It Starts With Me

Abstract

This article reports on a study of the lived experiences of 10 women who participated in feminist activism within a grassroots feminist organization. The study analyzed the women's narratives to determine how power shapes their subjective experiences in feminist activism. Their narratives were categorized into two broad themes: the intrapersonal locus of power and the relational locus of power. The themes refer to how women mediate power in practice and how their experiences with power are interconnected with relationships in the collective. The women in the study elaborated on the role of power in their own agency and in tensions, such as privilege and oppression.Keywords empowerment, feminist research, social justice, social work practice Researchers have identified power as an inevitable presence in women's experience of feminist activism (Healy, 1999;Horn, 2009;Reid, 2004). Cole (2008) referred to the need to examine the role of power and its immediacy in feminist social movements because of the diversity of perspectives and interests that are represented. Horn (2009, p. 152) wrote, ''It is a sociological truism that power circulates everywhere. However, in our own progressive activist spaces we very often ignore the power relations that exist between each other.'' The study presented here examined how women understand and mediate power between and within the individual and collective realms of women's social movements, situating individual women's experiences as a central starting point.Women who participate in feminist activism determine their own truths about how they experience and understand power and how these truths circulate beneath the surface of their social activism. Experiences of power in social activism have been analyzed in the literature according to the themes of empowerment, intersectionality, identity and difference, and positionality or one's subjective perception of their social location (Hanvinsky et al., 2010;Rowe, 2009;Williams, 1994). Women who participate in feminist social movements are in the best position to validate,

Non-abusing mothers’ agency after disclosure of the child’s extra-familial sexual abuse

“…Plummer (2006) found that mothers receiving more support were able to take significantly more protective actions towards their children than those receiving less support. Moreover, support from others could be interpreted as a mode of maternal empowerment preceding their empowerment of their sexually abused child (Gulbrandsen and Walsh, 2012; Hebert et al, 2014).…”