(Page 2 of 56) - Marketing Ideology: The Role of Framing and Opportunity in the American Woman Suffrage Movement authored by Trivedi, Rita.

ABSTRACT:

Social movements reflect the attempt of a challenging group within society to

affect change and achieve goals in a variety of ways, some of which include protest,
petition, violence, and pressure techniques outside traditional political channels. The
social movement must not only motivate and mobilize a significant segment of society
under a common cause or identity but also force or convince those in power to remedy
the problem that drives the challenging group. This requires a strong understanding of
political opportunity.

In this paper, I explore the importance of opportunity and its relationship to

common views of strategies used by social movements as discussed in the literature.
Strategy reflects the attempts by a movement to circumvent established barriers in
political institutions or in the social norms of the political community at large to achieve
its objectives. In this context, opportunity creation is defined as strategic action taken by
a social movement to reshape those norms and established power alignments by
modifying institutional constraints to its own advantage. These constraints are not fixed;
they are instead created and subject to constant change. I propose that social movements
can effectively build opportunities for themselves by forming alliances within the
existing power structure and attempting to function within the institutional constraints
instead of challenging them as political outsiders. In this way, they are not dependent on
the government, external alliance shifts, or a changing political climate to gain the
opportunity needed to press their claims.

To illustrate this general claim regarding social movements, I will employ

content-analysis of cartoons, leaflets, and broadsides to examine the choices of the
woman suffrage movement in America from 1850 to 1919 as it evolved from an
ideologically based appeal for woman’s political participation in earlier years to a
pragmatic and expediency-driven strategy to gain voting rights during the later years of
the movement. The course of this social movement clearly reflects the successes and
advantages that stem from a strategy of opportunity creation, including increased
leverage over those in positions of social and political influence and a broader base of
popular support.

Finally, I draw some broader conclusions regarding the impact of opportunity

creation on social movements in general and suggest that a movement need not present a
challenging framework to achieve results; a policy of frame expansion can be equally if
not more effective when combined with opportunity. I also note that successful
opportunity structures point to the eventual death of a movement, highlighting the
temporal nature of the social movement as a form of political action.