Bonnie J. Dow. Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. xii + 239 pp. $28.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-252-08016-6.
Reviewed by Emily Dufton
Published on H-1960s (May, 2015)
Commissioned by Zachary J. Lechner (Centenary College of Louisiana)
At the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City Dow’s excellent new book Watching Women’s Lib‐ on September 7, 1968, several protesters from eration, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Net‐ New York Radical Women draped a women’s lib‐ work News, which combines the felds of media eration banner over the balcony, released stink and feminist studies to expose how truly remark‐ bombs containing Toni Home Permanent Solution able 1970 was. (an at-home perm product, which reportedly Dow’s purpose is both simple and complex: smelled like eggs), and chanted “No More Miss she seeks to “construct a historicized narrative of America” and “Freedom for Women,” before be‐ national broadcast representation of the second ing ejected from the venue. In the same way pro‐ wave as it evolved over the course of a single piv‐ fessional sportscasts refuse to show streakers, net‐ otal year” (p. 11). To do this, she moves chronolog‐ work television cameras were kept squarely on ically through the year, covering the “frst, brief, the stage, equating coverage of the protestors’ an‐ hard news reports” in January that introduced the tics with dangerous encouragement. By refusing movement to the stations’ audiences, and then ex‐ to reveal the protests on screen, television execu‐ amining the March 18 sit-in at Ladies’ Home Jour‐ tives silenced the protestors and did their part to nal, an event that not only showed the move‐ uphold the country’s gendered status quo. ment’s growing power but also had the added But in 1970, the cameras abruptly turned and beneft of “precipitating signifcant changes in ed‐ women’s liberation took center stage. That year, itorial and employment practices at women’s second-wave feminism was a prominent story on magazines” (pp. 25-26). The fourth chapter covers all three major news networks (ABC, NBC, and the ABC News documentary Women’s Liberation, CBS), which collectively made the movement the aired that May, which presented the movement in subject of more than twenty discrete reports. That a comprehensible manner, analogizing it with the year, and this coverage, is at the heart of Bonnie J. civil rights movement and ofering the Equal H-Net Reviews
Rights Amendment (ERA) as the answer to wom‐ This is Dow’s most important contribution for en’s ills. The fnal two chapters cover the August those who study the social movements of the 26 Women’s Strike for Equality and the rise of Glo‐ 1960s and their efects. She details exactly how ria Steinem as “feminism’s enduring media icon” television promoted women’s liberation, how its (p. 28). Though Steinem barely appeared in any coverage of the movement excited and inspired media coverage in 1970, the “early mediated nar‐ women to join, and then how the networks al‐ ratives about women’s liberation and their inter‐ tered their coverage to characterize “women’s lib‐ action with the movement’s own media strategies bers” as radicalized man-haters, all in a single facilitated Steinem’s emergence as the antidote to year. It is a concise history of one way in which feminism’s image problems” (p. 28). White, liber‐ the hopefulness of the era was destroyed, and the al, moderate, and middle-class, as well as het‐ book’s depth makes it a useful text for a wide vari‐ eronormative and beautiful, Steinem, Dow main‐ ety of classes. tains, was the woman whom networks found Dow is a professor of communications and most appealing, and who became, for better or for women’s and gender studies at Vanderbilt Univer‐ worse, the movement’s most prominently mediat‐ sity, and, in Watching Women’s Liberation, she ed display. bridges her felds well. But she also draws from a Unlike the rest of the book, however, the frst number of other areas, including studies of flm, chapter moves away from 1970 to focus on the race, sexuality, media, and rhetoric, in order to 1968 Miss America protests, which were not cov‐ give her book the widest possible breadth. She is ered by network news at the time. Activists in particularly good at analyzing the shifts in New York Radical Women connected their actions rhetoric used to describe second-wave feminists to other New Left protests, but with little media and their goals, uncovering new meaning in old credibility and a shocking stance, the “bra burn‐ reports and tracing their impact on the stunted ing” myth was born. Nonetheless, widespread passage of the ERA. newspaper coverage made the Miss America It is Dow’s contribution to the history of femi‐ protests the origin story for second-wave femi‐ nism where Watching Women’s Liberation holds nism’s public debut. Underscoring the slow pace most sway. Students unfamiliar with how “bra- of network news at the time, Dow shows how it burning” and other manufactured myths about took over a year for television to catch up, and feminism took shape will fnd much to learn in even longer for it to refne and package its mes‐ Dow’s text, and it may help them evaluate the sage for viewers. Matter-of-fact and even positive rhetorical turns in coverage of women in the coverage was transformed over several months news today. Despite Dow’s book being focused until the movement was a caricature of itself, in squarely on 1970, the debates it uncovers and the which the image and rhetoric of second-wave consciousness it raises remain applicable even in feminism was distorted for an audience pre‐ 2015, at a moment when major media fgures con‐ sumed to be antagonistic to feminists’ goals and tinue to frame feminism in misguided but mean‐ overwhelmingly male. The revelation here is omi‐ ingful ways. One need not look much further than nous: how women’s liberation became a spectacle the treatment of Sandra Fluke in 2012 or of Zoe in the hands of American media, which elided the Quinn, the developer at the center of #Gamergate, diversity and pragmatism of the movement in fa‐ to see that women fghting for equality remain vor of (often exaggerated) claims of sexual initia‐ easy targets for media ire, which remains almost tives and the threat the movement held for dis‐ ritually concocted for the presumed white, male rupting traditional gender roles. audience that news organizations continue to
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Citation: Emily Dufton. Review of Dow, Bonnie J. Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. May, 2015.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43116
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