Elite Feminist Adherence and Framing: Women Nobel Laureates Speak Out against Gender Inequality

ABSTRACT

As feminist movements have become more diffuse, feminisms have increasingly emerged from and thrived within unexpected, “other” spaces. Elites have the potential to be powerful feminist adherents in social movement organizations as well as in these “other” spaces, yet we know little about the heterogeneity of their feminisms. We examined an understudied group of elites – women Nobel laureates – and the ways they forward a variety of feminisms across a range of historical and professional contexts. Drawing on a content analysis of 76 speeches, we examined if laureates express feminist adherence, how adherents frame gender inequality, and how adherence and framing vary over time and across award categories. Of all women Nobel laureates analyzed, nineteen expressed feminist adherence, framing gender inequality as: 1) women’s underrepresentation among laureates, 2) women’s oppression under patriarchy, and/or 3) not just a women’s issue. Feminist adherence became more common over time, and use of the third, most expansive and intersectional frame was especially concentrated within recent decades (more so than the other two frames). Peace and Literature laureates were more likely than Science laureates to express feminist adherence and to frame issues beyond the gender disparity among laureates. We argue that the variation in adherence and framing correspond to differences in laureates’ historical context and field of work. Our analysis responds to calls for more comparative research on framing, and we contribute to scholarship about variation in feminist attitudes by showing how historical conditions and professional communities can both influence adherence to and articulations of feminism.

Acknowledgments

We thank Maria Charles and Alison Dahl Crossley for feedback on prior drafts. We also thank research assistants Olivia Cao, Kay Ferguson, and Gwendoline Greiner.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

Most of the speeches and lectures analysed in this study are available from the Nobel Prize website (https://www.nobelprize.org/).

Notes

¹ As evidence, “Nobel Prize” appears 21,073 times in The New York Times (NYT) from 1901 to 2016 and 10,000+ times between 1905 to 2020 in various outlets from each of the following regions: Europe, Asia, Africa, and Middle East. Malala Yousafzai has been mentioned over 10,000 times in U.S. media alone. To track mentions of the prize before 1970, we searched the retrospective collection of NYT (ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The NYT), which includes every issue of the paper from 1851 to 2016. To assess mentions of the prize or laureates after 1970, we examined The NYT collection (1851–2016), and we conducted a headline and lead-paragraph search of Nexus Uni (formerly, Lexus Nexus), the most comprehensive database of media coverage from the 1970s to the present.

² Nobel Prize categories may not precisely reflect winners’ occupations (e.g., Peace laureates include an attorney, journalist, politician, etc.); however, the categories approximate the focus of laureates’ award-winning efforts, or as we call it, their “field of work.”

³ The prize for Economics is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. Established in 1968, it is awarded in memory of Alfred Nobel (Nobel Foundation 2021b). We treat Economics as another Nobel Prize award category.

⁴ Grazia Deledda, Literature laureate, declined to give a speech and wanted her writing to speak for itself (Hallengren 2005). Only Betty Williams gave a speech for the Peace Prize she shared with Mairead Corrigan. Jane Addams failed to give a speech for her Peace Prize due to poor health.

⁵ Marie Curie won two prizes. There is no record of any speech or lecture for her 1903 prize in Physics, but we do include her 1911 speech for the prize in Chemistry.

⁶ Two speeches were translated from French to English by a research assistant. Because written transcripts were not available, we transcribed six lectures from videos of the presentations. Similarly, we transcribed the simultaneous English translation of the video of Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s banquet speech. We have included Aung San Suu Kyi’s lecture that she wrote for the Peace Prize in 1991 but not the banquet speech given in her honor by her son.

⁷ For example, Herta Muller described how her mother wanted her to remain in her village and become a seamstress rather than move to the city and become a writer. She may have faced this pressure due to gender, but she did not directly attribute the experience to being a woman. Consequently, we did not consider this to be an example of feminist adherence.

⁸ Because of the small number of women laureates in most of the scientific disciplines (i.e., Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Economics), we combine them into one group, the “Sciences.”

⁹ “Neoliberal feminism” shares liberal feminism’s concern about women’s exclusion from social institutions, yet it emphasizes individualist, free-market solutions (Cooky and Antunovic 2020; Giuffre and Webber 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Murray State University’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts under an Interdisciplinary Research Circle Grant and the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College.

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Hendley

Alexandra Hendley is an associate professor of sociology at Murray State University. Her research has primarily focused on gender inequality and identity work in the spheres of work, education, and sport. She has examined these issues as they concern a variety of actors including private and personal chefs, youth athletes, and most recently, Nobel laureates. Alexandra’s work has appeared in outlets such as Advances in Gender Research, Cultural Sociology, Food & Foodways, Sociological Inquiry, and Sport, Education and Society. She has also contributed to scholarship on teaching and learning, having published in Teaching Sociology, Feminist Pedagogy, and TRAILS, the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology.

Heather McKee Hurwitz

Heather McKee Hurwitz is a professional staff (faculty) member of the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute and clinical associate professor of medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Currently, her research focuses on cancer disparities, especially community outreach to mitigate disparities. She is an expert on inequalities, social movements, and gender. Her book, the first comprehensive feminist and intersectional analysis of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, is entitled Are We the 99%? The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality, and is published by Temple University Press. In addition, she has written more than a dozen scholarly chapters and articles. In all her work, she draws on her personal experience as an activist for over 24 years. She has spoken more than 60 times at professional conferences in the United States and Europe, at major universities, and on radio programs across the United States, including NPR affiliates.