Feminism and the media

I’ll keep this entry short and sweet because I kept going on and on in the last one. I feel like I need to talk about the media’s involvement with the feminist movement. We all know that the media is where most people get their information and they base their opinions on it. It is the media who ultimately decides what the people are going to agree or disagree with. For the feminist movement the media was divided on which side to take up; the feminist side or the people who were against it.

Back then only women who were acting out or breaking the traditional norms of femininity would be in the news. So as you can imagine the feminist movement would have been in the news quite a bit. The United States had 393 articles on the feminist movement. In a twist I didn’t see coming most of these articles were supporting the feminist movement or at least colouring it in a positive light. Some of these articles had called the movement effective, unified, liberating and even necessary for women. I wasn’t expecting the media to side more so with the movement, I was thinking more of these man run media outlets would be completely against the movement! It’s awesome to know, though, that the women who were part of the movement had enough support backing them up and that their cause wasn’t going unnoticed.

What I didn’t find shocking would be the fact that some of the media outlets were completely against the movement. These media outlets would call the women deviants and try to de-legitimize the movement in any way possible. The women were branded as “lebians, man-haters, bra-burners and aggressive women.” All of these traits go against the “middle- class notions of femininity”. The words were harsh and unrelenting because they were trying to send a message to the movement. These outlets didn’t want the movement to succeed and they held the old-fashioned views of women. Some of them even labelled the movement as “ineffective” or “unsupported” and that it was dying down or even dead, even though this wasn’t the case. These people were just insecure about the modernization of women and they didn’t want to wake up to reality.

So as you can tell the media both supported and opposed the feminist movement. Thankfully most agreed with the movement and applauded the work of the women who wanted to better their lives! I feel the need to thank the media for this because if the movement didn’t have so much public support who knows where I would be today. I might not have had this much freedom over my life if it wasn’t for the movement and the support of the media. So thank you!