Structure of Women's Nonprofit Organizations

Women activists paid considerable attention to how they structured their organizations in the early years of the contemporary women's movement in the United States. As the movement has matured over time, what has happened to this preoccupation with organizational structure? What do women's nonprofit organizations look like structurally? What explains their particular form? Rebecca Bordt explores these questions in the context of a wide variety of women's nonprofit organizations in contemporary New York City. She conducted surveys of over one hundred organizations and supplemented these data with an analysis of in-depth interviews, organizational documents and field notes of a sample of these groups.The author's findings paint a picture of womenOs organizations that is different from women's groups in the early years of the women's movement. First, the majority of women's organizations are neither bureaucratic or collectivist in structure, a distinction hotly debated among feminists in the early years. Rather, most of the organizations in this study have hybrid structures that combine in imaginative ways the best qualities of bureaucracy and the best aspects of collectives. Second, bureaucratic structure and feminist ideology are not seen as incompatible as previous theory and research on the early women's movement suggests.The bulk of bureaucracies in this locale have a feminist ideology and, interestingly, most of the collectives operate without adherence to feminist ideals. Finally, unlike women activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women running nonprofits in New York City today engage in very little discussion about how they want to structure their organizations. Instead, their primary concern is getting on with what they see as the real work of empowering their sisters, providing services, and advocating on the behalf of women.