Social movement theorists have argued that multiple movements emerge during cycles of protest in response to political opportunities. This article develops the concept of a "social movement community" and contends that the culture and community of a protest cycle, rather than political opportunities, attract many participants and provide organizational and tactical opportunities for new movements. I examine historical changes in the local women's movement community in Bloomington, Indiana, to explain how some movements are able to endure, and even thrive, after the decline of a protest cycle; their individual movement communities sustain activists and sometimes partially recreate the atmosphere of a protest cycle.

Many social movements, including the women's movement, have emerged within "cycles of protest" (Tarrow 1989, 1994). Social movement theorists have explained this phenomenon of movement clustering in terms of political opportunities; multiple movements arise because activists recognize that the political climate is receptive to their demands. Movements that are "early risers" demonstrate to later movements that the political system is vulnerable, thereby encouraging the spread of protest to new groups (Tarrow 1994:86).

Although the concept of political opportunity remains central to theories of the emergence and growth of protest cycles, analysts have also begun to attend to the mobilizing functions of "social movement communities" (Buechler 1990) and the cultural meanings and collective identities that they sustain (see Taylor and Whittier 1992). McAdam (1995) argues that "initiator" movements emerge in response to political opportunities, but that "spin-off" movements are influenced by cognitive or cultural effects of the earlier movements rather than by political opportunities. In fact, spin-off movements may even be "disadvantaged by the necessity of having to confront a state that is already preoccupied with the substantive demands and political pressures generated by the early risers" (McAdam 1995:225).

The idea that some movements emerge in response to the culture of a protest cycle, rather than to political opportunities, is an important one. But movement culture is likely to influence both "initiator" and "spinoff" movements.(1) As McAdam (1995:218) notes, "social movements are not discrete entities, akin to organizations." Movements include cultural components and a whole range of mobilizing structures besides movement organizations (see McCarthy 1996). Depending on where they are positioned within a movement, some constituents are attuned to political opportunities while others respond to the culture and community of the movement and protest cycle.

To explain the emergence and maintenance of social movements, we need to examine the ways in which movement communities and their organizations, as well as political opportunities, vary across historical contexts. Over the course of a protest cycle, political opportunities, the density of movement organizations, and movement culture all change, making conditions different for early riser and latecomer movements (Minkoff 1997; Tarrow 1994). Moreover, some individual movements survive the decline of a protest cycle; movement communities may be particularly important in maintaining movements during "the doldrums" (see Rupp and Taylor 1987).

Along with an historical approach, we need a "fluid" conception of social movements (Gusfield 1981) to understand ongoing mobilization. Social movements rarely have clear beginnings or endings, and they overlap with other movements with similar values in the same "social movement family" (della Porta and Rucht 1995). Movements have supporters rather than members, and their boundaries are diffuse rather than fixed. To get a handle on social movements, many scholars have focused on the social movement organization (SMO) as a manageable unit of analysis. Movement organizations are undeniably important to contemporary social movements, and organizational analyses remain crucial to social movement theory. However, if we treat social movements simply as collections of SMOs, we miss some of the less visible ways in which movements emerge and survive.

The notion of a social movement community allows us to conceive of movements as consisting of cultural groups and interactions as well as political movement organizations. It is potentially very useful in analyzing both how movements emerge within cycles of protest and how some movements maintain themselves beyond the decline of a protest cycle. It is likely to be most appropriate for analyzing local movements, but we might also conceive of national or international movement communities.

This article develops the notion of social movement community and shows how the historically variable characteristics of movement communities affect movement mobilization. I begin by discussing the concept and key theoretical questions. After describing my data, I provide a chronological account of the changing women's movement community in Bloomington, Indiana, which shows how community dynamics operate in different political contexts. I examine the impact of characteristics of the movement community on both the initial growth of the movement and its maintenance over time, but focus particularly on the endurance of the local women's movement after the decline of the 1960s cycle of protest.

Social Movement Communities

Congruent with the notion of social movement communities, various theorists have attempted to capture the informal and amorphous as well as more formal and goal-oriented aspects of social movements. Gerlach and Hine (1970) characterize social movements as "decentralized, segmentary, and reticulate" in their organization. In their view, movements consist of multiple leaders and groups and are held together by networks between individuals and groups as well as by ideology and ritual. Fine and Stoecker (1985) similarly characterize many movements as networks of small groups that meet the expressive needs of members in addition to pursuing instrumental goals. Melucci (1984, 1989, 1996) sees movements as networks of individuals and groups that share a common culture and collective identity. He argues that a movement is not a unified actor, but "a network of small groups submerged in everyday life" that only emerges on occasion to engage in overtly political actions (1984:829). Curtis and Zurcher (1973) and Klandermans (1992) conceive of movement organizations as part of a "multiorganizational field" within a local community.(2) Diani (1992:13) concludes that a social movement is best defined as "a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity."

Buechler's (1990) concept of social movement communities (SMCs) allows us to think of movements as including both social movement organizations and informal networks of activists who share a commitment to the goals of a social movement. Although Buechler talks about SMOs and SMCs as alternative forms of organization within movements, I use the concept of social movement communities to encompass all actors who share and advance the goals of a social movement: movement organizations; individual movement adherents who do not necessarily belong to SMOs: institutionalized movement supporters; alternative institutions; and cultural groups. SMOs are explicitly concerned with cultural or political change and they have external targets such as governmental authorities. Other organizations within SMCs, such as feminist health clinics or women's music festivals, differ from SMOs in that they exist to provide services or to educate or entertain participants in the community.(3)

In this usage, community is not necessarily territorial, as with the residents of a neighborhood or a town, but involves human relations, which may be maintained through social networks rather than physical locale (see Gusfield 1975; Wellman 1979). Community implies mutual support among people who are connected to one another in various ways. Movement culture, in the sense of symbols, rituals, values, and ideology, is shared and developed within movement communities and creates a collective identity (see Taylor and Whittier 1995). Groups and individuals within a movement community are linked by culture (and through it, by collective identity), social networks, and participation in movement activities.

Buechler (1990) argues that movement communities must be linked to social movements, which are preferences for particular sets of changes. A distinctive subculture without movement connections cannot be considered a movement community; movement communities must share movement goals and attempt to advance them. Over time, a movement community "may gradually fade into a subculture with increasingly tenuous links" to the movement (Buechler 1990:43). If a movement community does survive over a number of years, we can expect its shape and function to change in different historical contexts. Thus, we need to examine changes over time in movement communities and the ways in which these changes affect social movements.

Key theoretical questions concern the changing role of social movement communities in the emergence and maintenance of social movements. First, how do social movement communities operate during cycles of protest and how does this change when the cycle declines? Second, what are the bases of commitment to social movement communities and how do they sustain the movement - or become independent of it - over time? Third, how are groups and individuals within movement communities linked together and how does this change with the larger political context? Fourth, what role do social movement organizations play in movement communities over time? Finally, what do movement "centers" provide to SMCs and how do decentralized communities differ from centralized ones in their capacity for mobilization? In the following sections, I develop theoretical ideas about each of these questions.

Connections to Protest Cycles

Movement communities look different during cycles of protest than during periods of relative quiescence. During a cycle of protest, movement communities within social movement families are inter-connected, sharing participants and providing mutual support. Participants see themselves as "part of a broad and rapidly expanding political-cultural community fighting the same fight on a number of related fronts" (McAdam 1995:236). At the height of a protest cycle, a general social movement community, in which participants from a variety of movements interact, links individual movements such as the environmental and women's movements.

Because movements overlap and there is a great deal of visible collective action during a protest cycle, many participants are easily mobilized into a variety of related movements. While some leaders and organizations are no doubt responding to political opportunities, large numbers of participants are attracted by the culture of the movement community. The activities of one movement provide organizational and tactical opportunities for other movements, and the visibility of the general movement community creates "free spaces" for previously unorganized constituencies. In the open environment of a protest cycle, new groups can talk freely and consider collective action for themselves (Evans and Boyte 1986:192).

As a protest cycle declines, movement communities change in ways that are significant for movement maintenance and continuity. Some individuals and organizations drop out of a movement community (cf. Klandermans 1992). Specific movement communities, which are associated with individual movements, lose their connections to a more general movement community. Without the overlapping participation of individuals mobilized by other movements, movement communities are more difficult to maintain. Within specific movement communities, new activists sometimes lose contact with the founding generation of activists, thereby missing out on the political experiences of their forerunners (cf. Franzen 1993; Whittier 1995).

Occasionally, the ambiance of a cycle of protest is recreated on a smaller scale when related movements and different generations of activists come together. Meyer and Whittier (1994) describe the "spillover" of feminists into the peace movement in the 1980s, creating overlaps between the two movement communities. In 1990-91 the Gulf War mobilized many feminists, gays and lesbians, ethnic and racial groups, and peace activists, and it brought out veterans of the anti-Vietnam War protests as well as younger peace activists (see Epstein 1992). Such periods of mobilization by related movements are likely to strengthen specific movement communities as relationships are renewed and new networks are formed.

In sum, rapid mobilization occurs during a protest cycle not simply because various constituents recognize political opportunities for protest. Rather, the community created by multiple movements provides organizational and tactical opportunities and attracts new constituencies with its openness. Once the protest cycle declines, the general movement community is lost and individual movements have a harder time mobilizing. To maintain itself over many years beyond a period of widespread protest, a movement needs to create its own internal community.

Bases for Community

Some movement communities are traditionally "communitarian" in that they build on prior commitments to local communities and traditions (Lichterman 1996). For example, communities centered around Black churches have become civil rights movement communities (Morris 1984); religious communities have spawned peace movement communities (Holsworth 1989); neighborhood communities have changed into neighborhood-defense movement communities (Stoecker 1993, 1994). Other movement communities are rooted in a "personalized" culture of commitment, in which individuals highlight their own individuality through their political activities. Lichterman (1996) argues that personalism does not imply selfish individualism; rather, the search for self-fulfillment through personal expression and action can be the basis of commitment to a community by people who lack any prior connections to one another.

The basis of commitment to a movement community affects the community's organizational forms and the types of bonds that exist among community members. Lichterman found that groups in personalized communities allocated a great deal of time for the expression of individual views and encouraged participation from each member. Communitarian groups were much more instrumental in their organization and procedures, relying heavily on leaders who felt that they could legitimately speak for their communities. In personalized communities, individuals were politicized activists who acted locally but who felt themselves connected to national and international movements, whereas communitarian activists saw their commitment more in terms of local community (Lichterman 1996:139).

Specific SMCs, like the women's movement community, often include several different communal groups, such as lesbians and women's rights activists. In addition, SMOs within SMCs may also have their own internal communities, based on either communitarian or personalized politics. Thus, an SMC might actually be composed of a number of inter-connected communities. At times, communal groups within SMCs may focus primarily on their own internal communities rather than on the larger movement community. For example, lesbian feminists may for a time be completely absorbed with the development of lesbian groups and networks rather than the larger feminist movement community. Communitarian groups, such as the members of a local ethnic community, who become part of a movement community, such as a local toxic waste movement community, may return to participation in their original community rather than the movement community once a crisis ends or political opportunities fade.

We can expect the bases of commitment to a movement community to affect its maintenance. The traditional organizational structures of communitarian SMOs are likely to be more stable than those of personalized communities, in which the search for process may lead to conflict and dissolution. Because communitarian groups are likely to revert to their previous statuses as local or ethnic communities, however, movement communities with communitarian bases may be relatively short-lived. The experience of participating in a movement does leave memories of injustice and experiences with collective action that will help to fuel subsequent collective action (see Woliver 1993), but the revival of the movement community requires a new crisis or issue.

In contrast to the crisis or issue-oriented participation of communitarian activists, individuals who are motivated by personalized commitments are likely to continue their activism indefinitely - even after a particular movement organization folds (Lichterman 1996:57) or after political opportunities decline. Such activists do not always help to maintain a specific movement community because they sometimes shift their activism to a related movement, as in the case of feminists who became peace movement activists in the 1970s and 1980s. However, activists motivated by personalism often move from one movement organization or project to another within a SMC, and they often help to maintain the networks of a movement community even during slow periods. Thus, we might expect movement communities that rely primarily on personalized politics to survive even as individual SMOs come and go and political conditions change, whereas communitarian groups are likely to lose their movement connections until precipitating events repoliticize them. Movement communities that include a mixture of communitarian and personalized groups may be the most enduring of all.

Linkages Within and Between Movement Communities

Networks between individual participants are clearly important both in linking communities within movement families to one another and in connecting "cells" within movement communities (Gerlach and Hine 1970:56). However, the linkages between groups vary in number and intensity, making for more or less strongly connected movement communities and families (cf. Aveni 1978; Granovetter 1973). Overlapping memberships among groups, as opposed to simple network ties (e.g., friendships), create the strongest bonds, and the more overlap the tighter the connections. At one extreme of the continuum, local movements take on a "federated frontstage structure" (Stoecker 1993, 1995) in which groups are so densely linked that the same people are involved in each organization or campaign. Movement communities within social movement families (e.g., lesbian and feminist) coalesce. At the other extreme, there are only a few weak network ties between movement communities or among groups within a movement community, with few or no overlapping memberships. When there are strong linkages, different organizations share leaders, for example, through overlaps on boards of directors; in the case of weak linkages, leaders of one group typically offer only expressions of personal support rather than leadership or organizational support for another group (Aveni 1978:189).

The extent to which a movement community is densely or loosely-knit affects its ability to mobilize for collective action. Stoecker (1993, 1994) finds that dense networks between groups promote behind-the-scenes unity and prevent factionalism. Aveni (1978) shows that the NAACP brought in large contributions through both extensive and intensive linkages to other organizations. Rosenthal et al. (1985) argue that weak ties create channels of communication between diverse groups, but that strong ties lead to more enduring alliances and exchanges of resources, ideas, and leaders. In the nineteenth century women's rights movement, membership overlaps between movement organizations and other voluntary organizations created a common community, which helped local movements in small communities advance their goals (Rosenthal et al. 1997).

Over time, the nature of the ties among groups in a movement community is likely to change. As the political and cultural contexts change, different organizations or groups within the SMC may develop stronger or weaker ties with others in the community (see Gamson 1996). During peak periods of activity, when the cultural influence of the movement community is strong, we can expect intensive and multiple overlaps between groups that facilitate the organization of collective action campaigns. In slower periods, the networks are likely to be weaker and fewer in number. This makes it difficult to organize extensive campaigns, but still permits occasional bursts of collective action.

National and International Connections. Many local movement groups are also linked to national, and sometimes international, movement organizations and activists. Some members of local organizations are active in national organizations, and some local groups are chapters or affiliates of national organizations. Activists may have network connections to other activists in different parts of the country. National movement leaders and organizers often travel to speak in different parts of the country. Organizers from national SMOs sometimes help with local campaigns, spreading movement tactics and frames and creating national-local connections (see Gerlach and Hine 1970:57). Increasingly, local groups are connected to other activists in different parts of the country - and the world - through the internet. Like local linkages, national and international linkages vary in intensity and number, and they have implications for mobilization. Although national organizations sometimes create burdens for local affiliates (see Oliver and Furman 1989), they can also aid local groups by providing tactics, organizers, and resources (see Gordon and Jasper 1996; Staggenborg 1991:155; Walsh 1984).

Even when local movement communities are strong enough to mobilize on their own, they may lack effectiveness without national support. In the case of the anti-Gulf War movement, the temporary union of various movement communities enabled the anti-war movement to mobilize huge demonstrations in cities with progressive political cultures, such as San Francisco. Although the local coalitions were not without conflict, the lack of a larger cycle of protest was also important in limiting the effectiveness of the local mobilization. Because the Left was in decline nationally, there was no national strategy to support the mobilization (Epstein 1992:135).

National linkages are likely to be particularly important in keeping local communities alive during slow periods. National and international issues sometimes ignite passions at times when nothing is happening locally. National organizations sometimes send organizers to initiate local campaigns and they provide resources to local entrepreneurs who attempt to reinvigorate local movements.

The Importance of SMOs

Social movement communities vary in the extent to which social movement organizations are central. Movements may have no SMOs at all, but maintain a movement community through other forms of organization. Or they might have a large number of very active movement organizations that attack various targets, as in the case of the federated frontstage structure identified by Stoecker (1993, 1994). Between these extremes, movements may have one or more strong movement organizations or one or more weak movement organizations. Over time, the number and role of SMOs in a movement community is likely to change.

Movements with strong SMOs have an advantage in that these organizations typically play a major role in movement recruitment and in mobilizing resources for movement campaigns. Each SMO can concentrate on a different target, and more radical organizations can make the demands of moderate SMOs look reasonable (Stoecker 1993:177). Movements with strong SMOs may be better able to maintain coalitions and long-term collective action campaigns, whereas movements that rely on other forms of organization may be limited to shorter-term, crisis-oriented collective action. Movement organizations may also promote dialogue among different groups in a movement community regarding divisive issues. For instance, Franzen (1993:904) describes divisions in the lesbian community in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and argues that the lack of a political organization was an important reason for the community's failure to overcome differences and develop a collective identity.

Despite their advantages for mobilizing collective action campaigns, movement organizations are difficult to maintain over many years. Like alternative service organizations such as feminist health clinics, their maintenance requirements are high. Active SMOs often require intensive commitments from core members as well as funding. While service organizations can employ full-time staff and charge fees to offset costs, SMOs need to put a great deal of time into fundraising if they wish to employ staff (see Staggenborg 1989). If they rely solely on volunteers, they need to continually recruit new generations of activists to replace tired and retiring activists. Intensive political work may be more exhausting than cultural activities like music festivals, which often provide relaxing atmospheres in which activists can renew their energies (see Eder, Staggenborg and Sudderth 1995; Staggenborg, Eder and Sudderth 1993/94).

We can expect SMOs to be particularly important to movement communities during peak periods. However, the cultural context in which the SMO operates is as critical as political opportunity to the attractiveness of the organization. With the decline of a protest cycle, SMOs lose some of their community connections and may survive during the doldrums either as elite-sustained organizations with their own internal communities (Rupp and Taylor 1987) or as formalized organizations with professional leaders (Staggenborg 1988). In local communities that lack the resources and stable population needed to support such organizations, however, cultural activities play an important role in maintaining movement communities during slow periods. In the absence of strong movement organizations, community networks provide a basis for political mobilization as new issues arise.

Movement Community Centers

Movement communities also vary in the extent to which they have "centers" that bring activists together. In his study of the southern civil rights movement, Morris (1984) points to the role of "local movement centers" like the Montgomery Improvement Association in bringing together leaders and coordinating collective action campaigns. Movement centers provide physical spaces that bring people together, creating solidarity and visibility for the movement community. SMOs sometimes serve as movement centers, opening their headquarters or meetings to the larger movement community. But other kinds of gathering places can also serve as movement centers. For example, a collectively run cafe served as the meeting place for the neighborhood movement studied by Stoecker (1994).

The extent to which a movement community is "centered" has implications for recruitment and mobilization. We can expect SMCs with vital centers to be more active than decentralized communities. A movement center creates visibility for a movement, making it easier to attract participants. When a movement community consists of multiple groups with no central coordination, it is hard for would-be participants to locate the movement. When issues arise in the community, collective action is more difficult to coordinate in the absence of a local movement center. Common participation in a movement center facilitates coalition work among different groups in a movement community and helps to prevent intra-community conflict.

Movement centers are most likely to be present during protest cycles when there is a great deal of collective action. In some cases, overlapping movement communities within families share a movement center. However, political movement centers are hard to maintain over many years, particularly after the decline of a protest cycle. Specific movement communities often survive in a decentralized form, but they have a harder time mobilizing collective action campaigns. Cultural rather than overtly political centers of activity may become dominant, helping movements in "abeyance" to survive (Taylor 1989; Taylor and Rupp 1993), but shifting the emphasis away from externally targeted political activities.

Institutionalization

Ties to influential allies are one element of political opportunity (Tarrow 1994), but such ties are not only important in gaining advantages for a movement; they also help create movement communities. Although some movement communities are completely separate from established institutions, lacking even network ties, movements that survive the decline of a protest cycle are likely to take hold within institutions. In some cases, movement communities may consist largely of individuals and groups operating within established institutions such as universities, government agencies, and corporations. Katzenstein (1990) argues that the women's movement has proliferated within previously male-dominated institutions such as churches, universities, the media, and the military. Spaces or "habitats" within these institutions, such as women's studies programs in universities, are part of feminist communities (Katzenstein 1998).

Institutional ties and habitats are important to the maintenance of movement communities in several ways. They help to spread movement ideas to new groups of people in an unobtrusive manner, even as more visible movement organizations come under external attack (Katzenstein 1990). Institutional networks provide resources and help sustain SMCs even when movement organizations disband (cf. Boles 1994; Staggenborg 1996). Movement community centers are sometimes established within institutions. During the doldrums, we can expect institutions to be particularly important to movement communities.

Activism within institutions can be either radical or moderate, depending on the institutional context (Katzenstein 1998), but institutionalization is likely to make movements less visible. Some established organizations fear attacks by countermovements and cuts in funding. Some movement centers within institutions are limited by the conservatism of the larger institution. Organizations set up to provide services have a hard time mobilizing collective action at the same time. When movement communities rely heavily on institutional centers and networks, they are likely to remain unobtrusive, but they do survive and spread movement ideas to new groups of people (Katzenstein 1990).

The Case Study

Bloomington, Indiana is a college town of about 90,000 residents, including the Indiana University student population of about 30,000. Although most case studies of the women's movement have been conducted in larger cities (e.g. Whittier 1995), the development of the movement community in a small city like Bloomington is theoretically interesting. In a small college town with frequent population turnover, we can expect movement maintenance to be very difficult (see Staggenborg 1996). In particular, the difficulty of maintaining movement organizations in such a setting makes it a good place to observe how other elements of the movement community maintain the local women's movement. At the same time, many developments in the Bloomington women's movement parallel those of the national movement, and we can see how national developments affect the local movement community.

My case study consists of interviews conducted from 1992-93 with 38 past and present activists, participant observation in the early 1990s, and use of newspaper accounts and available documents such as newsletters. I was able to obtain some copies of Front Page, a feminist newsletter published in the early 1970s, and a near-complete set of Womansource, the feminist newspaper published from 1977 to 1981. Newspaper accounts, documents obtained from some informants, and informal discussions with long-time feminists allowed me to compile a chronology of feminist actions and an initial "map" of the movement, which was filled out as I talked with additional informants. As I learned about different feminist activities, I chose informants to cover different time periods and as many different types of activities, both cultural and political, as possible. Informants represented the major constituencies of the local women's movement. Since the early 1990s, I have kept up with developments in the movement through e-mail networks, newsletters, and contacts with informants.

My purpose in presenting this case material is to uncover the dynamics involved in the ongoing maintenance of social movement communities. In the above theoretical discussion, I have outlined some ideas about features of SMCs that change over time. Some elements of movement communities, such as SMOs and movement centers, are stronger in some political contexts than in others. By looking at a movement community over time, we can see how it changes in different periods and how this affects mobilization and collective action.

The following chronology is divided into three periods, corresponding roughly to periods identified in other studies of the U.S. women's movement (cf. Davis 1991; Ferree and Hess 1994; Ryan 1992; Taylor and Whittier 1997; Whittier 1995). Developments in women's movement communities occur in the context of shifts in the larger political environment. In the first period, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, there was a visible women's movement in Bloomington; like other places in the U.S., Bloomington experienced a resurgence of the women's movement within the larger protest cycle of the 1960s. In the second period, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, the movement maintained itself after the decline of the protest cycle and then experienced a spurt of growth in the late seventies and early eighties. This surge was in part a result of the national campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the threats from Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 that promoted growth in many social movements. In the third period, from the mid-eighties to the 1990s, the movement has been in a state of abeyance, with occasional bursts of activity around issues like abortion.

The Movement Community During the Cycle of Protest

The earliest contemporary women's movement community in Bloomington, Indiana, was part of a general progressive political community. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the town of Bloomington, like other places throughout the U.S., was alive with political protest, particularly in opposition to the Vietnam War. Students at Indiana University and other members of the Bloomington community participated in civil rights, environmental, and anti-war protests. Like campuses across the country, Indiana University was the site of much of the protest activity in Bloomington. Dunn Meadow, a large grassy area on campus, was a place where students and non-students alike gathered for numerous anti-war rallies and other political events.

The context of visible and frequent protest made it easy to become involved in a variety of overlapping movements. For example, one young woman who grew up in Bloomington and graduated from high school in 1970, but was not a student at the university, came out as a lesbian, and became involved in feminist and other activities. She remembered:

We were really into the rallies during the war and everything. There was lots of stuff going on in Dunn Meadow all the time. I mean, that was our territory. We'd hang out at the [student] Union and Dunn Meadow and all that and we'd go to all of those things. Really, even if it pertained to us or not, because it was sort of the thing to do. (interview February 20, 1993)

During the 1960s and early 1970s, activists were caught up in the protest of the period and felt themselves part of a radical community. It was easy to identify with the whole cycle of protest; involvement in the women's movement and gay and lesbian movement emerged naturally from a more general culture of activism. By 1970, gay men and lesbians often met one another at campus gatherings and learned of houses where gay parties were held weekly. Non-student lesbians often became involved in feminist activities through their contacts with lesbian students. Gradually, a distinct gay and lesbian movement emerged within the political and cultural space created by the protest cycle. In 1972, for example, a group that called itself "Gay Women" used Dunn Meadow "as a non-threatening place for gay women to get together" (Courier-Tribune September 23, 1972).

The women's movement in Bloomington, like the movement elsewhere, frequently took advantage of opportunities for organizing provided by other movements during the protest cycle. For example, when a chapter of the New University Conference, a New Left organization (see Sale 1973:412-413), was founded at Indiana University, a women's caucus was also formed. At a large Earth Day celebration in Dunn Meadow in 1970, five women from a local WITCH group (see Hole and Levine 1971:126-130) interrupted the featured speaker, Senator Gaylord Nelson, by wailing as they ran through the crowd dressed as witches. They were protesting Nelson's role in hearings on the safety of the birth control pill, thereby interjecting women's issues into an environmental event (Courier-Tribune August 26, 1970).

The Shape of the Movement Community

Within this context of generalized protest, a visible and active women's movement community developed. It was characterized by overlaps among groups and active centers that brought together movement constituents. Movement organizations were important, but they were connected to, rather than isolated from, the larger movement community. Personalized politics predominated, but the movement also built on the pre-existing community of women who were "liberal Democrats," and it helped to create a new local community among lesbians.

Like the women's liberation unions forming across the U.S. (see Freeman 1975; Hansen 1986), an organization called Bloomington Women's Liberation was created in 1969. The umbrella organization brought together a number of small groups, including WITCH, and attracted several hundred participants. It sponsored consciousness-raising groups as well as action-oriented groups that worked on a variety of issues such as abortion, day care, sex education, and job discrimination. In 1970, several activists lived in a Women's Liberation house on North Washington Street in Bloomington where meetings and activities took place (and anyone could stay for the night). In the same year, a women's center was established in a house located at 414 North Park Street, which remained open until spring 1975 when the house was sold and the center was forced to close. This center was also a place where some women lived and where numerous meetings took place. A feminist newsletter called Front Page was published out of the Park Street center until 1975.

Although the Women's Center on Park Street was dominated by students and other young women, it attracted a mix of supporters. Most importantly, the center helped bring lesbians into the movement community, particularly through their connections to lesbian students. A lesbian feminist who was not a student recalled:

Most of the lesbians I met that were in college here were ones that hung out there [at the Women's Center] and I think that's how we all got involved because we all met one way or another, sooner or later. (interview February 20, 1993)

In 1973-1974, a group called Lesbian Liberation was one of the active groups that met in the Women's Center. Lesbian Liberation helped create a lesbian community by holding potlucks and parties; it spread lesbian-feminist consciousness by providing speakers to educational groups and organizing a course entitled "A Lesbian's View of Lesbianism" in the "Free University" program on campus (Women's Handbook, IUSA Women's Affairs office, Spring, 1975).

Whereas the Park Street center was primarily a "women's liberation" or "younger branch" movement center, there was also a "women's rights" or "older branch" component of the movement community (see Freeman 1975; Hole and Levine 1971). In 1972, a Bloomington chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a local chapter of the Women's Political Caucus were founded (although the latter never really got off the ground and soon folded). The early members of Bloomington NOW were typically in their late twenties or early thirties, and they had backgrounds in local party politics and in organizations like the League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood. The local League had a long-standing core of activists, a number of whom were involved in establishing Planned Parenthood in Bloomington in the early 1960s. Many of the women who were active in voluntary organizations and in the local Democratic Party were women who were married to Indiana University faculty members, commonly known as "faculty wives." Faculty wives and other local women who became involved in NOW were characterized by one early member as "all liberal Democrats."

Thus, in the early 1970s, the local women's movement community had two main centers: the Park Street women's center and the NOW chapter. Although the younger branch women's center attracted mostly students and lesbian feminists and the older branch NOW chapter attracted somewhat older liberal Democrats, there was some mixing of these constituencies. Bloomington NOW sponsored community festivals and sometimes co-sponsored events like films with student groups. Younger feminists came out for some of the educational forums and community events sponsored by NOW, and NOW members attended functions at the Women's Center and contributed articles to Front Page. Both of these feminist community centers relied on a spirit of excitement associated with the 1960s' cycle of protest.

It was the excitement of the protest cycle and the solidarity of the women's movement community, rather than the perception of political opportunities, that mobilized large numbers of activists. In the context of an active movement community, participants sometimes engage in collective action even when the odds of success seem low; in other words, a lack of political opportunities can be overcome by community solidarity. Although this may prove futile at times, movements can help to change the political opportunity structure, making success at a later date more likely. The following discussion of NOW and the effort to pass the ERA in Indiana illustrates this process.

NOW, Liberal Democrats, and the ERA Campaign

Bloomington NOW helped to change the pre-existing community of liberal Democrats and faculty wives into a loosely-knit feminist community. Many women who were already active in politics and voluntary associations became feminists as a result of exposure to feminist ideas and interactions with women like themselves who joined groups such as NOW. Nationwide, women whose aspirations were affected by the women's movement began running for public office (see Mueller 1987). Similarly in Bloomington, a number of women were elected to public office in the early 1970s. Many of them came to consider themselves feminists, and they were supported by members of the feminist community in subsequent election campaigns. The first woman elected to the Bloomington city council noted national and state support for women's concerns in her proposal for a bill that established the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women in 1974. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, sending it to the states for ratification, and activists across Indiana created Hoosiers for the Equal Rights Amendment (HERA), a statewide network active in lobbying for the ERA.

Bloomington NOW's activities drew on strategies developed by the national NOW organization and the concerns of state and local activists. As encouraged by national NOW, consciousness-raising groups were organized. Public forums were held on issues of concern; films on women's issues, often co-sponsored with campus groups, attracted interest. Annual events also created community; for example, in a tradition begun by national NOW in 1970, Bloomington NOW members organized commemorations of the August 26 anniversary of the passage of women's suffrage each year from 1972 to 1976. In 1973, NOW held a commemoration of both the February anniversary of Indiana's suffrage law, passed prior to the 19th Amendment, and the August anniversary of the suffrage amendment. For the latter, NOW encouraged the mayor of Bloomington to declare August 26 Women's Day and began organizing street fairs to celebrate the occasion each year.

Politically, the chapter became primarily involved in a campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in Indiana. The political campaign relied on a sense of community among activists and in turn helped to develop the feminist community. Between about August 1972 and March 1973, when the ERA was first considered by the Indiana legislature, NOW members were busily involved in letter-writing, pamphleteering, petitioning, and organizing educational forums and rallies in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. One activist remembered sitting at a table in Bloomington's College Mall, handing out literature and playing Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" song over and over until the shopkeepers begged them to stop! Although most of the activity was local, members also organized to attend hearings on the ERA in Indianapolis in February, 1973.

Interestingly, all of this activity occurred despite the fact that in the early 1970s the Indiana legislature was staunchly conservative and there was little realistic chance of passing the amendment. Some seasoned political activists who became involved in lobbying for the ERA were well aware of the intransigence of the existing legislature. However, other local activists were not very involved in lobbying the state legislature and they were not much affected by the negative political opportunity structure. When asked why she was not discouraged by the political climate of the state legislature, one activist replied that she mainly went to rallies and other events in Bloomington and talked to people like herself who were very excited about working for the ERA (interview March 14, 1993). The flurry of activity around the ERA created a sense of community that reinforced the political campaign. When the ERA was defeated by the Indiana legislature in March 1973, the first round of intense campaigning for the amendment in Indiana came to an end. However, the work of creating feminist sentiment within the community of politically active women had a lasting impact, eventually supporting a successful campaign to pass the ERA in Indiana.

Survival and Growth After the Decline of the Protest Cycle

As the cycle of protest declined there was a noticeable dip in feminist activity throughout the country by the mid-1970s (see Davis 1991:138). In Bloomington, the NOW chapter lost many of its founding members, Bloomington Women's Liberation dissolved, the Park Street women's center folded, Front Page ceased publication, and collective action on campus declined. Nevertheless, the movement survived and, by the late 1970s, there was once again a visible movement community.

Bloomington NOW was one of the few SMOs to remain active in the mid-1970s. However, NOW was sustained mainly by the sense of community that the chapter offered rather than by its political activities. After most early NOW activists had either left town or become less active, the chapter attracted a new cohort of mostly student members. As one of these members recalled:

I think that our biggest emphasis was on personal development and the opportunity to not be stopped in any way because of being women . . . we had several wonderful, very well-attended consciousness-raising groups. . . . It was really a magical time to be young and living in a college community because we really did think that all of our options were ahead of us and we certainly didn't think that we would have any trouble getting the ERA passed. (interview January 2, 1993)

The focus on personal development did not preclude political action, however. The same activist remembered going to about four different meetings a week in a frenzy of activity, not only through NOW, but through other groups including an ERA Coalition that brought together a broad range of feminist constituents.

Because the Indiana legislature refused to pass the ERA in the early seventies, feminists in Indiana who were active in legislative lobbying for the ERA and in party politics began to think in terms of changing the composition of the state legislature. In Bloomington, they worked through the ERA Coalition and through the Democratic Party to elect several legislators who promised to vote for the ERA. As one political activist explained, "we had spent time at the legislature lobbying and we knew we couldn't convince these people, we had to replace them" (interview April 27, 1993). Because there was an active movement community, this seemed like - and was - a realistic goal. Legislators who were elected by the efforts of activists in Bloomington and elsewhere in the state were held to their promises and the ERA passed in Indiana in 1977 when there was a Democratic majority in the state legislature for the first time in the decade. This effort did not depend on leadership by a movement organization, but was carried out by a network of activists. The NOW chapter itself fizzled out in 1976 after some key activists left town and others were exhausted, but it was revived by new members in the late seventies.

The Surge of the Late 1970s and Early 1980s

The revival of Bloomington NOW took place in the context of another growth period for the local feminist community in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Although there was no longer a cycle of protest to support the women's movement, feminists generated an active and visible community of their own in which various groups thrived. In addition to a lively NOW chapter, a women's bookstore, a women's newspaper, a feminist shelter for abused women, and a Rape Task Force all flourished during this period. Numerous feminist events were organized by various groups and individuals, such as ERA rallies, Take Back the Night marches, International Women's Day celebrations, a National Women's Studies Association conference in Bloomington in 1980, and other public forums held on campus and in the town.

National developments were one important reason for this surge in feminist activity. Nationwide, the ERA was a "hot" issue for many women; in 1978, Congress extended the deadline for ratification of the amendment and supporters mounted an all-out campaign to pass the ERA in the three additional states needed for ratification. Activists in states that had already passed the ERA, such as Indiana, participated by sending "missionaries" to unratified states like Illinois and holding rallies and other public displays of support. Until the deadline expired in 1982, NOW was at the center of the campaign for the ERA both in Bloomington and throughout the country. In addition to the ERA issue, the feminist movement across the U.S. was involved in campaigns involving specific concerns such as wife abuse and rape. Activists who followed these issues raised them in Bloomington, and employed tactics, such as Take Back the Night marches, that became part of the national feminist repertoire in the 1970s. Finally, Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 alarmed many feminists, who mobilized around issues such as abortion rights in response to the threat.

Personalized politics were also important to the surge of activism. Although the movement community in a college town like Bloomington suffers from a great deal of population turnover, there are individuals who stay for a number of years and continue to seek out involvement as a means of personal growth and out of commitment to feminist causes. The student population also provides an ongoing source of new activists who are attracted by personalized politics. In the late seventies and early eighties, a number of groups emphasized internal process and personal development. For example, a group called the Bloomington Organization for Abused Women (BOAW) had a small, closely-knit core of members who spent about two years discussing theory and planning how to run a shelter according to feminist ideals before they finally opened the Community Shelter for Abused Women in 1979. They all

found this process highly fulfilling - more so than actually running the shelter, which was fraught with all kinds of practical problems and closed after a little more than a year.

When Bloomington NOW revitalized in the early 1980s, it also provided a highly appealing internal community as a foundation for its political work. A few feminists from the liberal Democrat constituency were responsible for reactivating the chapter in the late 1970s, but once the chapter began to flourish, they were happy to withdraw and let others with a more personalized orientation take over. The chapter president in 1981 was a therapist by profession who made meetings attractive. One NOW member recalled:

[She] was a counselor and had a very good knack for seeing how people could feel good about being in the organization and getting them to plug into those roles. And kind of conducting meetings in a way that made people feel good. So people wanted to come back. (interview September 16, 1992)

As it had in the past, the chapter also used consciousness-raising groups to create internal community.

In addition to the internal attractions of SMOs, the nature of the larger movement community also added to the surge in feminist activity. No one center unified the local women's movement, but various types of connections among feminists brought the community together. There were multiple groups and projects with significant overlap among them, and various events and rituals created community among different groups of women. Some Bloomington groups shared key activists. For instance, some of the women who were very active in the feminist bookstore collective were also core members of the Bloomington Organization for Abused Women, which opened a shelter in 1979. A number of leaders were involved in multiple projects. For example, a leader of the Rape Task Force organized two highly successful International Women's Day celebrations. A NOW leader and her partner opened a feminist retreat center that became a hub of cultural and spiritual activity for women, mostly lesbians, sponsoring a variety of events such as a fall feminist fair in 1980.

Even groups that tended to be fairly exclusive in membership, overlapping little with others, spilled over into the larger movement community with their activities. The feminist newspaper Womansource was produced mainly by a small group of students, but it helped to create a larger feminist community and relied on that community for support. The newspaper covered a broad range of feminist activities beyond those of students and was widely distributed and read in the Bloomington community. Feminists who owned local businesses faithfully purchased advertising space in the paper. The paper was also supported through benefit dances and concerts that were held in local bars, including the gay bar in Bloomington. The Womansource benefits came to be big events in the feminist community, frequently attended by well over a hundred people, many of whom were lesbians.

The NOW chapter similarly attracted support well beyond its membership. The chapter was heavily involved in the national ERA campaign in the intense period before the deadline for passage of the amendment expired in 1982. NOW's president in the early 1980s was a lesbian with strong ties to lesbian feminists as well as other activists in the community. Under her leadership, membership in the chapter increased. Moreover, NOW became central to the larger women's movement community in that numerous women became aware of the group and attended public events sponsored by the chapter even if they did not become NOW members.

For the most part, participants were excited about the movement and passionate about its issues during the period of widespread mobilization. In this atmosphere, as in a protest cycle, numerous groups and projects did not compete with one another for participants as much as they helped one another to mobilize. Widespread movement activity made people feel that real change was possible, and many individuals were willing to participate in multiple groups because they felt that their energy was well spent.

Not all efforts at feminist organizing were successful during this period, however. Movement centers need to bring together different types of constituents and they need to generate excitement among participants. One unsuccessful project was a Women's Center that was finally opened in 1980 after two years of planning. Its founders were liberal Democrat, "women's rights" types of activists; they were involved in mainstream organizations and institutional centers of the women's movement, including the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women and the Office for Women's Affairs at Indiana University. There were various ideas about what the Women's Center should be, but the core backers of the center envisioned it as a place where services would be provided to women such as displaced homemakers and battered women.

Beginning in March 1980 the center was temporarily located first in the United Methodist Church and later in the Unitarian Universalist Church. In November 1981 it closed due to the lack of funds for a permanent home. During its brief existence, the Women's Center did serve as a place where various groups held meetings and it did offer some services for women, including a displaced homemakers program that was funded by the United Methodist Church. However, the center never really became a hub of activity for the local women's movement. One reason for this was that at least some of its founders viewed the women's center as a service provider rather than as a movement center. Another factor in the short life of the Women's Center was that students and other young women, who could have provided the center with a different vision and more energy, had not been recruited to the planning task force. An undergraduate student reporter for Womansource who covered a planning session for the Women's Center described the meeting as consisting of "middle-aged white women who work for social service agencies in Bloomington" and who lacked interest in involving students (Womansource December 6, 1978). Another informant, who was then a young woman heavily involved in feminist activities, described the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women at the time, one of the main forces behind the center, as "asleep at the wheel" (interview May 5, 1993).

Thus, unlike the earlier Park Street women's center, the Women's Center that existed from 1980 to 1981 did not succeed in bringing together the different constituents of the local women's movement. Although some of the older women involved in organizing the center were quite interested in issues such as the problems of displaced homemakers, their orientation was much more instrumental than personalized. They failed to appeal to younger women and the center failed to attract the emotional attachment and energetic participation that was needed to make it a vital local movement center.

Decentralization in the Doldrums

Since the early 1980s, the women's movement has endured, but in an altered form. Ferree and Hess (1994) characterize the period of the Reagan and Bush Administrations as a defensive one in which the movement responded to attacks on feminist initiatives with specialized efforts on specific issues such as rape and abortion. Taylor and Whittier (1997) argue that the women's movement of the late 1980s and 1990s has been in a state of abeyance, surviving in a less visible state, with the exception of short bursts of mass mobilization such as the 1989 abortion rights march in Washington. This decline in visible movement activity can be explained in part by national developments such as the defeat of the ERA in 1982 and the Reagan Administration's funding cuts for feminist projects such as battered women's shelters (Taylor and Whittier 1997:553).

The Bloomington women's movement experienced the same decline in visible activity as did the national movement. In contrast to the surge period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the women's movement was unable to recreate within its own community anything approaching the climate of a protest cycle. Although Bloomington did have an ongoing peace movement in which some feminists participated, it was not strong enough to sustain the type of visible overlapping community that Meyer and Whittier (1994) found elsewhere. One exception to this was during the Gulf War when Bloomington, like many other cities across the country, became the site of anti-war protests. A number of rallies were held and Dunn Meadow, on the university campus, became a gathering place for many peace activists, feminists, and environmentalists. Activists also founded a Peace and Justice Center intended to continue the activism generated by the war, but the center was short-lived, in part because of lack of funds.

Since the early 1980s, the movement community has lacked the types of movement centers and linkages, such as multiple overlaps in membership, that could bring together the various constituencies of the local movement. As a result, constituents such as lesbian feminists and liberal Democrats have to some extent retreated into their separate communities. The larger movement community remains alive through cultural activities, institutional support, and short-lived movement organizations, but visible movement activity is sporadic.

Cultural Activities

Throughout the U.S., many of the most vital feminist groups in the 1980s and 1990s were cultural projects generated mostly by lesbians. In Bloomington, as in other places, lesbian feminists developed movement communities that were to some extent distinct from the larger feminist community, but which nourished a feminist political consciousness (see Taylor and Whittier 1992). In 1986, a new feminist bookstore called Dreams and Swords opened in Bloomington, later becoming Aquarius Books in 1988. Until 1992, the bookstore was managed by a lesbian who was well-connected to the lesbian-feminist community. In 1987, Athena, a feminist cooperative gallery for women artists, opened in the same building as the bookstore; a storefront for the feminist Helene Victoria Press also opened in the building, creating a larger feminist center. The bookstore's manager made the store a place where lesbians felt free to drop in to find out what was going on and to talk with her; by several accounts, she was a maternal, middle-aged woman who served as an informal counselor to members of the lesbian-feminist community. She also organized numerous events at the bookstore, such as book signings and a series of women's history presentations called Herstory. When she left town in 1992, however, the new manager was a young woman who did not perform the same role. The bookstore ceased to function as a center for lesbian feminists and later closed. Moreover, the bookstore never brought together the entire feminist community; non-lesbian women and even lesbians who were newcomers to Bloomington reported feeling unwelcome at the bookstore because the women who frequented it seemed like an exclusive group.

There have also been numerous other feminist cultural activities. The National Women's Music Festival, held annually in Bloomington since 1982, became one of the primary activities that involved lesbian feminists in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, a feminist writers' group called Source formed and, over the years, offered programs of readings at coffeehouses. Other writers' groups were also formed; many, like Source, remained together for many years. In 1987, a feminist chorus formed out of the Unitarian Church, performed at a number of functions and continued to attract new members over the years. Feminist spirituality groups also formed around the Unitarian Church. In 1988, a lesbian-feminist group called Sparks was founded to bring lesbians together for social and educational events. Socially, many lesbian feminists also came together through their involvement on softball teams such as the team sponsored by the feminist bookstore.

These cultural enclaves of feminism have been joined together by some overlaps in membership and by friendship networks. They are known within the "women's community," which is largely lesbian, but they do not make for a visible movement community. Many participants in the early 1990s experienced both the lesbian-feminist community and the larger feminist community as scattered or divided into small groups or networks of friends. As one informant commented, "maybe a feminist singer will come and suddenly you'll see a women's community. But I don't know that there's much of a cohesive day-to-day community or network" (interview March 15, 1993). Nonetheless, various cultural groups and events did help spread feminist ideology and kept participants connected within a decentralized movement community.

Lesbians active in organizing the National Women's Music Festival each year, who are connected to one another through friendship networks and participation in cultural activities, often attend political events that are organized by other groups, such as Take Back the Night marches. In the early 1990s, a number of participants in cultural activities volunteered as escorts at Planned Parenthood when anti-abortionists threatened the clinic. In 1993, many lesbian feminists from Bloomington attended the national gay rights march in Washington. Later in the same year, when some gay and lesbian rights activists responded to a gay-bashing incident by forming a political organization called the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Coalition, a number of lesbians participated and feminist values were taken for granted by both male and female participants.

Institutional Support

In addition to cultural groups, institutionalized support has allowed the Bloomington women's movement to survive even as the movement community has become decentralized and loosely connected. Owing to the efforts of feminist faculty and students, Indiana University established an Office for Women's Affairs (OWA) in 1972 and a women's studies program in 1973. Two social service agencies, Planned Parenthood and Middle Way House, also became part of the feminist community. To differing degrees, these institutionalized sources of feminism helped to keep the Bloomington movement alive in the absence of local movement centers.

Both Middle Way and Planned Parenthood have many feminists on their staffs and each organization has spread feminist ideology and provided organizational expertise to the local women's movement. Middle Way House was originally a family crisis center that focused on drug and alcohol abuse, but in the 1980s it dropped these programs to carry on two feminist initiatives. In 1981, after the shelter founded by the Bloomington Organization for Abused Women closed, the agency worked in cooperation with BOAW members to open a new shelter at Middle Way House. In 1988, Middle Way expanded to offer rape crisis services as well, taking over the operation of a service begun in 1986 by a feminist rape counseling collective known as the Bloomington Rape Victim Empowerment Advocates (BRAVE).

The Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington supported the feminist approach to birth control as a woman's right, and in 1991 took the bold step of announcing its intention of adding a local abortion clinic to its services. This prompted the formation of a campus organization called Reclaim Our Reproductive Rights (RORR) by students who wanted to support the clinic. RORR established close relations with Planned Parenthood, and the latter trained RORR members and other supporters as clinic escorts after the clinic opened. Later, a key RORR leader quit graduate school to take a job at Planned Parenthood, creating an even closer bond between the two organizations.

At times when there have been no visible movement organizations, the women's studies program and the Office for Women's Affairs (OWA) at Indiana University have provided a way to find the local women's movement. For example, when the national Fund for a Feminist Majority wanted to locate feminist students at Indiana University, its organizers contacted the women's studies program, which referred them to the Dean for Women's Affairs, who gave them the names of students who were in the process of forming a new group called the Women's Student Union. The Office for Women's Affairs is visible both on and off campus; it coordinates annual events, such as Rape Awareness Week and Women's History Month, in which community groups like the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women as well as campus groups have participated.

Feminist staff at OWA, including graduate student assistants, have launched important projects through OWA such as the Rape Task Force in the late 1970s and a rape counseling service that was the precursor to BRAVE in the mid-1980s. When events spark a passionate response among feminist students, individuals can use the resources of OWA to organize responses. For example, a graduate student assistant at OWA was instrumental in organizing a Week to End Violence Against Women during Women's History Month in 1993, in part as a response to the murder the previous year of a graduate student at Indiana University by her ex-boyfriend. OWA invited Middle Way House to participate in Rape Awareness Week events on the campus and the two institutional centers have co-sponsored the annual Take Back the Night march, keeping the ritual alive during years when no movement organizations were available to organize it.

Thus, stable organizations like Middle Way, Planned Parenthood, and OWA have ensured a feminist presence in Bloomington, providing some visibility and continuity to the movement. There are, however, important limitations on the ability of these institutionalized members of the feminist community to serve as movement centers. Because it has been under attack from anti-abortionists, Planned Parenthood has been very cautious about its political involvements. Middle Way House has an extensive volunteer program, which helps bring many students into contact with feminism, and the agency does public relations work and political lobbying to help spread feminist messages. Nevertheless, Middle Way's primary function is the provision of services rather than movement organizing. The Office for Women's Affairs operates within the context of a university bureaucracy and the extent of its political involvement depends in part on the inclinations of the current Dean for Women's Affairs and the amount of freedom that she allows her staff.

Movement Organizations

The local movement community was not without SMOs in the 1980s and 1990s, but most had a hard time surviving for very long. Among those that enjoyed some success in mobilizing, some received help from national organizations like NOW and the Fund for a Feminist Majority. Others were aided by national events such as the 1989 Supreme Court ruling, which energized feminists across the country by threatening abortion rights. And some SMOs created the kind of internal community that sustained commitment. None, however, was able to serve as a vital movement center to bring together the larger movement community and sustain a visible movement.

Bloomington NOW continued to meet in the 1980s and early 1990s, but struggled to remain alive and finally dissolved in 1996 (although some students revived the chapter again in 1997). During the 1980s, the NOW chapter organized educational forums and some political activities and, on occasion, drew significant numbers of participants and local media publicity. Some successful events used strategies developed by the national NOW organization, such as a press conference denouncing the effects of Ronald Reagan's economic policies in 1984, and a "back alley vigil" commemorating the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 1986.

For the most part, however, NOW had a hard time getting people out for events and lacked the passion necessary to become a local movement center. Liberal Democrat types, who had founded the chapter in the early 1970s and helped revive it in the late 1970s, had mostly withdrawn from participation in feminist groups like NOW. Women from this constituency had previously been involved in NOW or worked for the ERA and still considered themselves feminists; however, in the 1980s and 1990s they put their energy into organizations such as the League of Women's Voters and the Monroe County Democratic Women's Club. Lesbian feminists, who had helped Bloomington NOW flourish in the early 1980s, also withdrew from the chapter, typically becoming involved in cultural activities such as the National Women's Music Festival. Some students in the late 1980s were interested in forming a student caucus of Bloomington NOW, but they ultimately decided that they did not need the baggage of the dying chapter, and formed the independent Women's Student Union instead.

BRAVE, the rape crisis collective formed in 1986, was one group that was highly successful in attracting passionately committed members. The core of this group consisted of about eight women, some of whom were students and about half of whom were lesbians. The group arranged with Middle Way House, which operated a shelter for abused women and a hotline, to have calls from their hotline dealing with rape transferred to BRAVE through a beeper system. Each member of BRAVE typically covered at least one 24 hour shift per week; as one participant put it, "we were real committed" (interview June 7, 1993). Although the commitment required of members was very high, BRAVE met as a collective and members were very close and supportive of one another. They eventually gave control of the service to Middle Way House because they recognized the need for a more institutionalized rape crisis center, but several members remained involved in Middle Way House as staff or board members.

With the exception of BRAVE's rape crisis work, the only vigorous feminist collective action campaigns after the early 1980s were led by students around the issue of abortion. Many young women were fired up by the 1989 Supreme Court ruling, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which permitted significant restrictions on abortion services and invited further challenges to Roe v. Wade (see Staggenborg 1991). A leader of the Rape Task Force in the late 1970s, who later became the director of the university's Office for Women's Affairs and an advisor to the Women's Student Union, recalled experiencing the mid-1980s as a depressing period of inactivity. She was surprised that her own passion had subsided and was later thrilled to find the same passion about abortion that she once felt about rape in the Women's Student Union activists:

[Abortion] was what woke them up. They were so pissed at the idea that they could lose their right to abortion. That's what they needed to be working on. . . . You need that juice, you really need that passion . . . one of the things that was stunning to me was the realization that it wasn't forever. I mean, I'm like on fire for three or four years, then suddenly I'm tired and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. And it was fascinating to me, working with those women with the Women's Student Union. . . . They were hot, they were hot. I loved it. It was such a thrill for me to watch them walk in a room because the mid-eighties, I would say, were really depressing to me. It was very depressing to watch that stuff just kind of sag. And for me personally I've really involved myself with spiritual work and that kind of practice, which is where my juice is now. But the women's movement just died. (interview May 5, 1993)

Despite the students' passion, the Women's Student Union got off to a slow start as its founders explored the possibility of becoming a student caucus of NOW, and later tried to figure out how to go about building an independent organization. Just as the group was getting started, however, its leaders were contacted by the Fund for a Feminist Majority, which was organizing a nationwide campaign against state parental consent laws for abortion. As a result, a core of about ten students became passionately involved in the campaign and active in a state coalition on parental consent. Thus, a national organization and nationwide campaign channeled the energies of local activists during a period of abeyance.

In the fall of 1991, other students created RORR in part out of an interest in supporting the local Planned Parenthood's proposal to start an abortion clinic, which was still in the planning stages. Although the clinic did not open until July 1992, RORR quickly became a large organization known for its activist approach. At some of RORR's first meetings on campus, over a hundred students turned out. One graduate student, who became an activist in RORR after seeing a flyer for the group and attending a mass meeting, recalled:

I think that one thing that was so exciting about RORR right at the beginning was that we were all very hungry for something like this. . . it was exciting because what it sounded like. . . it was really a very activist group. And I felt like we were going to do things." (interview February 12, 1993)

RORR was very active for about a year. Its numbers gradually declined to a small core of activists, in part because leaders graduated and left town, and in part because abortion issues became less pressing to many students after the 1992 election of abortion rights supporter Bill Clinton. By the mid-1990s, the organization was kept alive by a few activists via an e-mail network.

On campus, feminist e-mail networks have provided some visibility to the local movement. In the early 1990s, the Women's Concerns Network sent postings to a list of about 200 subscribers, keeping them informed about local, state, and national feminist issues and events. Owing in part to the personality of its administrator, the network was highly successful and some student activists even called it the "center" of the campus women's movement. When the graduate student who had developed the network quit running it, other students took over, and new feminist e-mail networks have since been founded. At times their postings have consisted largely of forwarded excerpts from various national feminist web-sites, but e-mail networks are one way in which local activists have remained connected to one another.

Thus, the Bloomington women's movement community continues to exist as a loose collection of decentralized groups. Some places, such as the feminist bookstore, have served as centers for parts of the movement community, but no local movement centers have been capable of bringing together the whole community. Most local feminists agree that there is a feminist community in Bloomington, but it is a fragmented one that is held together by friendship networks rather than overlapping memberships and centers of activism. Under these circumstances, the movement can generate episodes of collective action, but they are short, issue-driven campaigns that are typically organized through the university.

Conclusion

Social movement communities are critical to the emergence and survival of social movements. To understand why so many movements emerge within protest cycles, analysts need to look closely at the attractions for participants and the underpinnings of collective action. Collective action campaigns are not simply the result of calculations about political opportunities - even for movements like the women's movement that come relatively early in a protest cycle. Rather, the activities of the general movement community in a protest cycle provide numerous opportunities for mobilization and collective action by new social movements. Activists who interact in the community infect one another with their enthusiasm for related causes. While some participants notice political opportunities, others are encouraged to act collectively by the culture and solidarity of the movement community. In a period of intense activity by many social movements, even radical social change seems possible.

Some social movements, such as the women's movement, endure and even thrive beyond the decline of a protest cycle. They are able to do so because they create their own specific movement communities after connections to other movements weaken. Specific movement communities can recreate something of the atmosphere of a protest cycle when multiple groups with overlapping memberships are active, or when movement centers bring together various movement constituencies. Personalized political orientations keep individual activists involved even as movement organizations come and go. SMOs that survive often generate commitment by allowing participants to seek personal fulfillment and to explore the ways in which their activism can help create the kind of society that they value.

The passion generated by personalism and community within groups helps sustain an active movement (cf. Taylor 1995). In some instances, activists who are caught up in the quest for self-fulfillment and the passion of commitment do not make realistic assessments of the movement's prospects for success. This was true, for example, of the young NOW activist who remarked that in the mid-1970s, "we certainly didn't think that we would have any trouble getting the ERA passed" (interview January 2, 1993). In the case of NOW and the ERA campaign, however, the presence of a vibrant movement community allowed activists who were more attentive to political obstacles to carry out their plans of changing the composition of the Indiana legislature and passing the ERA in the state. Although some movements face stronger barriers than others, movements can alter a negative political opportunity structure through collective action.

However, a negative political opportunity structure, like that of the 1980s, can also weaken movement communities. As groups lose battles, they may disband, and constituents may decide to work on more rewarding activities such as cultural projects rather than externally targeted political campaigns. When a movement community loses its visibility and vitality, the movement enters the doldrums. In this situation Melucci's (1984) depiction of movements as submerged networks that only erupt into collective action from time to time seems most apt. Decentralized movement communities with weak ties among participants and groups have a difficult time producing collective action. Some movement constituencies, such as lesbians and liberal Democrats, focus on their own internal communities during the doldrums. Nevertheless, they maintain a politicized collective identity and loose networks that keep the larger women's movement community alive. Increasingly, connections to national, international, and other local activists through e-mail networks and web-sites also help sustain movement communities, albeit weak and decentralized ones.

Movements can draw on the loose networks maintained by cultural groups and on resources provided by institutionalized elements of the community to generate visible collective action from time to time. National organizations, such as NOW and the Fund for a Feminist Majority, also help local groups develop strategies during the doldrums. However, collective action campaigns during abeyance periods are typically brief, occurring as important issues and critical events arise and subsiding when immediate threats decrease. For there to be another rebirth of a highly visible and centered women's movement in places like Bloomington, another cycle of protest is needed. In the meantime, local movement communities with the capacity to erupt occasionally into collective action continue to exist.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, 1997. The author thanks Rod Nelson, Randy Stoeker, anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff of Social Problems for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Direct correspondence to Suzanne Staggenborg, Department of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal PQ Canada H3A2T7; e-mail: suzanne@leacock.lan.mcgill.ca

1. The distinction may be difficult to apply. In the case of the American protest cycle of the 1960s, the civil rights movement was a clear initiator. McAdam (1995) also mentions the women's movement as an initiator movement and the gay rights movement as a latecomer. However, the heyday of the "gay liberation" phase of the movement was 1969 to 1972 (Adam 1995:83), about the same as that of the early "women's liberation" movement.

2. The notion of a multiorganizational field includes a variety of organizations besides SMOs. However, a multiorganizational field differs from a social movement community in that it is a collection of organizations, whereas a movement community includes other actors, such as individuals and cultural groups, that are not organizations.

3. Following McCarthy and Zald (1977), "social movements" are preferences for change in the population; the movement community comprises the various actors who work to achieve movement goals. Whereas McCarthy and Zald originally focused on SMOs as the central actors in social movements, the concept of social movement communities draws attention to a wider variety of actors involved in maintaining movements and carrying out collective action campaigns.

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