The Media and the Movement: A User's Guide GLORIA STEINEM DICTATORS KN.OW what they're doing when they seize control of the media even before seizing control of land or people. Image and narra- tive are the organizing principles on which our brains work, and the media deliver them with such power and speed that they may over- whelm our experience, actually make us feel less real than the people whose images we see. But media are not reality; reality is reality. After thirty-plus years of traveling as an organizer, I've learned that nothing replaces the experience of being there, Social justice movements (lived experience) will probably always be struggling with the media (derived impressions), and vice versa, yet neither can be credible for long-without the other. Two notes: I've defined "media" here as everything that represents reality, from newspapers and talk shows to the Internet.Movies, novels, poetry, ads, and other works of the imagination are crucial, too, but that's a different story; Second, I've used past examples that might offer ideas for the future. After all, if we don't learn to use the media, main- stream and alternate, global and local-and by "use" I mean monitor, infiltrate, replace, protest, teach with, create our own, whatever the sit- uation demands-we will not only be invisible in the present, but absent from history's first draft. Lesson 1:How the Movement Changed the Media In the 1960s, on the cusp of feminism, women were identified in print as "Miss" or "Mrs.," "divorcee" or "widow," "blonde" or "brunette," not to 103 THE MEDIA AND THE MOVEMENT 105 ~ A ~ A .•.••• " •• \J \J 1J 1" r U K.t. V .t. 1{ '4 mention by what we wore. "Women's Pages" in newspapers featured so- ~~~the.media rarely report on their own inner workings; the Women's cial notes often written to please advertisers-a level of journalism that ,~'Movement is as bad as are women in general at taking credit for success; would have been a scandal on the (male) news pages. Radio and televi- ~~.andthe mainstream distorts what movements do anyway, so that others sion refused to hire women to read the news, on the premise that nothing ~tiwillbe less likely to follow. Thus, suffragists were depicted as cigar- spoken in a female voice would be taken seriously. 1 Classified ads were "'; ~~i;,smokingharridans in the newspapers of their day, only to become im- ,! divided into "Help Wanted-Male" and "Help Wanted-Female." .~. possibly saintly in history. Civil-rights advocates now are portrayed as Marriage-announcement pages in newspapers looked like meat markets, . seeking special privilege, and only in retrospect are viewed as righteous. with photos of brides only. The rare woman who made news in men's My generation of feminists was first ridiculed as oversexed "women's terms still might get a headline like, "Grandmother Wins Nobel Prize." libbers," then opposed as "anti-male," "anti-family," and even "anti- At Time magazine, where men wrote and women researched, the most sex."l We haven't yet reached the safe and saintly stage. No wonder frequent female cover subject was the Virgin Mary. "Lesbian," "gay," or feminists get less approval than do the issues we support; as in, "I'm not "homosexual" were words rarely used to describe anybody, partly be- .:a feminist, but ... "4 cause they could be considered libelous. On NBC's Today Show, Barbara The plain truth is that nothing changes without change-makers. Walters was still off-camera writing a script for men to speak, beauty- , Media problems like those listed above yielded to tactics like these: contest winners served coffee, and the only female host was a trained chimp. Rape was described only by such euphemisms as "attacked" • Employment ads were sex segregated until the National Organi- or "interfered with." When African American women were raped and zation for Women (NOW) petitioned the Equal Employment murdered by European Americans, they were not counted as victims Opportunity Commission in 1966, picketed The New York Times of racially motivated crimes. Even counterculture, Left-wing, anti- in 1967, and joined such pioneers as Joanne Evans Gardner of Vietnam-war kinds of media exempted women from their radical Pittsburgh in pressuring local newspapers. Stylebooks began to change: "chicks," staff positions, and sexual service to draft resisters (as change only after feminist writers suggested alternatives to sex- in "Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No") symbolized our role. Mean- ist language, and more women journalists invaded newsrooms while, women's magazines enshrined the "feminine" role, and often ran and unions. Grooms turned out to have faces-and brides to by formula: every marriage could be saved, only white women could be have occupations-after feminists complained to newspapers on the cover, and, except for Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan, women and picketed Bridal Fairs. "Interfered with" and other obscuran- who had sex outside marriage were doomed to suffer a sad end. tisms began to disappear once rape survivors held speak-outs, I offer all that as a reminder of how far we've come=-and therefore how far we can go. However, the idea that the media change as reality 3. "Women's liberation" was confused with 1960s "sexual liberation," but once we does is a myth. They need the same prodding tactics we've directed at} were seen as being serious about equality per se, a deep cultural assumption took over: sex is so presumed to be passive/dominant that feminists must therefore be say, academia, government, or big business (which, of course, the media anti-sex, Such an attitude won't end until equality is eroticized. are).' The myth of automatic change persists for at least three reasons: 4. In public opinion polls, about a third of U.S. women identify as feminists, 1. See "Standing By:Women in Broadcast Media," by CarolJenkins, p. 418.-Ed. roughly the same proportion as identify as Republicans. When polls include a defi- nition of feminism-"the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of 2. See "Climbing the Ivory Walls: Women in Academia," by Jane Roland Martin, malesand females"-this rises to over 60 percent. (If pollsters included such multi- p. 401; "Running for Our Lives: Electoral Politics," by Pat Schroeder, p. 28; cultural equivalents as "womanist" or "mujerista," that number would be even "Women and Law: The Power to Change," by Catharine A. MacKinnon, p. 447; higher.) Given the Right-wing demonization of feminists-including "femi-Nazi," and "Up the Down Labyrinth: Ins and Outs of Women's Corporate and Campus the word popularized by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh-this could be seen Careers," by Ellen Appel-Bronstein, p. 387.-Ed. asa major victory. 106 SISTERHOOD IS FOREVER THE MEDIA AND THE MOVEMENT lU/ \ feminist legal scholars changed the laws to reflect degrees of sex- tactic of closing some press conferences to male reporters- ual assault, rape-crisis centers pressed for media guidelines that despite cries of reverse discrimination-had its effect. (Neither protected a survivor's privacy, and rape came to be understood as side seemed aware that Eleanor Roosevelt had closed her White a criminal act of violence, racial or otherwise, not of sex.' In- House press conferences to male reporters for the same reason: deed, the pages of The New York Times allowed "Ms." as a form of to force the media to employ women.) Coverage of issues like address only in 1986, fourteen years after Congress had passer. welfare and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) expanded Bella Abzug's "Ms. Bill" that forbade the federal government when women's groups briefed editorial boards on their impor- from using prefixes indicating marital status, and after an equal tance. New subjects and women leaders got covered when ac- number of years of petitions and protests from women inside tivists arrived with lists of newsworthy story ideas. Some and outside the Times. feminist groups issued press releases with no individual names, • High-spirited feminist sit-ins riveted the attention of the almost to keep the media from designating leaders and creating stars. totally male editors at Newsweek and The Ladies' Home Journal, Others recognized the media's need for someone to quote, but resulting in major coverage and Journal articles by and about the rotated spokeswomen. A surprising number of women founded Women's Movement. A feminist seizure and occupation at Rat, new media, from volunteer-run newspapers and public-access the counterculture newspaper, first yielded an entire issue writ- TV to radio shows, news services, and book-publishing houses. ten by women, then permanent control of the paper by women. Between 1968 and 1975, more than 500 feminist publications Sex-discrimination suits were brought against the Associated began, including off our backs in Washington, D.C., Ain't I a Press, Newsweek, Life, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and The Woman in Iowa City, Iowa, It Ain't Me, Babe in Berkeley, Califor- New York Times. Media actions across the country included nia, Sojourner in Boston, Massachusetts, and Ms. in New York lunchtime demonstrations in Chicago's Loop, the invasion of a City, the largest feminist magazine and the only one available on San Francisco newspaper by seventy-five women from Berkeley national newsstands. More than thirty years later, off our backs Women's Liberation, and a demonstration by women from the and Ms. are still publishing. So is The Feminist Press, founded United Auto Workers that caused a Detroit TV station to cancel in 1970 to publish new and classic books by women, a harbinger a show in which secretaries and wives competed to see who knew of smaller, women-owned presses that have been cropping up more about the wishes of their bosseslhusbands.