detached from the
people I studied. That I sought in various ways to empower participants
at the same time that I was researching the movement has meant that I
have experienced this research as less alienating than some of the previous
research I have done. More important, I am firmly convinced that research
done in cooperation with community activists is more likely to benefit
powerless groups.
Action
Knowledge-generation is the starting point of most academic research,
but feminist research often begins out of a commitment to social activism
(Naples and Clark 1996; Naples 1998). Ideally feminist inquiry has a policy
component that benefits a particular group of women and aims to reduce
gender inequality (Spalter-Roth and Hartmann 1996). It is the action com-
ponent of feminist research that frequently produces tension in the lives
of feminists who struggle to balance the contraditions between the openly
political and biased nature of research advocating policy for women and
the presumed political neutrality and unbiased assumptions embodied in
basic scientific standards (Steinberg 1996). Since the beginning of my re-
search I have been fortunate that The Ohio Department of Mental Health
encouraged me to build into the project an action component as a condition
of receiving the grant.
At the same time that I was engaged in researching the postpartum
self-help movement, I sought to make the results of my work available to
policy-makers who might make changes to benefit women who have suf-
fered postpartum illness. I did this in several ways. At the end of the first
two-year funding period, the Ohio Department of Mental Health sponsored
372 Taylor
state-wide conferences in two different regions of Ohio to disseminate pre-
liminary research results. The audience included policy makers in health,
mental health, and human services. I also invited the women and men in-
terviewed for the study to these conferences with the aim of breaking down
the division between "expert discourses" and the women whose needs are
in question (Fraser 1989). That the feminist approach to research has real
meaning for participants came home to me when one woman attending
the conference expressed feelings of empowerment by exclaiming, "you
used my words in your presentation!" It was at one of these conferences
that Karen Mumford, one of the founders of Ohio D.A.D., came into con-
tact with Dagmar Celeste. Shortly afterwards, in 1989 the postpartum sup-
port movement in Ohio began to take shape as Mumford joined efforts
with Celeste, who has never lost sight of the conviction that mutual support
and caring are the cornerstone of feminism. Together they sought to create
a statewide system of small groups of women to support each other per-
sonally and act politically to break the silence surrounding "motherhood
and madness."
In addition, I served on Dagmar Celeste's personal Advisory Board.
In this capacity, I advised her staff on policy with respect to women's
mental health and on the establishment of a statewide network of post-
partum support groups. I also drafted material for speeches Celeste de-
livered locally and nationally about her own experience with postpartum
illness. I made numerous presentations on my research to health pro-
fesionals at local hospitals and to movement activists, including Ohio De-
pression After Delivery. In addition, I have lectured to dozens of
academic audiences around the country about the research. Media pub-
licity about my research also furthered activism surrounding postpartum
illness. When my research was featured in outlets such as The Columbus
Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, The Montreal Gazette, The New York Times,
Self Magazine, and American Health Magazine, I referred the professionals
and individuals who contacted me to the two national self-help organi-
zations. Finally, I have served as an advocate for those campaigning to
win a psychiatric defense for women charged with killing their children
in connection with postpartum illness by writing letters on their behalf
to parole boards. Since my book on the postpartum self-help movement
was published--and I chose to publish with a trade publisher rather than
a universitypress in order to make the findings more accessible to women
who have suffered postpartum illness--I have been contacted by several
women incarcerated in the state of Ohio. If it was often difficult to bal-
ance the tenets of academic research with my commitment to advocacy
on behalf of these women, little did I realize the intellectual rewards that
I would reap from moving in both the political and academic worlds.
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 373
IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY
In studying postpartum illness and the social movement that emerged
to address this problem, my goal initially was to use research procedures
that fit the feminist goal of challenging gender inequality and empowering
women and other marginal groups. Ultimately, however, the purpose of
social science research is to explain, and thereby to solve, social problems.
If, as feminists hold, women experience a series of erasures and distortions
owing to their structural location that can become epistemologically con-
stitutive, how do feminist methods allow us to see features of the world
that remain invisible or secondary to conventional research? What new
points were incorporated into my thinking as a result of the feminist
method? How was my understanding of social movements transformed?
Researching the postpartum depression movement has influenced the
way that I think about social movements in general and feminism more
specifically. Feminist scholars interested in the study of social movements
recently have called attention to the gendering of both social movement
processes and theory (Barnett 1993; McAdam 1992; Naples 1992;
Neuhouser 1995; Blee 1996; Robnett 1997; Gamson 1997; Staggenborg
1998a). They hold that the preoccupation with movements operating in the
political and economic arenas rather than in the cultural arenas, the em-
phasis on formal organizations and exclusion of more fluid and diverse
forms of association, the accentuation of cognitive factors and negation of
emotions in social protest, and the focus on institutional change strategies
rather than identity politics in mainstream social movement theories are
based on the exclusion of women's collective action (Ferree 1992; Whittier
1995; Staggenborg 1996, 1998b; Taylor forthcoming a). This exclusion, in
turn, creates fundamental inadequacies in theorizing about social move-
ments. In my writings on the postpartum support group movement, I too
demonstrate that treating gender as an analytic category in the study of
social movements illuminates a range of questions for investigation that
both expand and challenge conventional assumptions by enabling scholars
to identify important issues pertaining to the political opportunities, mobi-
lizing structures and strategies, and framing processes of social movements
(Taylor 1996; Taylor forthcoming b).
Although feminist research may have originated to challenge the gen-
der bias of traditional social science and the tendency for theoretical ex-
pression to marginalize and distort the experiences of women and other
less powerful groups, the critical stance is firmly implanted in the feminist
tradition in a growing body of work that problematizes taken-for-granted
questions in feminist theory (Hartsock 1996). In my work on the postpar-
tum self-help movement, I have attemped to show that a combined gender
374 Taylor
and social movements approach offers a more complex reading of women's
self-help than we find in feminist accounts. Feminist writers have been out-
spoken in arguing that contemporary women's self-help reinforces women's
subordination by promoting what Wendy Kaminer (1992, 1993) terms a
"cult of victimhood" that undermines feminism's most fundamental tenet
to empower women (Echols 1989; Wolfe 1994; Kitzinger and Perkins 1993).
My reading of women's self-help, in contrast, has focused on the con-
tradictory impulses in this form of feminist organizing. On the one hand,
I have highlighted the ways that the postpartum support movement erodes
gender inequality by targeting the practices and logic of social institutions,
such as medicine, the law, and the family, that inscribe gender difference
and maintain gender stratification. By using postpartum illness as a site for
challenging the ideology of intensive mothering that requires women to
dedicate themselves to childrearing, activists in the postpartum self-help
movement are engaged in defining a new kind of mother. Women's self-
help communities also challenge the gender code by cultivating emotion
cultures that permit open displays of emotions that violate prevailing defi-
nitions of femininity (Taylor 1995). Finally, support groups make caring a
collective project in a society that holds individual women accountable for
the care and nurturing of children. On the other hand, like many contem-
porary women's self-help movements, by organizing around an interpretive
frame of gender difference, whether biologically or socially constructed,
women's self-help reinforces the binary divide that some scholars hold to
be the foundation of gender (Butler 1990; Stein and Plummer 1994). Thus,
the feminist methods I discuss here not only allowed me to see how the
dynamics of self-help movements challenge some of the fundamental tenets
of social movement theory, but they also resulted in my questioning the
feminist dismissal of self-help as a simple upholder of the gender status
quo.
One sociologist has noted that combining activism with an academic
career means "swimming against the mainstream" (Chester 1991). For
scholars of social movements the current may not be as strong. Certainly
the academic power structure poses a formidable barrier to the use of post-
postivist methodologies such as feminism and other participatory and ac-
tion-oriented approaches that are often seen as undermining scientific
standards or objectivity. My work on the postpartum self-help movement
demonstrates, however, that the kind of "insider" knowledge gained from
alternative methodologies that allow us to "enter the field" can result not
only in the development of situated knowledges located in a particular time
and space (Haraway 1988), but they can open possibilites for more general
and universal theoretical visions.
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research 375
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by grants from the Office of Research
and Program Evaluation, Ohio Department of Mental Health and by funds
from the Ohio State University Offfice of Research and Graduate Studies,
the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the College of Humanities,
Department of Sociology, and the Department of Women's Studies. I
thank Leila Rupp, Nancy Whittier, Elizabeth Kaminski, and Suzanne Stag-
genborg who provided comments on the paper.
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