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What can we learn from TV coverage of feminism in 1970?

Once upon a time, there were only three television networks. Before cable and especially before the Internet, a social phenomenon that went unnoticed by the “Big Three”—CBS, NBC, ABC—might as well not be happening at all. That was the case for second-wave feminism before 1970, the year that the national television news networks finally gave airtime to the rapidly growing movement. In Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News (University of Illinois Press, 2014), I analyze the meaning and influence of that surge of news coverage. In addition to numerous feature stories on the movement as a whole, network news covered important protests that year, such as January’s disruption of Senate hearings on the birth control pill by radical feminists, and the March sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal by 100-plus women. The August 26, 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality march, which involved thousands of women across the country and closed down Fifth Avenue in New York City to demand abortion rights, child care, and equal opportunity, led the evening news on all three networks. Yet CBS’s story that night termed the marchers a “militant minority,” even though they included current and former members of Congress, editors from Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s, and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown. These 1970 reports were opening salvos in the televised battle over feminism’s public image, one that continues today in a much wider array of media forms.

In 1970, network news coverage of feminism was a surprising mix of positive and negative reporting. Most reports, for instance, treated abortion rights and the ERA as reasonable, even commonsensical, demands. The National Organization for Women’s focus on public gender discrimination generally resonated with journalists who understood demands for equality because of their experience with civil rights protest. They used racism/sexism and feminism/civil rights analogies to make sense of feminist claims, but this approach was a double-edged sword—sometimes the comparison worked to legitimate feminism, but other times it dismissed sexism as less important than racism. In all cases, such analogies ignored intersectionality, as when a CBS report featured a sound-bite about sexism from Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and noted that “she speaks not as a black, but as a woman,” as though the two were separable for her.

Radical feminism generally fared less well than NOW at the hands of reporters, who sometimes used a “divide and conquer” strategy that depicted radical feminism as extremist and threatening in contrast to what they presented as reasonable demands for equality of opportunity and wages. Radical feminists’ focus on deeply personal issues such as sex, marriage, body image, sexual assault, and sexuality enabled reporters to depict them as fanatical, underscoring such assessments with footage of so-called “militant feminists” practicing karate and judo.

Particularly on television, reporters used visual as well as verbal content to shape the meaning of feminism for public consumption. Negative coverage used extreme close-ups to make radical feminists appear wild-eyed and eccentric, and other stories featured multiple images of women protesting while never interviewing them on camera, making feminism into a kind of visual spectacle. Even so, some reporters used images quite strategically to offer support for feminist claims, such as by showing women capably performing the jobs that “protective” legislation assumed they could not do.

Television news reporters and producers usually assumed that they were speaking to an audience of white, middle-class, and middle-aged men like themselves. The venerable Walter Cronkite once introduced a report on the movement by quoting Sigmund Freud’s question “What does a woman want?” and noting that Freud would be “even more confused” by feminism. Reporters were fascinated by whether or not feminists were married, whether or not they “hated” men, and how attractive they were. TV reporters commonly asked “ordinary women” how they viewed feminism, and those women dismissed the movement’s relevance with replies such as “I am a very happy wife and mother,” leaving the implication that feminist grievances were groundless because not all women agreed with them. A woman who was asked about the Women’s Strike for Equality replied that she thought that feminists were “giving up their femininity,” thus supporting the perspective that lurked in many of these reports that political protest by women was unseemly, and that “good” women understood that their place was at home, tending to their families.

Much of this early coverage stimulates chuckles, displaying clumsy versions of outmoded stereotypes. The tremendous expansion of media forms since 1970 has provided new platforms for feminists, and we no longer need rely on the nightly news to carry our messages. But mainstream media are still as much or more preoccupied with feminists’ personal choices than with their political opinions, and they still use the divide-and-conquer strategy (“mommy wars,” anyone?) to make conflicts among women more newsworthy than the problems all women share. We’ve come a long way since 1970, but still not far enough.


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