Women have been underrepresented in political office ever since the first wave of feminists paved the way for women's suffrage a century ago. Existing work on descriptive representation emphasizes institutional explanations such as quotas, party nominations, and role models. I consider an understudied potential cause: radical social movements. Such movements may enhance women’s political representation by shaping public and elite attitudes through sympathetic media coverage, yet their confrontational tactics may also provoke backlash rooted in status-preservation motives. I study this dynamic through the Danish Redstockings movement of the 1970s–80s—a radical but nonviolent, decentralized feminist organization focused on improving women’s roles in households, labor markets, and politics. Using computer vision (OCR) to digitize records of all candidates who ever ran for office (1945-2022) and newspaper archives, I exploit the staggered establishment of women’s houses across Danish cities as local shocks to feminist mobilization. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the causal impact of these mobilizations on the supply and demand of women candidates and elected across Denmark. Further down the line, I look at whether the increased representation is due to first-time runners entering parliament or incumbents. Finally, I explore if numerical increase is followed by substantial representation, analysing parliamentary speeches (1966-2022). My findings shed light on the potential of radical social movements to promote representation of women as well as causes to increases in representation and mobilization more broadly.
