Women in a community power structure
Creators: name: Stonier, Shirley Ann
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: Feminist researchers have noted the invisibility of women in power structure studies to date and have suggested that it is the methods of main-stream social science research that systematically obscure women's political activities. The primary objective of this study is to identify and describe the women who participate in the public decision-making process at the community level, as a test of the suggestion that there is a bias in the methods, and as a way of beginning to correct the present lack of knowledge about women's contributions to community politics. There is, however, no accepted theory of community power, and the organization and distribution of power in a Canadian suburban community, a previously unstudied setting, could not be taken for granted. Therefore, the research has been designed to determine both the structure of power in the community and the location of women in that structure. Variations on standard research methods are used to identify men and women active in community politics, and interviews with elected and other community leaders provide data about the leaders, their memberships in key organizations, and their political activities and strategies. Fictitious names are given to the community, some of the local organizations, and the community leaders in order to protect the anonymity of the informants. The distribution of power in the community is found to conform to the elite power structure model. An organized opposition somewhat limits the power of the dominant clique, but this does not constitute evidence of the mutual control that some researchers state is the case in pluralistic societies. A comparison of the data in this and other studies indicates that individuals active in sectors such as business, government and the independent professions, are predominant in all the communities in the comparative survey, no matter what type of community or what methods are used to identify the community leaders. It is suggested that this finding lends weight to the stratification theorists' assessment of the distribution of power in the community. It is concluded that the methods of power structure research are designed to focus on the most powerful members of the community, and active women will be under-reported because, although they are similar to influential men in personal characteristics, women are not often elected to positions of power, they are less likely than men to be members of the associations and institutions through which political power is organized, and they are less often active in the issues that are important to the dominant men. However, main-stream social science research has been designed by men to focus mainly on men's experiences. Women have been classified only in terms of the men in their lives, their political behaviour has been defined in different ways than men's, and researchers and informants alike have not thought of women as influential in public decision-making. By using methods which draw attention to the women who are active in community politics, it is shown that women participate in many ways to shape public policy, from activities that are designed to influence economic issues and land use decisions, to those which influence the type of educational and welfare programs available to the community. Women bring many personal resources to the decision-making process, but lack the organizational resource bases that men use to exert influence and gain political power. Women, like less powerful men in the community, exercise influence in different ways than the men in the dominant clique. It is recommended that the study of women's political experiences be used as a starting point in studying the organization, exercise and distribution of power at the community level from the perspective of relatively powerless individuals and groups. It is hoped that apart from offering women a way to validate their political experiences and to understand the nature of the limitations on their power, such studies will provide the impetus to renew efforts in developing a comprehensive theory of community power.