Interests, Issues, and Preferences: Women’s Interests and
Epiphenomena of Activism
Karen Beckwith, Case Western Reserve University
doi:10.1017/S1743923X11000195
What do we mean by “women’s interests?” To consider interests requires us
to consider the “real interests” of women, which “[rest] on empirically
supportable and refutable hypotheses” and to examine women,
“exercising choice under conditions of relative autonomy and, in
particular, independently of [the constraining] power [of others] – e.g.
through democratic participation” (Lukes 1984, 25, 33). Identification of
interests is always a normative concern, resting on an appreciation of
citizens’ autonomy and deliberation — or lack thereof.
In this essay, I distinguish among interests, which are fundamental to
women’s life chances and their options for action; issues, which are
strategic choices that emphasize components of interest as points of
mobilization; and preferences, which position actors to select among
discrete and limited alternatives. Interests are not part of an essentialist
understanding of “women” as a group but, rather, a recognition of
constant contexts of women’s life circumstances, and an appreciation of
women’s opportunities for advancing their human capabilities and
options for action and improving their life chances.
Power shapes the recognition of interests and the individual’s
understanding of her interests. Identification of interests is grounded in
deliberative democracy, where interests are articulated by participating
citizens in a context of inclusion, where “all those [likely to be] affected
by [decision making] are included in the process,” and where those
participants would be affected by the resulting “decisions and policies
[that would] significantly condition [their] options for action.” Inclusion
in deliberative democracy must be “on equal terms,” free “from
domination” in the deliberative process (Young 2000: 23; see also Dovi
2009). In contexts where women are not present, where the power
dynamic silences women or requires them to refrain from full expression
and articulation, differences in political power are evident and the
identification of women’s interests is difficult at best, if not ultimately
impossible.
Identifying interests requires that we take into account the context in
which interests are developed and expressed — or fail to develop or are
repressed. Nearly all political offices are held by men, in almost every
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political system; and because the presence of women in public office
enhances women’s mass-level political participation and involvement
(Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001), the absence of women in public
office functions to suppress women’s political participation and the
factors that inform and enrich it. That is, the dominance of men in
political institutions constitutes a context of political drag on the
identification of women’s interests. Moreover, because women also differ
along class lines, and because women are present in all racial and ethnic
groups, we need to consider the context of race and class in terms of
those who govern, and how exclusion of some women in governments
might also depress women’s autonomous discussion of interests outside
formal institutions. Finally, as Vickers (2006, 22) writes, “We can make
it a rule of methodology to assume that women will have both interests
in common and interests in conflict unless there is persuasive evidence
to the contrary.”
One persistent, shared political interest among women emerges from
women’s self-organizing: access to political power to articulate women’s
interests.1 Women in different time periods, in different nations and
localities, have asserted their desire for political voice, even as “women
as a group have remained excluded from public authority” (Diamond
and Hartsock 1981, 719). As a result, women share an interest, as
women, in access to political power and voice. This is a meta-interest: It
constitutes an interest in and of itself; that is, women organizing
autonomously and with full agency have repeatedly asserted such an
interest. Moreover, this meta-interest is, in fact, an assertion of the
necessity of access to the context within which articulation of women’s
interests becomes fully possible.2
Interests, Issues, and Preferences
Most of the scholarship on women’s substantive representation turns not on
women’s interests but on women’s issues. Issues are strategic choices that
emphasize components of interest as a point of mobilization. Derived
from interests, issues are more specific, immediate, and limited. For
example, women have an interest in being free from violence, in not
being subjected to beatings by husbands, fathers, mothers-in-law, and
1. To date, seven countries have not yet ratified CEDAW: Iran, Nauru, Palau, Sudan, Somalia, Tonga,
and the United States.
2. The text of CEDAW is available at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/.
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vigilantes. How women organize around this interest is by identifying an
issue derived from this interest, such as legislation criminalizing spousal
assault. The selection of this particular issue, from among a range of
possible issues, is a strategic choice made in the context of political
opportunity and women’s autonomous organizing and strategic
deliberations. In addition, lack of political opportunity — in contexts of
political threat, the oppression of women and their inability to organize,
state hostility to women and women’s interests — also means that
absence of women’s organizing around women’s issues cannot serve as
evidence of lack of interest.
Finally, preferences constitute a range of discrete and limited alternatives
in relation to a specific issue. Once an issue is identified (and advanced and
promoted), the range of possible positions on the issue will both diminish
and consolidate. In regard to wife beating, preference alternatives will be
constructed in regard to, for example, the role of the state, level of
criminalization, establishment of safe houses for women and children,
and funding. Activists, officials, voters, and others involved in the issue
will focus debate on their preferences (including opposition). Debate on
the issue is more likely to turn on possible preferences and less on the
fundamental interest from which the issue has emerged (although this is
an empirical question).
Taking Women’s Interests Seriously: Epiphenomena of Activism
In studying working-class women’s participation in mining strikes and
other campaigns involving deep coal mining and miners’ unions, I have
faced the question of what constitutes women’s interests in such contexts.
I suggest that we can identify women’s interests in political movements
by focusing, among other things, on the epiphenomena of women’s
activism and on the ways in which mechanisms of their marginalization
create pathologies of participation.
Miners’ campaigns are distinctive in terms of identifying women’s
interests: 1) Women are structurally excluded from membership (insofar
as union membership turns on employment in a unionized workplace,
mining firms have not hired women, and miners’ unions have been slow
at best to insist on equal-opportunity employment); 2) women are hence
excluded from formal leadership (because they are not union members);
and 3) women are excluded from formal decision making (they cannot
vote on contracts or participate in a vote to end a strike).
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How, in such a context, can women’s interests be identified? First, we
need to identify locations where women have organized on their own, in
“their own, autonomous organizations” (Vickers 2006, 24). Groups such
as Women Against Pit Closures and the Coal Employment Project
constitute potentially fruitful venues for identifying some of women’s
interests. Such organizations are most likely to meet the criteria of
“relative autonomy and [independence of the constraining] power [of
others] – e.g. through democratic participation” (Lukes 1984, 33).
Second, research will require deep interviewing and participant
observation to identify actual interests — and lack of recognition of
interests — and to distinguish among interests, issues, and preferences.
For example, the desire to have one’s husband return to work during the
course of a mining strike is better understood as a preference; the desire
to have safe, well-paid, fulfilling work for oneself, one’s husband, and
one’s children in a healthy environment in a region whose economy is
dominated by mining corporations is better understood as recognition of
an interest — as is painful admission that fulfillment of this interest is
unlikely. Understanding difference among interests, issues, and
preferences requires extended discussion of the kind possible only in
field research and multiple interview encounters in a context of mutual
trust and respect.
Third, it is hard to identify interests in methodological terms, and it is
difficult to assess interests directly, in contexts where women’s
autonomous organizing and deliberation are constrained. In such
contexts, interests may be more likely to reveal themselves indirectly, as
political and personal epiphenomena related to political conflict. Hence,
we need to be attentive to those matters that appear inexplicable,
peripheral, and/or trivial, which may constitute the epiphenomena that
evidence women’s interests in securing voice and political power.
One piece of evidence of women’s fundamental interest as women in
access to political power may be conflicts among them in the same
political campaign. We often see political struggles among women
within campaigns: for example, the battle among French feminists over
the ownership of the phrase “mouvement de libe´ration des femmes,” or
conflict among female activists in the Pittston Coal Strike over
ownership of the title “Daughters of Mother Jones.” Such internal
struggles are rarely the focus of political science research, and I suspect
they often go unreported by feminist scholars, and underanalyzed by
those scholars who do report such conflict. These intracampaign
struggles may, in fact, take place in contexts of exclusion where women
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are nonetheless “exercising choice under conditions of relative autonomy
and, in particular, independently of [the constraining] power [of others]”
(Lukes 1984, 25).
From 1992 to 1995, I undertook interviews, participant observation, and
general field research in Britain concerning the anti–pit closure campaign
of the National Union of Mineworkers. Activism in Women against Pit
Closures, nationally and even locally, produced substantial intragroup
competition and conflict among activist women, specifically in terms of
positioning for power within the campaign. This competition and
hostility, and the accompanying charges and countercharges over
strategy, leadership, and finances during the 1992–1994 anti–pit closure
campaign, were the product of the strong desire among women for a
voice as women and as respected political actors.
Similar conflicts occurred among women who were active during the
Pittston Coal Strike. In my June 1995 interview with him, Cecil Roberts,
vice president of the United Mine Workers of America and former field
director of the Pittston strike, observed, in the context of a strike:
It’s hard, it’s really hard. For a period of time — well, all through the strike,
you had one group of women who thought everybody ought to be on the
picket line, being arrested, and another group of women that didn’t think
that. And there was always that conflict there, and we had a really difficult
time keeping both of those groups working together.
These brief and incomplete accounts of intragroup conflict among women
in a political movement, where issues of class and gender intersect,
indirectly evidence women’s interests in having voice and standing.
Although they may appear as epiphenomena that require no explanation,
such pathologies of participation signal a persistent interest of women: to
achieve power and have a voice as women.
Conclusion
What women’s interests mean, and our interest in them, depends upon the
questions we ask. An identification of women’s interests, the issues that
derive from them as a result of women’s organizing, and the preferences
that organized women identify and negotiate will be context specific. To
the extent that a context of women’s political marginalization and
gendered inequalities in law and political power persists, these constants
will produce at least one universal women’s interest: their full inclusion
in political power and governance. As women organize to advance
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specific women’s issues, even as these vary along intersections of class and
race, we are likely to see epiphenomena of activism that suggest their
continuing struggle for full political incorporation and voice. As women
move from political exclusion to self-determination, they both express
this fundamental interest and seek the means by which to advance all
women’s interests in extending their life chances, their options for
action, and the full development of their human capabilities.
Karen Beckwith is the Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science,
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH: karen.beckwith@case.edu
REFERENCES
Burns, Nancy, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba. 2001. The Private Roots of
Public Action: Gender, Equality and Political Participation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Diamond, Irene, and Nancy Hartsock. 1981. “Beyond Interests in Politics.” American
Political Science Review 75 (3): 717–21.
Dovi, Suzanne. 2009. “In Praise of Exclusion.” Journal of Politics 71 (3): 1172–86.
Lukes, Steven. 1984. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor.
Vickers, Jill. 2006. “The Problem with Interests: Making Political Claims for ‘Women.’” In
The Politics of Women’s Interests: New Comparative Perspectives, ed. Louise Chappell
and Lisa Hill. New York: Routledge, 5–38.
Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford.
An Endogenous Approach to Women’s Interests: When
Interests Are Interesting in and of Themselves
Beth Reingold, Emory University and
Michele Swers, Georgetown University
doi:10.1017/S1743923X11000201
As Sapiro (1981) pointed out many years ago, recognizing that women’s
interests are interesting is the vital first step in establishing the
significance of women’s political representation (or the lack thereof) —
both in the “real” world and in the scholarly world. Indeed, the
assumption that women’s interests exist, that women have political
interests that can be defined and measured, is central to much of the
subsequent research and discussion of women in politics. It is central to
our own research on the relationship between women’s descriptive and
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