State Feminists Fight for Spaces in the 1980s

As the 1970s drew to a close, the feminist organizations that had sprawled during the decade were confronted with a new set of challenges. This paper surveys the priorities and efforts of two American feminist organizations, NOW and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (NOW’s chicana counterpart) as they realigned against the growing conservative backlash of the 1980s and the economic crisis. Several spaces and programs developed by feminists in the 1970s either significantly shrank or closed their doors. As activists confronted the changing political and economic landscape, they doubled their efforts in legislatures to try obtain gains that would secure the redistributive aspirations the feminist coalition had been pushing for the last decade. Looking at feminists’ efforts to make space for their aspirations in legislatures while managing the spaces they had created in the previous years illuminates how activists' efforts to change small scale-spaces was imbricated with their aspirations to change large-scale institutions.