Using Typology to Classify Social Movements: Feminism in Two Contexts

This article helps remedy the lack of exploration of women’s social movements in sociology by undertaking a typology of social movements through the highly influential methodologies enunciated by David F. Aberle (“Aberlian classifications”) in two ways. First, the article explores the Aberlian classifications for the two movements focused on social change (revolutionary and reformative) through a “political process” typology. Second, it proposes two sub-categories of the Aberlian reformative classification through two twentieth-century women’s movements in the United States: social justice feminism and post-World War II feminism