A highly influential essay on the women's movement in the United States, The Tyranny of Structurelessness was written by Jo Freeman and published in 1972. Freeman looks at the women's movement and the negative effects of its back then wide-spread desire to stay "structureless". While this desire is born from the idea to create an alternative to patriarchal hierarchy, in Freeman's opinion, the rejection of formal structure actually creates a worse kind of structure.
According to the author, structure is given in any social group no matter what its aims are, in the form of informal structures. Informal structures develop because people in the same activist groups also become friends. And this phenomenon corresponds to Freeman's definition of elites, "groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities". Per this understanding, elites can thrive even if there is no formal structure.
The fact that these elites are not tied to a formal structure has a host of bad effects on the women's movement: First, there are no open rules for decision-making, which means the elites control the rules. But they do not simply control the modes of decision-making, but also the decisions themselves: "When informal elites are combined with a myth of 'structurelessness', there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power". Structurelessness is also discriminating to certain parts of the population: The movement recruits members through informal modes and criteria, which has the consequence that the exclusion of certain women cannot be confronted. For example, some groups may exclude lesbians, others will exclude straight women.
Another major problem with women's groups' lack of formal organization that Freeman diagnoses is, quite simply, the resultant lack of power and influence within the political system. If the entire movement follows the same ideology of structurelessness, it is unlikely to have a more significant impact than individual groups. If a movement doesn't elect its leaders democratically, no one is able to speak for it, or to be held responsible for decisions and their consequences. Freeman suggests that new modes of democratic organization and decision-making should be developed and experimented with to increase the movement's power and effectiveness.
Freeman, J., 1972: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, in: Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17, pp. 151-164.