Cycles of Conflict, a Century of Continuity: Computational Methods and the Longue Durée

Abstract

The women’s liberation movement hotly debated both the cause of women’s oppression and the best approach to changing it. When treated as a moment within 1960s political polarization, these debates can seem esoteric and arbitrary. When examined across the longue durée, I show that these debates reflect complex and stable differences in interpretation that were tied to place more than to the political moment. Using computational methods to examine women’s movements from the 1860s to the 1970s, I challenge long-standing theories of feminist waves and reflect on the potential for using computational methods, in particular when combined with qualitative methods and interpretation, to re-examine historical patterns in social movements over long time frames.