IB History Role of Mass Media Notes

Mass Media: Amplifying and Distorting the Feminist Message

1. The mass media did not simply report on second-wave feminism.
   1. It shaped it.
   2. In the 1950s and 1960s, television, advertising, and women's magazines actively reinforced a narrow image of womanhood.
   3. By the 1970s, feminist publications and sympathetic TV programming had begun to push back.
   4. But the media also trivialized protests, invented myths, and sold feminism back to women as a brand identity.
   5. Understanding the media's role means holding two things at once: it was both a vehicle for feminist ideas and a force that distorted them.

Media as a Tool of Oppression

1. In the postwar decades, mass media did not reflect women's lives so much as prescribe them.
   1. Television sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver centred on the home, with women as wives and mothers whose purpose was domestic comfort.
   2. Commercials reinforced this relentlessly: the happy housewife became the dominant image of femininity in American advertising.
2. Women's magazines followed the same script.
   1. Publications like Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping filled their pages with recipes, cleaning tips, beauty advice, and articles on how to be a better wife.
   2. The message was consistent: a woman's identity was defined by her home and her husband.
3. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) named this directly.
   1. She called the domestic ideal projected by media and advertising the "feminine mystique" and argued it trapped educated women in roles that denied their full humanity.
   2. The book sold millions of copies and gave feminists a shared vocabulary for critiquing media culture.

Feminists Fight Back Through Media

1. Rather than simply rejecting the media, feminists recognised its power and moved to claim it.
   1. The clearest example was Ms. magazine, co-founded by Gloria Steinem in 1972.
   2. It was the first mainstream magazine run by and for women from an explicitly feminist perspective.
   3. Within days of its preview issue hitting newsstands, it sold out across the country.
2. A different kind of transformation was happening at Cosmopolitan.
   1. Editor Helen Gurley Brown took over in 1965 and repositioned the magazine entirely.
   2. She addressed women as sexually independent, career-ambitious individuals rather than homemakers.
   3. Cosmopolitan's approach was not explicitly feminist, but it directly challenged the domesticated image of women that dominated print media.
3. Music, art, and literature reinforced this cultural shift.
   1. Artists like Judy Chicago produced feminist visual art that reclaimed women's history.
   2. Writers like Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison brought women's perspectives into literary culture in ways that the mainstream press had largely ignored.

Media Coverage of the Movement

1. Mainstream newspapers and television networks covered feminist activism inconsistently.
   1. Some reporting was fair and substantive.
   2. Much of it was not.
   3. Journalists frequently focused on protesters' appearances, dismissed demands as trivial, or framed feminism as a fringe movement of angry women.
2. The most lasting example of distorted coverage came from the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City, where members of the New York Radical Women demonstrated outside the pageant.
   1. Media coverage of the protest created a durable myth that has shaped public memory of second-wave feminism ever since.

1. Dismissive coverage had a paradoxical effect.
   1. Even when reporters mocked protests, they broadcast feminist ideas to audiences far beyond those who would ever attend a march or join the National Organization for Women (NOW).
   2. A woman watching the evening news in a suburb who had never heard the word "feminism" might find herself thinking about the issues being raised, even if the anchor was sneering.
   3. Mass media exposure, however hostile, gave the movement national reach.
2. By the mid-1970s, coverage had shifted somewhat.
   1. Publications like Newsweek ran cover stories on the women's liberation movement.
   2. Network news began featuring feminist voices more regularly.
   3. This shift reflected both the movement's growing political power and the fact that women were increasingly entering newsrooms themselves.

Co-optation and Commercialization

1. As feminist ideas moved into the mainstream, advertisers saw a commercial opportunity.
   1. Rather than fighting the movement, some corporations adopted its language.
   2. The result was co-optation: the absorption of a political message into consumer culture, often draining it of its radical content in the process.

1. Virginia Slims was not an isolated case.
   1. By the late 1970s, advertisers across industries were using imagery of strong, independent women to sell products ranging from pantyhose to cars.
   2. The language of liberation was profitable.
2. This created a genuine tension within the movement.
   1. Some feminists welcomed any cultural representation of independent women, arguing that normalising that image had value regardless of the commercial motive.
   2. Others argued that co-optation was a form of neutralisation: once feminism was a brand identity, it became harder to treat it as a political threat.
   3. The debate over commercialisation remains relevant to how social movements interact with mass media today.
3. The media's own newsrooms revealed this contradiction most sharply.
   1. In March 1970, 46 women on Newsweek's editorial staff filed a sex discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, timed to the same week the magazine ran its own cover story on the women's movement.
   2. That story had to be written by a male freelance writer, because Newsweek's own policy barred female staff from reporting or writing bylined stories, the exact practice their complaint targeted.
4. By the end of the decade, mass media had made feminism impossible to ignore nationally, even as coverage kept simplifying the movement's internal diversity into slogans and stereotypes.