Women's Agency, Activism and Organization

Agency, activism and organisation have been central and constant themes in women’s and gender history. They provide useful lenses through which to study women’s interaction with the social world. Both separately and in combination, they constitute a valuable analytical framework for the study of women’s lives, culture and experience in past societies by foregrounding and articulating historical challenges made to patriarchy, social structure and the status quo. Agency highlights the individual action/social structure explanatory dichotomy whilst activism and organisation help focus on the specific ways in which women have challenged, resisted, overthrown or gained entrance to social structures and institutions that had tended to ignore, exclude, disadvantage or penalise them.