When Women Lead Protest Movements

This doesn’t necessarily mean that women are immune to the kinds of violent crackdowns that have become a familiar response to mass demonstrations around the world. Even ahead of the Belarus vote, Amnesty International reported that women activists in the country were being disproportionately targeted with politically motivated persecution, intimidation, and harassment. Still,  women have proved a more difficult force for riot police to suppress. Indeed, women were credited with keeping last year’s anti-government protests in Lebanon largely peaceful by acting as “human buffers” between demonstrators and security forces.

Key to the success of nonviolent movements in recent years has been their ability to diversify beyond street demonstrations. Here, too, women have played a vital role, innovating methods of protest such as boycotts, strikes, and other forms of noncooperation that apply pressure on those in power. “It’s not because they are women that they were nonviolent and innovated tactics better,” Chenoweth said. “It’s that their particular position, the gendered roles that they had in society, gave them access to knowledge about social power.”

Women have been providing protests with these kinds of tactical innovations for centuries, Chenoweth said, noting that some of the earliest documented campaigns of nonviolent action were created by women. Nineteenth-century women in rural Ireland, for example, played a strategic role in the conception of the boycott—a technique named after its original target, Captain Charles Boycott, an English land agent who sought to evict tenants demanding a reduction in their rent. Similar tactics have been vital in Belarus, where demonstrators have been buoyed by the walkouts of factory workers, employees of state-owned media, and members of the police and security services.

Mark Engler: How mass protests end

But perhaps the greatest reason women have made such an  impact on protests in Belarus and elsewhere has been their ability to bring further legitimacy to a movement’s demands. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a 1977 movement of Argentine women whose children disappeared under the country’s brutal military dictatorship, proved effective in large part because of participants’ ability to leverage their status as grieving mothers. Though the government tried to portray them as las locas, or “mad women,” it was ultimately reluctant to crack down, for fear of sparking backlash. The Belarus protests, though different in context, pose a similar challenge to authorities. “They wanted to take the men who stood behind our shoulders,” one protester told Belarusian media. “But we said that even if they themselves want to leave, we will not let them out, because we are mothers here.”

An unlikely icon of the Belarus protests is septuagenarian Nina Bahinskaya. The great-grandmother and longtime activist gained prominence after her confrontation with police who attempted to seize her flag during a demonstration went viral. By simply being there, women like Bahinskaya have been able to exploit traditional and gendered stereotypes in their favor, as though to say, Would you treat your mother this way?

Yasmeen Serhan is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic.