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Edwards
Chapter 12
Personal Life and Politics
Gemma Edwards
[A] Introduction
‘Personal life’ and ‘politics’ are often studied as two distinct areas in sociology. In
fact, on examining their subject-matter, you could be forgiven for thinking that they
are opposites. Studying ‘the personal’ leads us to look at the ‘private sphere’ of
particular, emotional relationships between family and friends. Studying ‘the
political’, on the other hand, leads us to look at the ‘public sphere’ of general, rational
relationships between states and citizens.
In reality, however, the boundaries of our social lives are not so exact, and as
we have already seen in Vanessa May’s chapter, personal life transgresses both
private and public spheres. Contemporary examples of this are not hard to come by:
think of the men who – as fathers – dress up as superheroes and scale Parliament to
demand access to their children. You would be hard pushed to argue that their
personal troubles are not shaped by politics. And you would be as equally hard
pushed to argue that politics is not, in return, shaped by the new challenges posed by
their personal troubles.
It is this mutual intersection between personal life and politics that I take up in
this chapter. The examples I could use to examine this intersection are many and
varied. Here, I argue there is good reason to start with the case of ‘social movements’.
I examine how second wave feminism – and the ‘new’ social movements more widely
– have transformed personal life into a ‘stake’ and a ‘site’ of political struggle, and,
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suggest furthermore, that political struggle is also rooted in personal life. I show that
in the case of personal life and politics, opposites attract.
[A] The opposition between the personal and the political
To understand personal life do we need to explicitly talk about politics? After all, in
political philosophy personal life and politics were traditionally placed in ‘separate
spheres’. Personal life was associated with the ‘private sphere’ and politics with the
‘public sphere’. This goes as far back as Aristotle, who put politics in the public world
of men, and the family household in the private world of women (Mansbridge and
Okin, 1995, p. 272). These spheres invoke a whole range of other opposites therefore,
like those between men and women, and rationality and emotionality (Okin, 1989).
This is because these spheres have been divided up on the basis of the different types
of relationships and interactions that they involve. The private sphere is constituted
by particularized, emotional relationships, such as those between family and friends
that we study under the rubric of ‘personal life’ – and the public sphere by generalized,
rational relationships, such as those between states and citizens that we study under
the rubric of ‘politics’. It is also important to note that in much social theory, politics
– which is fundamentally about relationships structured by power – has been placed in
‘public spheres’ of the state and the economy rather than private spheres of everyday
interpersonal relations (Fraser, 1989). As we have already seen in Vanessa May’s
chapter, however, it is necessary to critically engage with the way in which the
boundaries between private and public have been drawn.
Feminist social theorists have shown, for example, that these boundaries are
highly problematic, not least because they are rooted in the gendered assumptions of
‘malestream’ theory (see Elshtain, 1981; Pateman, 1988). They argue that the notion
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of ‘separate spheres’ is an ideological construct, rather than a natural one, because the
public sphere has been defined in opposition to the private sphere – it is not the family
household, and it is not emotion, and it is not women. In fact, the separate spheres
argument was often used as justification in political philosophy – from Aristotle to
Rousseau – as to why women could not be ‘citizens’ on the same basis as men. What
do the gendered assumptions of separate spheres mean therefore? Well, we could
argue, that rather than the personal and political being ‘opposites’, the whole
theoretical notion of separate spheres is itself a product of politics in the first place – it
is a product of the unequal power relationships between men and women.
It is also necessary for us to challenge the picture that the separate spheres
argument draws of personal life as entirely ‘private’ and thus without relationships
structured by power (see Fraser, 1989). Most contemporary sociologists would
concede that our personal lives are inherently ‘political’ in the sense that they – more
often than not – involve inequalities of power. Families are not always ‘sanctuaries’
that offer protection from the outside world, but can involve domination, exploitation,
violence, and the reproduction of inequalities (Greer, 1970). And friendships too – as
Katherine Davies’s chapter in the present volume shows – can have a ‘dark side’ to
them, where people can exploit and be exploited rather than adhere to mutual
reciprocity. ‘Private’ life is also influenced in a variety of ways by the public sphere,
for example, by government policies and public debates about how people should live.
Think of the important changes in personal lives that have been enabled by changes in
the law – the right of women to file for divorce, the introduction of same-sex marriage,
and policies on adoption, to name but a few that have already been mentioned in
Carol Smart’s, Anna Einardottir’s and Jennifer Mason’s chapters. In fact, many of the
changes in personal life that are examined in this book cannot be comprehended
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without an awareness of the ways in which personal lives are politically constituted,
and politically constrained, in a myriad of ways.
In reality, therefore, the boundaries of our social lives are not as easy to draw
as the theory of public/private spheres would suggest. If most contemporary
sociologists would accept this, then how has this change come about? How have
theorists moved from placing the personal and the political in opposite categories, to
acknowledging their deep intersection? It is my contention that to tackle this question
we should start by looking at the example of social movements – by which I mean
collective actions for social and political change. In particular, I suggest that we need
to look at the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. It was, after all, these
‘second wave’ feminists who announced to the world that ‘the personal is political’
and inspired the kind of feminist theorising that critiqued the notion of separate
spheres. In the next section we begin to unpack the feminist slogan to find out exactly
how ‘the personal is political’.
[A] The personal is political
The Women’s Liberation Movement – established in 1969 in the United States and
1970 in Britain – is a very good place to start when considering the ways in which the
personal and political are interrelated. Perhaps more than any other social movement
of its time (with the exception of the Gay Liberation Front), feminists explicitly
centred their struggle on the notion that ‘the personal is political’.
This idea had been present to some extent in the ‘first wave’ feminist
movement concerning women’s suffrage. Female campaigns for the vote challenged
the notion of ‘separate spheres’ by arguing that women’s participation in the public
sphere was absolutely vital for the nation. The suffragists, for example, were clever in
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turning the idea of separate spheres in favour of votes for women by suggesting that
women were ‘experts’ in affairs like family and childrearing, and therefore had
‘special skills’ that male citizens lacked when it came to matters like education.
The challenge to separate spheres took place on a much more fundamental
level with ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1970s. By this time, the argument was not
only about admitting women to public life on an equal footing with men – for instance,
by campaigns for Equal Pay for Equal Work – but for a redefinition of ‘politics’ itself.
Feminists did this by arguing that relationships of power were not limited to the
institutions of the public sphere, but were present in all aspects of life. This included
the private – even sexual – relationships between men and women. In fact, the private
sphere and the public sphere were interconnected to the extent that the domination of
women within the family and heterosexual relationships helped to ensure their
subordination within public spheres of work and institutional politics (Walby, 1990).
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) posed the question, ‘is it possible to regard the
relation of the sexes in a political light at all?’ Her answer was that it depended upon
‘how one defines politics’. If we define politics as ‘power structured relationships’
(Millett, 1970) that allow some groups to dominate over others, then the systematic
domination of men over women in all areas of life – referred to as ‘patriarchy’ – could
be defined as a ‘political’ issue. The private as well as the public is, then, inherently
political.
This realization had important implications. The first was that aspects of
private life could now be placed on the political agenda. This was because women’s
‘private’ problems were not necessarily due to personal failings, but to patriarchy. In
the ‘consciousness raising’ groups of the Women’s Liberation Movement, small
groups of women would meet to discuss their ‘private’ troubles – with sex and
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contraception, with marriage and childcare, with work and housework, and with
feminine beauty and appearance. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination
(1959) had urged sociologists to locate the ‘private troubles’ of individual biographies
within the context of wider ‘public issues’ and this is what the women within these
groups did. It was C. Wright Mills therefore who inspired the feminist slogan ‘the
personal is political’. In the wake of the separation between private life and politics,
this was, however, controversial. Carol Hanisch commented that whilst it was
sometimes accepted that women needed further rights relating to work and pay, ‘they
belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called ‘personal problems’ into the public
arena – especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance and abortion’ (Hanisch,
2006, p. 1). Consciousness-raising also made another important link between the
personal and political. Through these groups, political knowledge and action was to
arise from, and be grounded within, women’s personal experience. Women were
encouraged to understand their problems in the context of unequal power
relationships with men. And they did not need to understand complex political
philosophy to grasp this; all they needed was to reflect upon their personal lives.
Another important implication of seeing the personal as political was that
solutions to personal troubles required a collective movement to change things
(Hanisch, 1970). This meant that aspects of personal life, like identities and lifestyles,
became the sites as well as the stakes of political struggle. Feminists, for example,
rejected the dominant meanings attached to being a woman, or being ‘feminine’, or
being a wife and a mother, and constructed alternative identities. Individual efforts to
transform the self produced a ‘collective culture’ which gave women an alternative
way of knowing, representing and relating to themselves and to men (Rowbotham,
1997). In America and Britain, feminist magazines like Ms and Spare Rib acted as
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conduits for this alternative culture, challenging conventional gender norms and sexroles. Feminists produced alternative music, art and poetry. They dressed differently,
and argued that the way in which everyday language was used mattered (Spender,
1980). Leading British feminist, Sheila Rowbotham, reflected that ‘it seemed as if
politics and culture had melted into one’ (Rowbotham, 1997, p. 398).
Feminist politics also inspired radically different lifestyles by challenging the
nuclear family, and gave rise to diverse living arrangements like communes.
Lesbianism was further suggested as an alternative way of living outside of male
dominated heterosexual relationships, and the ‘political lesbianism’ of groups like the
‘Leeds Revolutionary Feminists’ in the UK suggested that men should be bypassed
altogether, ‘not because of sexual preference but as a political duty’ (Rowbotham,
1997, p. 431). This ‘separatist’ contingent of women’s liberation led to tensions
within the movement, and highlighted that the experiences and agendas of women
varied by sexuality; tensions that were also mirrored by class and ethnic differences.
Social movements, like feminism, seem therefore to have been of vital
importance in bringing about academic and societal awareness of the intersection
between personal life and politics. But why is it that these types of movements
emerged in Western societies in the 1970s? To address this question we need to turn
to theories of ‘New Social Movements’.
[A] Theories of New Social Movements
The idea that aspects of personal life – like identity and lifestyle – are ‘stakes’ in
political struggle has been seen as a unique feature of the social movements which
dominated the political scene in Western countries in the 1970s and 1980s. These
included the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements already mentioned, but also
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student movements, environmental and peace movements, and various self-help
groups, like anti-psychiatry. They were referred to by European social theorists like
Melucci (1985) in Italy, Habermas (1981) in Germany, and Touraine (1974) in France,
as the ‘New Social Movements’.
Three key reasons were given for the ‘newness’ of these movements. Firstly,
they seemingly had ‘new’ political concerns, which were different from the ‘old’ class
politics of the labour movement. For example, they were not concerned with
‘material’ issues like wages, but with ‘postmaterial issues’ like culture, identity and
lifestyle that cut across social classes. Secondly, they did not operate within the
conventional political system but on the margins of society, and involved previously
marginalized groups like students and women. And, thirdly, they had a new way of
‘changing the world’. They did not form large bureaucratic organizations like the
trade unions, but instead small, informal, and decentralized networks – like the
feminist consciousness-raising groups – which were embedded in everyday life. And,
by and large, as we also saw with feminism, members of these movements engaged in
politics by trying to live their everyday lives differently. They would ‘change the
world’ by changing themselves first.
Theorists of the New Social Movements (hereafter NSMs) argued that they
arose as a reaction to a new set of social conflicts that characterized Western capitalist
societies from the late 1960s onwards. Alain Touraine (1974), for example, related the
rise of the NSMs to historical transformations in capitalism, which in the 1970s led to
the emergence of a ‘post-industrial’ society. In post-industrial societies, he argued, the
‘key conflict’ had shifted from the class conflict between capitalists and workers
(which had characterized industrial societies), to postmaterial conflicts concerning
culture and identity. The NSMs were, for Touraine, the ‘new historical agents of
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change’ in postindustrial societies; they had taken over the mantle from the working
class previously identified by Marx. But where exactly did these postmaterial
conflicts come from? And why did they create ‘political stakes’ out of personal lives?
Alberto Melucci (1985) offers us an interesting explanation, and one which
seems to capture well the distinctive nature of NSMs like feminism. Postindustrial
societies, argued Melucci, are moreover consumer societies (please refer to Chapter
10 by Dale Southerton for an in-depth discussion of consumer culture). They rely not
upon the production of material goods, but upon the production and control of
meaning (or what sociologists could more generally call ‘symbolic resources’).
Meaning and culture are part of the system of producing and selling goods in
advanced capitalist societies, as reflected in the efforts of advertisers to make their
products appeal to consumers by drawing meaningful associations between the
product and a certain (desirable) identity and lifestyle. Consumer societies are
therefore ‘mass symbolic systems’ which allow for the construction of multiple
identities and lifestyles. This process of construction is, however, subject to
domination and control. In fact, for Melucci, the struggle over symbolic resources is
the key conflict of Western capitalist societies. Meaning and information have
become ‘stakes’ to be fought over in battles to establish, affirm or reject the dominant
definitions of personal and collective identities. The way to engage in political
struggle for members of the NSMs is, therefore, to mount a symbolic challenge to
what Melucci called the ‘dominant logic’ of society by living life differently. This is
why for Melucci, the NSMs operate within what he called ‘submerged networks of
everyday life’ rather than bureaucratic organizations. Melucci talked of the NSMs as
offering people ‘the possibility of another experience of time, space’ and
‘interpersonal relations’ (Melucci, 1985, p. 801).
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Jürgen Habermas’s (1981, 1987) explanation of NSMs is different, but it also
focuses upon the way in which culture and identity have become the focus of political
struggle in Western capitalist societies. Habermas pins the shift from material to
postmaterial conflicts on the welfare state. He argues that the welfare state in
advanced capitalist societies had brought about a ‘class compromise’ by offering
workers money in compensation for their grievances at work, alongside a range of
benefits for illness and unemployment. These measures effectively integrated the
working class into the capitalist system and pacified the conflicts between capital and
labour that had driven the labour movement. The existence of the welfare state did not
however mean an end to social conflict, but merely a shift in where conflict occurred
in society. When the welfare state grew, Habermas (1987) argued, it cast a web of
bureaucratic relations over personal life. Everyday private lives (which are part of
what Habermas called the ‘lifeworld’) were increasingly ‘taken over’ by the state and
economy (which Habermas called ‘the system’). A good example of this is the way in
which the state moved activities like education and care for the elderly away from the
family and coordinated them instead through formal bureaucratic institutions such as
schools and care homes. The state also interfered in the private sphere by
administering a host of benefits to families like maternity pay, sick pay, and child
benefit. The result was what Habermas (1987) called a ‘colonization of the lifeworld
by the system’. ‘Colonization’ was problematic because it introduced the money and
power of the ‘system’ (that is, the state and the economy) into personal life.
Increasingly for example, education and care homes are not only state-bureaucratic
institutions but also organised on market principles and run for profit. By taking over
areas of private life, the state and the market have redefined people’s roles and
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identities, and their relationships to one-another. This has produced what Habermas
(1987) calls ‘symbolic conflicts’ surrounding identities and lifestyles.
Habermas sees the NSMs as a reaction to colonization and the symbolic
conflicts it raised. The majority of NSMs, like anti-nuclear, peace, anti-psychiatry and
self-help groups, were attempting to defend their existing identities and relationships
from becoming redefined by state bureaucracies and markets. Habermas sees
feminism, however, not as a defensive reaction to colonization like other NSMs, but
as an attempt to seize hold of the new opportunities for reconstructing identities and
lifestyles on a more equal basis; opportunities which have been opened up by the state
interference in the family. Once the state had explicitly intervened to shape private
life in various ways, it became clear that traditional identities and ways of living were
not natural or fixed, but subject to political constitution and thus open to political reconstitution. For Habermas then, there came a point in history in the 1970s when
politics and economics started to transgress their boundaries and infiltrate private
lives. The effect was to politicize personal life, and infuse it with power in a way that
it had not been before. On this point, Habermas’s theory has been criticized by
feminists like Nancy Fraser (1995), who argue that he fails to capture the way in
which power has always been present within the private sphere of personal
relationships.
The theories of New Social Movements we have looked at here are useful
because they help us to capture exactly what was so distinctive about the politics of
movements like feminism. NSMs seemed to be responding to a new set of
‘postmaterial’ social conflicts. NSM theories offer a number of potential reasons as to
why identities and lifestyles became the focus of political attention at a certain stage
in the development of Western capitalist societies. Melucci’s explanation, in
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particular, also helps us to understand the way in which NSMs engaged in politics,
and why they suggested that change had to happen in the context of everyday life and
personal relationships. Living differently, speaking differently, relating differently –
all of these were in themselves symbolic acts of resistance. On the other hand,
theories of NSMs have also been criticized for overstating their case. Labour
movements of the past and present were not, for example, devoid of identity and
lifestyle concerns (Edwards, 2004). And moreover, the Women’s Liberation
Movement can hardly be described as entirely ‘postmaterial’. In this respect, Jean
Cohen (1995) has criticized Habermas for failing to acknowledge the enduring
material concerns, like unequal pay, that were also at the heart of the feminist
campaign.
[A] The political is also personal
So far we have looked at social movements to highlight the ways in which ‘the
personal is political’. They have shown us that in order to understand personal life we
need to understand the ways in which it intersects with politics. In this section I want
to argue that the same is also true the other way around – in order to understand
politics we need to understand the influence of personal life on political behaviour.
Social movements continue to be a good example to use here because sociologists
have shown that people’s personal ‘social networks’ – by which I mean the web of
kinship and friendship relations in which their lives are embedded – have a crucial
role to play in forming their political attitudes and behaviour.
A good deal of the research on social movements looks at the important
question of participation. How is it that some people come to be involved in political
activism? Many people in the 1970s were generally sympathetic to feminism, but only
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a minority actually became actively involved in the movement. This is typical of
social movements generally. Today, many people say that they care about the
environment, but only a minority are members of groups like Greenpeace, and even
less will actually turn up to a demonstration against tree felling, or road building. One
way to address the question of why some people become involved and not others is to
concentrate upon individual political attitudes. We could ask for example how people
came to hold the kind of values that lead to political activism. What starts as a
question about the individual however quickly turns into a question about people’s
interconnections. This is because personal social networks have a great deal of
influence over the development of political attitudes and behaviour. People do not
become political (or apathetic) in isolation, but in the context of their everyday
interactions with significant others.
A good example is the classic study of voting behaviour conducted at
Columbia University in the United States in the 1940s called The People’s Choice
(Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). Against the image of voters as isolated rational actors who,
on their own, calculate the costs and benefits of various parties, the Columbia study
showed that people actually make up their minds about politics within the context of
their close personal relationships. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel
Gaudet (1948) found that people’s political values and choices were influenced by the
others with whom they interacted on an everyday basis, especially those they were
intimate with. They argued that the people in our personal social network tend to be
quite similar to ourselves – an effect called ‘homophily’ which you came across in
Katherine Davies’s chapter. This means that we only tend to talk about politics with
people who already share similar characteristics and political dispositions, and who
therefore reinforce our political attitudes. In these circumstances, we are probably
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very clear about what we think and who we want to vote for. Even conflicting
information from the media becomes further ‘mediated’ by our personal contacts so
that it confirms, rather than challenges, our group position.
These findings have been supported by other research which suggests that
political values are directly influenced by personal relationships. This influence can
come via political socialization in the family, or because the household tends to be the
primary place in which politics is discussed and views formed (Zuckerman, 2005).
Interestingly, Nina Eliasoph (1998) has argued that apathy – a form of political
disengagement – is also reproduced in everyday personal interactions. She found that
because people do not talk about politics with their friends, they find politics less and
less relevant to their lives. The influence of personal relationships on political
behaviour does not, however, have to be direct. Ronald Burt (1987) argued that
alongside ‘contagion by cohesion’ – by which he means direct socialization – there is
also ‘contagion by equivalence’. This means that rather than being directly influenced
in your political attitudes by others, you tend to decide upon what you will do by
looking at what other people in your social circle do – especially those who you
consider to be ‘like you’. Significant others act as ‘reference points’ therefore for our
own political behaviour. A more recent study conducted in the Netherlands concluded
however that the socialization effect of intimate relationships had more influence
upon people’s political choices than reference groups (Nieuwbeerta and Flap, 2000).
Nevertheless, the point can be made that political values and behaviour are not the
result of individual decision making, but of the mediated decision-making of people
embedded within personal social networks.
Research on social movements has also found that personal networks of
kinship and friendship are very important when it comes to recruiting people to
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political activism (Passy, 2003). Individual level factors are once again insufficient
for explaining participation (Snow et al., 1980). In fact, whether there is a prior
personal connection to somebody already in the movement turns out to be one of the
best predictors of participation. For example, in a classic study by David Snow, Louis
Zurcher and Sheldon Ekland-Olson (1980) in the United States, it was found that the
majority of the university students surveyed (63 per cent) had been recruited to
political movements through their ‘social networks’.
***
Box 12.1 The social network of Emmeline Pankhurst
What role do family and friends play in political activism? Is it accurate to say that
family and friends ‘pull you in’ to activism? Or that some families are ‘political’
families? These questions have been the focus of a historical research project by
sociologists at the University of Manchester1. The researchers looked at the role of
social networks in the political activism of British Suffragettes (1903-14). They
looked in particular at the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which was
founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903 to campaign for votes for
women. The project employed the methodological technique known as ‘Social
Network Analysis’ (SNA) (see Scott, 2000) and used a computer programme called
UCINET (Borgatti et al., 2002) to map and analyse Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘personal
network’ of family and friends before she founded the WSPU. They also traced the
key leading members of the WSPU between 1903 and 1914 when it ceased.
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Edith How Martyn
Annie Kenney
Grace Roe
Constance Lytton
Charlotte Despard
Minnie Baldock
Mabel Tuke
Mary Gawthorpe
Nellie Martel
Mary Neal
Fred Brocklehurst
Ethel
Annakin
(Snowden)
H.H. Champion
Emmeline Pethick Lawrence
Helen Harker
John Burns
Philip Snowden
Mary Dendy
Rachel Scott
Henry Hyndman
Margaret Gladstone (McDonald)
Ramsey McDonald
Sarah Dickenson
Enid Stacey
Sarah Reddish Selina Cooper John Harker
Leonard Hall
Frank Smith
Pattie Hall
Harriet
McIlquham
Fred Pethick Lawrence
Nellie Keenan
John Bruce Glasier
Robert Blatchford
Eva Gore Booth Isabella Ford
George Lansbury
Pete Curran
Katherine St John Conway (Glasier)
Kier Hardie
Anne Cobden Sanderson
Rev Samuel Steinthal
Wilhelm Liebknecht
Christabel Pankhurst Tom Mann
Esther Roper
Milicent Garrett Fawcett
Eleanor Marx
Caroline Biggs
Hannah Mitchell
Sylvia
Pankhurst
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy
Josephine Butler
Nellie Hall
Alice Scatcherd
Helen Taylor
Emmeline Pankhurst
Florence Roe
Harry Pankhurst
Ursula Bright
Florence Balgarnie Ben Elmy
Richard Pankhurst
Lady Emilia Dilke
Jane Cobden Unwin
Eva Goulden (Brown)
Adela
Pankhurst
Agnes Garrett Jacob Bright Florence Fenwick Miller
Herbert Burrows
Ada Goulden (Bach)
Lady Margaret Sandhurst Harriot Stanton Blatch
Teresa Billington
Mary Goulden (Clarke)
Lydia Becker Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Henri Rochefort
Annie Besant
Effie Goulden (Bailey)
Rhoda Garrett
Lillias Ashworth Hallet James Bryce
Grant Allen
Robert Goulden Jnr
Eliza Sturge
Charles Dilke
Sophie Jane Goulden
Harold Goulden
William
Lloyd
Garrison
Walter McLaren
Herbert Goulden
Dadabhai Neroji Enrico Malatesta Walter Goulden
William Stead Irene Fenwick Miller
Flora Drummond
Robert Goulden
Noemi Rochefort (Dufaux)
William Morris Richard Haldane
Edmund Golden
Henry Fawcett
Lillie Rochefort
Edward Grey
John Bright
Dora Montefiore
Beatrice Webb
Elizabeth Robins
The diagram above – which looks rather like a thick spider’s web because it depicts a
very dense network – shows Emmeline Pankhurst’s personal social network before
she founded the WSPU in October 1903. The diagram has also added in the people
who became key leading members of the WSPU at some time between 1903 and 1914.
We can see by the red squares that several of Emmeline Pankhurst’s existing family
and friends became leading activists (note in particular her three daughters Christabel,
Sylvia, and Adela, who each had an important role to play in the campaign for
women’s suffrage). We can also see by the yellow triangles that most of the other
leading members of the WSPU at one time or another in the campaign were friends of
existing friends. Indeed, only four leading members - shown by the green diamonds had no prior personal connection to Emmeline Pankhurst. The results of this exercise
suggest that the core of this political group (the rank-and-file being a different matter
of course) has largely grown out of an existing personal network of family and friends.
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*** End of Box ***
Why is it, then, that personal social networks are so influential when it comes to
participation in politics? Doug McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen (1993) address this
question in their research on the participation of white college students in the 1964
Freedom Summer Project. This project was part of the Civil Rights Movement in the
United States, and involved college students travelling to Mississippi to help register
black voters and run Freedom Schools. Students had to apply in advance to participate
in the project, and by the time it started, some had dropped out. McAdam and
Paulsen’s research followed up on the differences between the students who went on
Freedom Summer and those who were ‘no shows’. They argued that the key factor
was the extent to which the student had close personal relationships that were
supportive of their involvement. The ‘no shows’ reported much less support from
their family, friends and peers. This made participation very difficult, according to
McAdam and Paulsen, because we depend upon close personal relationships to
sustain what they call ‘salient identities’, that is, the predominant image we hold of
ourselves as particular kinds of people. Participation in high risk activism does not
only risk personal safety, it also risks salient identity. The activist effectively ‘comes
out’ as committed to a politically controversial cause, thus altering the image that
family and friends have of who they are. McAdam and Paulsen suggest that if family
and friends do not support the ‘new’ identity of the activist then it can make it very
difficult for them to sustain their sense of self whilst remaining politically active. This
helps to explain why those who recorded more hostility from their friends and family
dropped out of the Freedom Summer project.
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There is one final way in which political activism and personal life are
connected which I will mention here. I have already suggested that pre-existing ties
with friends and kin explain to a large extent how people come to be involved in
social movements. Friends and family influence your political values, but may also
‘pull you in’ to political activities that they are already involved with. And often,
social movements recruit not individuals but ‘blocs’, like a group of friends or a
family unit (Obershall, 1973). This is especially true for social movements that
depend upon the trust and reciprocity of close personal bonds to operate – and I am
thinking here of movements that employ tactics of political violence. In the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, for example, people were often recruited
by friends and family, and consequently had especially strong bonds of solidarity
because of the overlap between political and personal relationships (White, 1989).
Also, whilst people may come to political activity via friends and family, they also
make friends and family out of political activity. Close-knit and intense interactions
with political comrades can forge bonds that are akin to kinship and friendship. In her
study of the Italian Red Brigades, a left wing terrorist movement in the 1970s and
1980s, Donatella della Porta (1992), for example, found that underground political
groups became like surrogate families for those involved (please see Katherine
Davies’s and Jennifer Mason’s chapter for a discussion of the porous boundary
between different categories of relationship such as ‘family’ and ‘friends’). In extreme
cases of political involvement therefore, the political and the personal become one.
[A] Concluding remarks
This chapter has examined the ways in which personal life intersects with politics. We
have seen that the opposition in political philosophy between ‘the personal’ and ‘the
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political’ is a false one. Instead, we need to look beyond ‘separate spheres’ to the
ways in which personal life and politics interact. In order to do this, the chapter has
concentrated upon the example of ‘social movements’. It has argued that social
movements are a good place to start when considering the intersection between
personal life and politics, not least because it was the Women’s Liberation Movement
that first suggested that ‘the personal is political’. Women’s Liberation was part of a
wider set of movements, however, which emerged in Western countries in the 1970s
and involved a turn towards identity and lifestyle as ‘stakes’ in political struggle. We
looked at the reasons for this shift by considering ‘New Social Movement’ theories.
Finally, we turned the ‘personal is political’ on its head to look at some of the ways in
which the ‘political is also personal’. We found evidence to suggest that political
attitudes and behaviour are routinely embedded in personal social networks. Friends
and family have a crucial role to play in political activism, and friends and family are
also forged in the course of political activism. This chapter has put forward a number
of arguments therefore to suggest that in order to understand personal life we must
look at politics – and in order to understand politics, we must look at personal life.
[A] Questions for discussion
1. What did the Women’s Liberation Movement mean in 1970 when they
declared that ‘the personal is political’? Is this slogan still relevant today?
2. Does politics influence who you are and how you live? If so, in what ways?
3. To what extent do theories of ‘New Social Movements’ adequately explain the
politicization of personal life and identity?
4. In what ways can participation in politics be shaped by a person’s social
network?
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1
The Covert Social Movement Networks study was conducted by Nick Crossley,
Gemma Edwards, Rachel Stevenson, and Ellen Harries in 2009-10 at the University
of Manchester.
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