Review Essay: Reading the Second Wave

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Notes

1. Abby Kelley Foster, in Proceedings of the National Woman's Rights Convention Held at Worcester, October 15, 16, 1851 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1851), 102.

2. See, e.g., Kathleen C. Berkeley, The Women's Liberation Movement in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: The Dial Press, 1999); Rachel Blau Du Plessis and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999); Amy Erdman Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920–1982 (New York: Columbia, 2001); Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminist and its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1998); Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Karla Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). I am merely noting here a surge in publication in the last few years, but do not mean to dismiss the many fine treatments of the second wave that appeared previously and which have laid the ground for the more recent scholarship. See, e.g., Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960 (New York: Touchstone, 1991); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Random House, 1994); Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979); and Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: Longman, 1975).

3. See, e.g., Lisa Maria Hogeland, “Against Generational Thinking, or Some Things that Third Wave Feminism Isn't,” Women's Studies in Communication 24 (2001): 107–21; Helene A. Shugart, “Isn't it Ironic? The Intersection of Third Wave Feminism and Generation X,” Women's Studies in Communication 24 (2001): 131–39; and Helene A. Shugart, “Mediating Third-Wave Feminism: Appropriation as Postmodern Media Practice,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 194–211.

4. Bonnie J. Dow, “Historical Narratives, Rhetorical Narratives, and Woman Suffrage Scholarship,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 321–40.

5. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol. 1: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, and Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol. II: Key Texts of the Early Feminists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

6. Examples of analyses produced in the 1970s include Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 74–86; Sonja Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy: Two Worlds in Conflict,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 275–88; and Brenda Robinson Hancock, “Affirmation as Negation in the Women's Liberation Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 264–72. More recent scholarship includes Charles Kimber Pearce, “The Radical Feminist Manifesto as Generic Appropriation: Gender, Genre, and Second Wave Resistance,” Southern Communication Journal 64 (1999): 307–15; Kyra Pearson, “Mapping Rhetorical Interventions in "National" Feminist Histories: Second Wave Feminism and Ain't I a Woman,” Communication Studies 50 (1999): 158–73; Sally Perkins, “The Rhetoric of Androgyny as Revealed in The Feminine Mystique,” Communication Studies 40 (1989): 69–80; and Kristan Poirot, “Mediating a Movement, Authorizing Discourse: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, and Feminism's Second Wave,” Women's Studies in Communication 27 (2004): 204–35.

7. See, for example, Bonnie Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Coverage, and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Bonnie Dow, “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Gender Anxiety in Television News Coverage of the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality,” Communication Studies 50 (1999): 143–57; and Bonnie J. Dow, “Fixing Feminism: Women's Liberation and the Rhetoric of Television Documentary,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 55–80.

8. See, e.g., Roxanne Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Barbara Crow, ed., Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

9. Steinem and Friedan are noteworthy as figureheads because their fame lasted for some time, but there were other feminists who had brief moments as theoretical, if not organizational, leaders on the basis of their authorship of controversial feminist books. For example, Kate Millett, author of the best-selling Sexual Politics, was featured on the cover of Newsweek in August of 1970, but she dropped from the limelight a few months later after she was “outed” as a lesbian in a Time magazine piece that questioned her credibility as a movement leader. For an excellent analysis of these events, see Poirot, “Mediating a Movement.” Other examples include Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch and an Australian feminist who had few ties to the U.S. movement. Greer obtained her most significant moment of visibility in an infamous public debate with Norman Mailer that Bradley describes in Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, Chapter 6. Finally, Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex, was very active in radical feminist circles, but her commitment to “leaderlessness” meant that she was never really promoted in a manner that the public could recognize.

10. Evans, Personal Politics; Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989).

11. See Davis and Rosen for examples of histories that devote chapters to media/movement interaction. See Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, and Douglas, Where the Girls Are for examples of works on women and media that devote chapters to the second wave. See also Cynthia Carter, Gil Branston, and Stuart Allan, eds., News, Gender, and Power (London: Routledge, 1998) and Marian Meyers, ed., Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture (Cressill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999). For journalists’ memoirs that discuss the second wave, see Kay Mills, A Place in the News: From the Women's Pages to the Front Page (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Marlene Sanders and Marcia Rock, Waiting for Prime-Time: The Women of Television News (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). For examples of journal articles treating the second wave and media interaction, see Bernadette Barker-Plummer, “News as a Political Resource: Media Strategies and Political Identity in the U.S. Women's Movement,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 306–24; Bernadette Barker-Plummer, “Producing Public Voice: Resource Mobilization and Media Access in the National Organization for Women,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (2002): 188–205; Dow, “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Gender Anxiety”; Dow, “Fixing Feminism”; Elizabeth A. van Zoonen, “The Women's Movement and the Media: Constructing a Public Identity,” European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 453–76.

12. For a review of recent feminist scholarship in the field of communication, see Bonnie J. Dow and Celeste M. Condit, “The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication,” Journal of Communication, forthcoming 2005.

13. Charles E. Morris III and Stephen H. Browne, eds., Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, (State College, PA: Strata, 2001).

14. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation”; Martha Solomon “The ‘Positive Woman's’ Journey: A Mythic Analysis of the Rhetoric of STOP ERA,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 262–74.

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Notes on contributors

Bonnie J. Dow

Bonnie J. Dow is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia