Despite the importance of the women’s rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, news media coverage of feminists’ demands for equality was largely dismissive. Francesca Polletta writes that news was not the only place that Americans learned about the movement; women’s magazines also played an important role. In new research which analyzes magazine coverage, she finds that rather than being an obstacle to feminism, women’s magazines were more likely than newspapers to cover the feminist movement’s more radical goals.

In the 1970s, Americans came to believe not only that women should have access to the jobs, educational and political opportunities that men had, but also that that equality should extend into the home. Several factors were responsible for the shift, including women’s increasing employment and the shrinking size of families, but scholars agree that the rise of a movement dedicated to women’s liberation was one of them.

How Americans got their news about the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s

Just what role the movement played has been difficult to determine. Since even the most popular movements recruit no more than a fraction of the population, most people learn about movements and what they are fighting for through the news media. News coverage of the women’s movement, though, was largely dismissive. Reporters treated moderate feminists’ demand for equal access to jobs, education, and politics—so-called equity goals– as legitimate. But they treated the activists calling for the transformation of culture, marriage, and family—role-change goals–as altogether silly. Why, then, did Americans come to embrace at least some change in gender roles?

Because news was not the only place that Americans learned about the movement. In 1970, books of feminist critique became bestsellers. Television and radio talk shows featured leading movement activists. Television comedies incorporated feminist characters. Advertisements celebrated milestones of women’s liberation. Skilled in communicating with the mainstream American public, popular cultural producers made some feminist ideas accessible and appealing. They did so less because they were feminists themselves (although some surely were) than because imagining audiences as forward-thinking and progressive was potentially profitable.

Women’s magazines, feminism and the economics of content

This was the case with popular women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Redbook, and McCall’s. Targeted to lower- to middle-class white married women with children, and with up to fifteen million readers per issue, these magazines reached American women who had little contact with the movement. Betty Friedan famously held them responsible for the lie of domestic contentment that kept women chained to home and hearth in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. The book, which became a bestseller, is credited with launching the women’s movement. And women’s magazines since then have been seen as an obstacle to feminism rather than a vehicle for it.

That view is wrong. Women’s magazines were certainly slower than news outlets to pay attention to the movement. In the late 1960s, television and print news reported on moderate feminists mobilizing for the passage and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and reported on radical feminists’ consciousness-raising groups, colorful protests, and attacks on the nuclear family. Women’s magazines ignored both. But, behind the scenes, the economics of magazine content were changing. Fighting for ever-scarcer advertising dollars, magazine editors sought to persuade advertisers that their readers were sophisticated and interested in the world outside their kitchens. These readers exercised purchasing power not only over traditional household items, editors insisted, but also over automobiles, liquor, travel, and insurance–products long considered the purview of men. Magazines’ stories about pollution and the war in Vietnam fell flat with readers, though.

By contrast, the questions feminists were posing about marriage, family, and career might be a storyline that appealed to readers at the same time as it demonstrated readers’ open-mindedness. McCall’s new editor, Shana Alexander, said this explicitly. Criticized in 1970 for cutting features popular with advertisers such as beauty, food, and health, she told the Wall Street Journal that, to the contrary, she had “brought McCall’s up to date”. The “evidence,” was “five articles in the July McCall’s on militant feminists.” By 1972, according to a business reporter, for women’s magazines, “the Women’s Liberation movement has been a boon.”

Compared to newspapers, magazines had more in-depth coverage of the feminist movement’s goals of role-change

Women’s magazines covered the movement differently than the news. News professionals understood their mission as providing readers with the timely information about political developments they needed to be well-informed citizens. Magazines offered their readers something else: the practical advice they needed to be successful wives and mothers, and, especially after World War II, to be psychologically self-fulfilled. Even before the movement, magazines had encouraged women to pay attention to their needs separate from those of their families, in a way that stood in awkward tension with the prescriptions of the feminine mystique. Now, magazines writers translated the movement’s call for liberation into an idiom of self-fulfillment with which readers were familiar. They asked what this new trend offered readers in the way of practical insight for living a satisfying life.

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

My students Debra Boka, Caroline Martinez, Mutsumi Ogaki and I compared coverage of the movement in the New York Times and in five women’s magazines in 1970 and 1971. We found that the Times’ coverage of the movement’s equity goals, like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and anti-discrimination law, was serious and substantive. When it came to the movement’s role-change goals, which were associated with radical feminists, stories focused on activists’ appearance more than their aims. Women’s magazines, for their part, rarely covered the ERA or the movement’s legal initiatives. Like the Times, they represented radical feminists as strident, angry, and desperately in need of make-up—but also as having a point. “I’m no karate chopper…” or “I believe in make-up…” writers assured their readers and then went on to rehearse approvingly feminists’ claim that housewives should be paid for their labor or that couples should share housework equally.

Alongside recipe roundups and tips for a svelte figure, magazines interviewed radical activists, profiled couples in egalitarian marriages, ran fictional stories about women chafing against the bonds of domesticity, provided contact information for consciousness-raising groups, and published readers’ essays on what women’s liberation meant to them. Overall, we found that magazine stories were significantly more likely than those in the Times to cover the movement’s role change goals substantively—by, for example, discussing them at length or quoting an activist–and were more likely to represent ordinary women as interested in and supportive of the movement.

This was a gentle feminism, to be sure, one that viewed men as allies rather than antagonists and attributed gender inequality to outdated ideas rather than to men’s stake in the status quo. And insofar as magazines’ feminism contributed to Americans’ changing attitudes about gender roles, it did so in conjunction, not only with legal initiatives and policy changes, but also with representations of the movement in other popular cultural forms. This is the takeaway for activists today. For entirely commercial reasons, popular cultural outlets sometimes take up a movement’s issue in a way that can help to create public support for that issue. Activists should be prepared to make the case that their issue is trendy, morally urgent, excitingly controversial or practically useful enough to attract the audiences popular media producers want.

• This article is based on the paper, “Social Movements in the Commercial Public Sphere: How Women’s Magazines Popularized Second-Wave Feminism”, in the American Journal of Sociology. 
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.