From Protective to Equal Treatment: Legal Framing Processes and Transformation of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s

Abstract

The author develops the concept of legal framing to expand theoretical knowledge on the cultural and symbolic processes that enable, constrain, and transform social movements. Merging insights from social movement theory, the sociology of law, and law and society scholarship, the author argues that law is a type of “master frame,” and that mobilizing law’s “constitutive” symbols and categories is a central, yet routinely overlooked, way in which challengers frame their grievances, identity, and objectives. This study systematically explores legal framing processes through historical‐narrative analysis of the women’s movement and the debate over protective labor laws in the 1960s. Historical evidence suggests that reciprocal transformations in the women’s movement and equal employment law were largely attributable to a symbolic framing contest between competing cultural representations of gender (“protective” vs. “equal” treatment) and that this contest was waged in explicitly legal terms.