Are We Really Making a Difference?: Activism & Social Change

I wonder all the time if we’re truly making progress towards a better world or just chipping away at a metastasizing mess of problems that’ll never improve. Seeing public energy on a given issue wax and wane can make it feel like we’re losing all the progress we gain during those fleeting peaks of visibility and action. It’s also incredibly difficult to know how we fit into these bigger movements, and the scale of collective action often swallows the incremental impacts of our contributions, making us feel powerless and inconsequential. I think there are 2 main questions we should address: is this large-scale up and declining trajectory really doing anything, and are the ups outweighing the downs?

The first question requires that we grapple with the human reality of burnout and the fact that political and social change are inextricably bound up in other contextual factors that influence their viability. Momentum is built through the compounding forces of multiple forms of action and sometimes we can’t sustain that kind of organized push for more than a few months or years, sometimes decades. This slow, cyclical process does move the needle but it’s not a straight path and it’s often not visible in real time. 

The second question might depend more on the specific movement, but in general I think the answer is also yes. I think the effects of movements are usually net positive in the direction of their efforts, although often with lots of unforeseen complications and consequences. This trial and error trajectory complicates the question, “does it work?” because the answers are usually “yes but it’s flawed.” My best evidence of these patterns is what I’ve learned about the history of various liberation movements. I’m going to use the evolution of mainstream American feminism as a case study. It’s not a perfect or universal example, but hopefully it can give us a reference point and maybe a little bit of belief in the possibility of change.

Mainstream American feminism is currently in its 3rd or 4th wave, depending on who you ask. The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th C was almost exclusively led by and for middle- and upper-class white women seeking voting rights and other forms of legal personhood while ignoring and excluding Black women, poor women, and anyone else who didn’t fit the movement’s narrow focus. The result was significant but unequally distributed progress, most notably the right to vote. Second wave feminism swept through the US during the 60s and 70s, drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights movement. It focused on sexual and reproductive autonomy, workplace discrimination, and educational and economic opportunity. It was slightly more inclusive but still centered white women’s experiences and minimized the contributions of LGBTQ+ activists and WOC. The second wave movement gave us Roe v Wade (RIP), legal protections against sex discrimination via the Civil Rights Bill, and the creation of women’s and gender studies as a field. Modern feminist movements center prevention of sexual assault and harassment, paying more attention to how race, sexuality, and class intersect with gender to shape experiences of privilege and oppression. 

These waves of feminism, to me, represent an extremely imperfect but super influential movement that spanned centuries and fundamentally changed the fabric of American society through the efforts of millions of activists, their allies, and a lot of small changes in the way our collective society thinks about gender, sexuality, and human rights. Feminists still struggle with inclusivity, conflicts in theory and practice, and balanced representation. As an umbrella encompassing an infinite number of unique ideologies, feminism will always be evolving. What I aim to communicate here, with this convoluted history, is a little seed of hope that change is possible.