Stirred, Not Yet Shaken: Integrating Women's History Into Media History*

Stirred, Not Yet Shaken: Integrating Women’s History into Media History* By Barbara Friedman, Carolyn Kitch, Therese Lueck, Amber Roessner and Betty Winfield More than 50 years ago, historian Jack Hexter wrote that history had “been mostly stag affairs” in that men far outnumbered women among practitioners, students, and subjects of study.1 In the 1970s, “women’s history” established itself as part of the historical community, in large part due to the momentum of the women’s movement. But the response was tepid. Textbook authors, journal editors, and conference organizers showed a willingness to “add the women,” but rarely went beyond noting their presence in the tradi- tional male-centered historical narrative. As historian Elaine Tyler May wrote of that approach, “adding women and stirring provided a hint of spice, but the flavor of history remained pretty much the same.”2 As feminism evolved, its influence on historical study devel- oped, too, and is evident in many outstanding works in our field of journalism and mass communication history. But there is much work left to be done if we are intent on creating a more inclusive historical narrative. And we should be. With the enrollment at most journalism schools now tipped in favor of women, women’s history is especially relevant to our students. It offers role models and milestones, and suggests challenges for future scholars and profes- sionals. For the same reason, it bolsters the argument in favor of journalism history as a core subject in journalism education.3 In a panel discussion at AJHA’s 2008 conference in Seattle, we offered our thoughts on the significance of women’s history as part of journalism and mass communication history, and some concepts and strategies for moving beyond the “add women and stir” approach to integrate women’s experiences into the curriculum. 160 • American Journalism — Theorizing the Documentary: Thoughts on New Ways of Continuing Our Work Carolyn Kitch Temple University In one way or another, all of us are revisiting the challenge is- sued by Catherine Covert 28 years ago: to find new ways of thinking about women and journalism history.4 Her call followed James Carey’s now-better-remembered criticism that journalism-history scholarship was too documentary and atheoretical, and his wish for, instead, a kind of journalism history that sought patterns and that asked new kinds of questions.5 In the three decades since then, communication scholarship, defined broadly, has evolved in major ways that correspond to theo- retical shifts across disciplines. For instance, identity theory tells us that gender is a social construction, that it’s always fluid and com- plex, that therefore we cannot speak about others’ identity, and that in fact it may be too simplistic, even irresponsible, to talk about a concept so broad as “women.” Many of us have found such ideas compelling and yet have struggled when trying to apply them to historical scholarship, especially about women. If it’s hard to “speak for others” right now, it seems impossible to do so with regard to people who lived in the past. But we have to try anyway, because our subjects can’t speak for themselves anymore. Then there is the factor of our own experience. Like many of our male counterparts, many women in the journalism academy came from journalism itself, and our own experiences in the workplace tell us that is worthwhile to try to gen- eralize about the shared experiences of women; indeed, it may be irresponsible not to. And so as researchers we are likely to continue along a documentary path. At the same time, however, we must also continue to try to theorize our findings, to seek new perspectives on the nature and meaning of our scholarship. One of the suggestions Covert made in 1981 was that if you consider the past in light of how it was lived by most women, you’re inspired to reconceptualize the past itself, to see the passage of time as cycles of advance and retreat, rather than one long march of linear progress. When I teach journalism history, I use Gloria Steinem’s article “I Was a Playboy Bunny.”6 Before they read it, the students snicker — Winter 2009 • 161 and dismiss this as an artifact of the ridiculousness of both women and history. After they read it, the female students are shocked. Their reaction is not as much to the poor labor conditions Steinem described as to the fact that she had the nerve to tell the truth and she was allowed to write it. They’re also surprised to learn that the tra- ditional women’s magazines worked together during the late 1970s and early 1980s to campaign for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment; students find it hard to believe that women’s magazines were once more liberal than they are now. Their reactions re- mind me of the value of thinking of time as cycles or waves, a model that invites us to compare women’s experience (and media content) across time. These examples also underscore the value of document- ing what was actually done and published in the past. So much scholarship in our field begins with the “common- sense” premise that a particular era (the 1850s, the 1920s, the 1950s, or whenever) was a terrible time for women, that women weren’t active or respected, and that there were hardly any women really doing anything serious. And then our research says: Look! We have found the exception! We’ve found the female war correspondent, or the women’s magazine that praised working women, or the news- room where women were in management 50 years ago. And then this exceptional woman or media phenomenon becomes “the news” of our research, our contribution to the literature. But what if we rethink our finding? What if we say, wait a minute: If we’ve found this exception, might there be others? Might there be a lot of others? Might common sense be wrong? At this conference, Kimberly Wilmot Voss did this by showing us why the departure of newspaper women’s pages was a loss for women, as journalists and as audiences. Similarly, in her study of newspaper editors’ rhetorical uses of the suffrage debate, Jane Mar- cellus reminded us that women have symbolic uses to men within battles over political power.7 These papers encourage us to think about women as a social group with an evolving and connected history. We need to resist the common historical urge to understand people as slices or snapshots of achievement. This is especially true of how we historicize successful women and minorities, because we do tend to think of them as exceptions. Yet women and minorities have been present in the media industries for a long time, not just for a few moments of accomplishment. It’s worth considering the possibility that a woman who didn’t do anything first but had a long career may have been hugely important as a mentor to other women. 162 • American Journalism — Surely there is a whole subfield of unasked and unanswered questions about how and why women’s careers in the media industries have taken the shape and direction and quality they have, over time and across industries. These are just a few suggestions for ways we might start asking new questions, theorizing the story of journalism and mass communication history while not abandoning our work of restoring women to that unfolding narrative. Avoiding Presentism in Gender and Communication Studies: A Cautionary Tale Lori Amber Roessner University of Georgia Historians have long warned against presentism, blindly judg- ing the past by present-day standards. So my cautionary tale may seem, at first glance, like the most basic lesson of all. In fact, sipping coffee and quietly nibbling a raspberry muffin, I got an early lesson on the subject in my first historical methods class. However basic, presentism is, in my experience, the most commonly encountered tension in historical interpretations. After all, we cannot help but acknowledge the existence of our terministic screens, always linger- ing in the corner.8 As subjective humans, we are all influenced by the socio-historical milieus from which we come.9 This essay is not advocating a denial of human subjectivity and reflexivity; to do so would be naïve. However, we must actively guard against mapping today’s conceptions of gender, race, and class ideologies onto the past. Failing to do so would risk missing insights into the subtle nu- ances in cultural struggles over gender and race. Consider for a moment the life of Jane Cunningham Croly, one of the trailblazing female journalists of the nineteenth century. Re- cently exploring Croly’s writings on gender, I engaged in a struggle against presentism, battling against the urge to map current conceptions of feminism onto the phenomenon. I struggled to let “Jennie June” speak. At first glance, a present-blinded scholar might argue that Croly’s views about gender were not progressive—after all, she wrote predominantly about domesticity and was not a member of the suffrage movement; however, when one grapples with her conception of gender as presented in a sample of articles that spans the length of her career, one can begin to see the great complexity and contradictions evident within her writings. — Winter 2009 • 163 Although Croly reinforced Barbara Welter’s cult of true wom- anhood by arguing that women were by nature morally superior to men, her conception of separate spheres was both subversive and liberating.10 Mirroring the work of Sarah Hale, the prominent edi- tor of Godey’s Lady Book, Croly’s extension of the women’s sphere from the domain of domesticity to civic housekeeping was a source of empowerment.

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