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INTRODUCTION
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. The social movement must motivate and
mobilize a significant segment of society under a common cause or identity, often outside
traditional electoral channels. In addition, a movement must 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 building alliances within the
existing power structure and attempting to function within the institutional constraints
instead of challenging them as political outsiders. A group must find ways to connect
with those in positions of influence and attract the attention of mainstream society by
linking the movement’s goals to larger political issues. To illustrate this general claim
regarding social movements, I will examine the choices of the woman suffrage
movement in America from 1850 to 1919. The course of this social movement clearly
Convention