Holly McCammon
Professor of Sociology
Professor of Law
Holly McCammon’s work focuses the U.S. women’s movement and how it has gained greater political and economic rights for women, including investigations of the woman suffrage movement, women’s campaigns in the first part of the twentieth century to win the right to sit on juries, and feminist litigators and their successes before the Supreme Court. She is the author of
The U.S. Women’s Jury Movements and Strategic Adaptation: A More Just Verdict (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and co-edited
100 Years of the Nineteenth Amendment: An Appraisal of Women’s Political Activism (Oxford University Press, 2018). She served as editor of the
American Sociological Review from 2010-2015. Professor McCammon joined Vanderbilt’s sociology faculty in 1990 and has since served as the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science’s associate dean for graduate studies from 2006 to 2008 and as associate director for doctoral training of the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies in 2008-09.
Research Interests
Social movements, women’s legal rights, law and society, historical sociology, political sociology
Representative Publications
- “Feminist Institutional Activists: Venue Shifting, Strategic Adaptation, and Winning the Pregnancy Discrimination Act,” 34 Sociological Forum 5 (2019) (with Amanda Brockman)
- “Why We March: The Role of Grievances, Threats, and Movement Organizational Resources in the 2017 Women’s Marches,” 23 Mobilization 401 (2018) (with Rachel McKane)
- “Legal Mobilization and Analogical Legal Framing: Feminist Litigators’ Use of Race-Gender Analogies.” 40 Law & Policy 57 (2018) (with Brittany Hearne, Allison McGrath, and Minyoung Moon)
- “Targeting Culture: Feminist Legal Activists and Critical Community Tactics,” 41 Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 243 (2017) (with Allison McGrath, Ashley Dixon, and Megan Robinson)
- “Are You One of Those Women? Within-Movement Conflict, Radical Flank Effects, and Social Movement Political Outcomes,” 20 Mobilization: The International Quarterly Review 157 (2015)
- “Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System,” 9 Sociology Compass 128 (2015)
- “A Radical Demand Effect: Early U.S. Feminists and the Married-Women’s Property Acts.” Social Science History (2014) (with Sandra C. Arch, and Erin M. Bergner)
- The U.S. Women’s Jury Movements and Strategic Adaptation: A More Just Verdict, Cambridge University Press (2012)
- “Explaining Frame Variation: Moderate and More Radical Demands for Women’s Citizenship in the U.S. Women’s Jury Movements,” 59 Social Problems 43 (2012)
- “Becoming Full Citizens: The U.S. Women’s Jury Rights Campaigns, the Pace of Reform, and Strategic Adaptation,” 113 American Journal of Sociology 1104, 2008 (with Soma Chaudhuri, Lyndi N. Hewitt, Courtney Sanders Muse, Harmony D. Newman, Carrie Lee Smith and Teresa M. Terrell)
