Fixing Feminism: Women's Liberation and the ... - CompHacker

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 90, No. 1, February 2004, pp. 53–80
Fixing Feminism: Women’s Liberation
and the Rhetoric of Television
Documentary
Bonnie J. Dow
On May 26, 1970, ABC broadcast the first television documentary treatment of the
women’s liberation movement. Part of a wave of media attention that second-wave
feminism received in the spring of 1970, the documentary was produced and reported by
Marlene Sanders, a reporter sympathetic to the movement who hoped that the documentary
would correct its image problems. Three key rhetorical moves in the documentary—
form, framing, and refutation—are used to “fix” the movement, that is, to repair its
radical image and to stabilize its meaning by inserting it into dominant narratives of
social change derived from generic conventions of the television documentary, from a
nostalgic vision of the civil rights movement, and from the media pragmatism favored
by the liberal wing of women’s liberation, which is shared by Sanders. The conclusion
traces the implications of the documentary’s rhetorical/ideological strategies for understanding
how dominant media naturalize particular narratives about the possibilities for
and meanings of social change.
Keywords: Women’s Liberation; Television Documentary; Second-wave Feminism;
Marlene Sanders; Ideology; Liberalism; Media; Social Movements; Framing; Civil
Rights
On May 25, 1970, ABC News broadcast a program titled “Women’s Liberation” as
an episode of NOW, ahalf-hour documentary series billed as “a weekly presentation
examining the world’s fascinating people and places, crises and curiosities.” 1 The
May 25 broadcast was the first television documentary treatment of the women’s
movement. It was produced and reported by Marlene Sanders, a female broadcast
news pioneer and the first woman to anchor a network nightly news broadcast. Two
Bonnie J. Dow is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. Correspondence
to: Bonnie J. Dow, Speech Communication, Terrell Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. Email:
bdow@uga.edu. A previous version of this essay was presented as the 2001 Gladys Borchers Lecture for the
Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
ISSN 0033–5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) © 2004 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/0033563042000206817

54 B. J. Dow
months earlier, ABC’s only previous television treatment of the movement also had
been reported by Sanders, when the March 18 ABC Evening News had carried her
exclusive report on a sit-in by feminists at the offices of the Ladies Home Journal.
While occupying editor-in-chief John Mack Carter’s office for eleven hours, feminists
charged that the magazine’s predominantly male editorial staff, its exclusive
focus on women’s roles as wives and mothers, and its demeaning and sexist
advertising made a mockery of the magazine’s supposed commitment to improving
women’s lives. By the end of the sit-in, they had wrung a concession from Carter,
who gave them space in the August 1970 issue of the Ladies Home Journal for a
special insert on women’s liberation, composed entirely by feminist writers. 2
Sanders had been given advance warning of the protest primarily because she was
known among feminists as a journalist highly sympathetic to women’s liberation.
She was a friend of Betty Friedan, the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique
and the first president of the National Organization for Women. Indeed, when
NOW was formed in 1966 in New York, and Sanders was the sole female correspondent
for ABC News, she was an early recruit to the new feminist organization. And
it was Sanders who originally pitched the idea of a documentary on women’s lib at
ABC. As she put it in Waiting for Prime-Time, her 1988 book on women in television
news, “while the women’s movement was making news in bits and pieces, it
warranted in-depth attention. The one thing a television documentary could do was
to put the parts together and see what it meant.” She maintained that approval of
her proposal gave ABC “the distinction, unheralded, of being the first network to
examine the burgeoning women’s movement in any depth.” Moreover, in recounting
her motivation for producing the documentary, Sanders is candid in stating her
opinion that “the emerging women’s movement needed straightforward television
coverage instead of ridicule,” and she noted that “in the initial phase of the women’s
movement, reporting on it was done mainly by men, and it was snide and hostile.
Women’s lib was treated with humor at best, and contempt at worst.” 3
Sanders’ ultimate assessment of the documentary is that it was “a primer,
exploring the goals of the bra-less campus radicals as well as the more socially
acceptable feminist theoreticians.” 4 Yet the “Women’s Liberation” documentary was
far more than an introduction to the ideas and activities of the movement: it was a
considered attempt to stabilize those ideas and activities for a presumably middle
American audience that had little concrete experience with the second wave of
feminism 5 beyond its representations in public discourse. A series of rhetorical
moves—form, framing, and refutation—coalesce in the documentary both to fix the
meaning of the movement and to insert it into dominant narratives about social
change in the U.S. My use of “fix” reflects the dual meanings of the term; Sanders’s
rhetorical situation was complex, and “Women’s Liberation” was a pragmatic
response to it that stabilized and repaired perceptions of the meaning of the second
wave. As I discuss below, the nature of that response was a product of several
interacting factors, including the growing visibility of the feminist movement in
national media, Sanders’s commitment to the pragmatic goal of improving the image
of the movement, and the social and institutional position of television documentary

Fixing Feminism 55
and television news as vehicles for social commentary, a position that had solidified
during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Establishing that context
provides the rationale for understanding “Women’s Liberation” as situated rhetorical
action that works toward the purpose of “fixing feminism” through a complex
amalgam of generic conventions, historical analogy, and verbal and visual refutation.
Media and the Making of “Women’s Liberation”
Despite some earlier coverage, much of it connected to the protest mounted by
feminists at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, 1970 was the crucial
year for public awareness of the second wave of U.S. feminism. 6 Although the
movement’s beginnings can be dated in various ways—from ideological origins in
the publication and subsequent success of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in
1963 and women’s emerging rebellion within the New Left in 1965, to organizational
beginnings with the founding of NOW in 1966 and the formation of radical
women’s liberation groups in 1967—there is consensus among historians and media
critics that 1970 was the year of the “grand press blitz” of women’s liberation. 7 This
wave of press attention began in late 1969 with features in Life and Time. Byearly
1970, Saturday Review, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and The New York Times
Magazine had carried cover stories that treated different facets of the movement’s
diffuse agenda, and by March of that year, the television networks had decided that
feminism was a worthy topic when both CBS and NBC offered multi-part series on
the movement during their regular evening news broadcasts. 8
On CBS, Walter Cronkite introduced each of the segments of its three-part series
broadcast in early March, but David Culhane reported the stories. Less a report on
the actual activities within the feminist movement and more an attempt to explain
why some women were attracted to it, these reports were given little credibility by
Cronkite’s studiously ironic introductions, including his opening comment on
March 11 that
Sigmund Freud, an expert on women if there ever was one, said that despite his thirty
years of research, he was unable to answer one question: “What does a woman want”
If the famed Austrian psychiatrist were alive today, though, he’d have more to think
about and perhaps be even more confused.
When NBC offered its five-part series at the end of March, its treatment of the topic
was not only more thorough, but more sensitive to the problem of assigning male
reporters to such a story. NBC used four different women reporters over the five
nights of the series—Liz Trotta, Aline Saarinen, Norma Quarles, and Catherine
Mackin—representing practically its entire staff of female national correspondents.
Initially treated by the networks as a social trend story (with the exception of
Sanders’s sit-in report), women’s liberation activity did not reach the status of “hard
news” across national media until the late summer of 1970, when it finally led the
evening newscasts on all three networks and received its first banner headline and
front page above-the-fold coverage in The New York Times, a breakthrough in

56 B. J. Dow
amount, if not in quality, of coverage. The occasion was the August 26, 1970
Women’s Strike for Equality, the brainchild of Betty Friedan, in which a coalition of
feminist groups organized huge marches in New York and other major cities to
dramatize women’s need for equal pay, child care, and abortion rights. 9
That the Strike for Equality was a breakthrough moment for media coverage of
the second wave makes sense, as the Strike easily qualified as a hard news “event.”
Commercial media generally found the movement a difficult story to cover because
it did not, initially, produce a number of such events, and it did not have clearly
delineated leaders or easily accessed organizational sources. With the exception of
NOW, women’s liberation primarily operated through small leaderless groups, many
of which practiced consciousness-raising, an activity that “does not provide observable
events that may be held to symbolize the progress, purposes, or problems of
organized institutions.” 10 When women’s liberation began to receive dominant
media coverage in late 1969 and early 1970, ridicule and amusement colored reports
on radical groups such as WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy
from Hell) and radical feminists such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, who denounced
marriage as legalized prostitution. Framing of feminists as “crazed freaks” obsessed
with karate and the use of quotation marks around terms such as “sex discrimination”
and “sexism,” coupled with the ritualistic tactic of interviewing “ordinary
women” who claimed to be perfectly satisfied with their lives, created an extremist
public identity for the movement that was only slightly tempered by the admission,
in these same stories, that feminists might have a point about economic discrimination,
although even the latter was not presented as a cause for alarm. As Susan
Douglas astutely notes, “possibly the most important legacy of such coverage was its
carving up of the women’s movement into legitimate feminism and illegitimate
feminism,” the former characterized by liberal demands for equal pay, abortion, and
child care, the latter characterized by radicals’ critique of marriage, gender roles, and
other issues that fell under the heading of “sexual politics.” Scholars of the second
wave would generally agree with Sanders’s assessment that, by and large, media
coverage of women’s liberation up to 1970 had evolved only slightly, from invisibility
to trivialization. 11
Clearly, the late spring of 1970 was a propitious moment for the first television
documentary on women’s liberation; indeed, Marlene Sanders later noted that her
proposal of the documentary was a case of “be[ing] in the right place at the right
time.” In 1988, she wrote that,
as I look back on my career, the women’s movement provided an exceptional point
when time, place, and position all came together to give me the power and focus to
contribute to the country’s awareness of the new status of women and also to vocalize
that change for my own industry.… The women’s movement came along as I was
strategically placed in the documentary department. 12
Feminist Susan Brownmiller, one of the architects of the Ladies Home Journal sit-in
and a former colleague of Sanders at ABC, claims in her memoir of the movement
that Sanders was “the movement’s only ally in television”; at another point, she labels

Fixing Feminism 57
Sanders “a one-woman corrective in television.” 13 Indeed, in addition to Sanders’s
clear sympathies, the very fact that she was a woman was important. Many radical
feminist groups refused to speak to male reporters, a strategy that stemmed from a
belief that male reporters could not understand their issues as well as from a desire
to force news organizations to hire women in order to cover the movement. 14 As a
result, Sanders would have a kind of access that was not available to all reporters.
The growing media preoccupation with defining feminism and explaining its
implications, a preoccupation that had spread across the media landscape in recent
months to affect most major news outlets, meant that Sanders’s documentary was
especially timely and that she escaped the charge that ABC was giving time to an
issue that no one cared about. At the same time, however, for someone like Sanders,
who sympathized with the movement and thought that it had been underrepresented
in media reports (still true at the time she began work on the project, although
perhaps less true by the time it aired), the rhetorical burden was still heavy. She
clearly saw the documentary as an opportunity to correct misimpressions about the
movement and to improve its public image, but because she was known as a
sympathizer by many of her colleagues in the news business, her obligation to
project fairness and objectivity in the program was magnified. 15
The changing institutional and political positioning of network news and documentary
created additional pressure for the appearance of objectivity. In the 1960s,
as many have noted, entertainment network television ignored social and political
tumult as escapist situation comedies began to rule the airwaves. In contrast,
network news came into its own during this same period, devoting increasing hours
(many in the form of documentaries) to the examination of topics such as civil rights
and the Vietnam War. 16 By 1968, the year that CBS’s 60 Minutes premiered, the
nightly news on all three networks had expanded from fifteen minutes to a half hour;
“instant specials,” usually an in-depth look at a breaking story, were more commonplace,
and local news in major markets was becoming lengthier and more sophisticated.
By 1970, television was “America’s prime news source,” and “TV news was
becoming more acceptable, believable, and profitable.” 17 As a result, however, it also
became a target of criticism from political elites. Network news’ increasing tendency
to question official positions on the war in Vietnam had led to backlash from both
the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and in November 1969, Vice President
Spiro Agnew launched his famous series of invectives against journalists, reflecting
President Nixon’s longstanding distrust of the press as well as the perception that
news divisions had had a significant impact on turning public opinion against the
war in Vietnam, a war that Nixon still was trying to salvage. Agnew maintained that
The American people would rightly not tolerate this concentration of power in
Government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of
a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a
monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government … Perhaps the place to start
looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of Government in Washington but in
the studios of the networks in New York.

58 B. J. Dow
Agnew’s charges were echoed by the Nixon-appointed chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, and networks and affiliates felt pressured to modify
their coverage of political protest. 18
Thus, the climate in which “Women’s Liberation” was produced was distinguished
by a variety of rhetorical constraints arising from the intersecting personal (for
Sanders), institutional, and political contexts that coalesced around its creation. That
is, the evidence is persuasive that Sanders felt pressure to improve the poor media
image of women’s liberation but also needed to avoid explicitly highlighting her own
sympathies for the movement. In addition, she was working within the form of
documentary, a genre that, like network news in general, had become more
politicized by 1970, as the Nixon administration was paying close attention to what
it perceived as a liberal bias in the news. Indeed, the White House had some interest
in the topic of women’s liberation; FBI surveillance and infiltration of feminist
activities was systematic and ongoing between 1969 and 1973. 19
Documenting “Women’s Liberation”
The combination of factors explained above is a useful lens through which to
understand the rhetorical form and function of “Women’s Liberation.” Generally,
the documentary operates within what Bernadette Barker-Plummer has termed the
“media pragmatism” strategy designed by the National Organization for Women.
NOW was a feminist group that was generally reformist in tone and strategy; it
distinguished itself from the more radical branches of the movement, and its
membership was made up primarily of older, professional women, many of whom
had previous experience in politics and government. Barker-Plummer claims that
“NOW saw media, especially the national, elite news media, as a powerful movement
resource. They sought to use news media to mobilize new members and to win
public approval, while also giving the public an honest picture of the movement,”
three goals that characterize media pragmatism. Understanding “Women’s Liberation”
through the lens of media pragmatism allows for analysis of the rhetorical and
ideological work that it does under the guise of offering an “honest picture” of the
women’s liberation movement. The opinion of NOW, shared by Sanders, was that
the movement was poorly framed in dominant media not only because of sexism
and resistance to the goals of the movement, but also because feminists needed to
learn how to package the movement to work with media logics. 20 Thus, Sanders
faced the formidable task of reshaping the public identity of women’s liberation so
it might be taken as seriously as those movements for social justice that had preceded
it and from which many of its adherents were drawn.
In what follows, I focus on three crucial elements of the documentary’s overall
rhetorical design. These include, first, its highly conventional form, which eschews
any innovative aesthetic techniques, closely resembles a traditional, if lengthy, news
story, and hews closely to the codes of realism and objectivity that distinguish
expository documentary and that further its liberal, pluralist goals. Second, I discuss
Sanders’s specific, and specifically rhetorical, framing techniques, most evident in her

Fixing Feminism 59
introductory and concluding remarks, as well as her frequent use of voice-over
narration. More than any other aspect of the program, Sanders’s overt interpretations
and explanations of what the viewer is seeing and hearing signal her embrace
of the greater rhetorical license offered by the documentary form, and she uses that
license to construct a powerful, yet problematic, analogy between feminism and
Black civil rights.
Finally, I argue that the most useful way to understand this documentary is as a
rhetorical act oriented primarily, although implicitly, toward refutation. That is,
although Sanders might have seen her role as offering what she called a “primer,” a
first attempt to explain what the movement “meant,” I contend that it is more useful
to understand the documentary as responsive to the wave of media attention that
preceded it. When viewed as refutation, “Women’s Liberation” indicates the key role
that imagined White male spectators play in its rhetorical construction; indeed, it
ultimately reveals the centrality of a White, heterosexual, evolutionary liberalism to
the documentary’s overall logic. This liberalism is signaled by the documentary’s
elision of issues of race and sexuality within the second wave as well as by its
ultimate emphasis on reformist goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, and
the concomitant need to make feminism palatable to male opinion leaders and
decision makers. The documentary’s strategies coalesce around the attempt to
stabilize the meaning of women’s liberation, to establish a telos for it, and to give
it a narrative coherence that had thus far been lacking in media representations.
This attempt to fix the meaning of the movement had important rhetorical and
ideological implications, which I discuss in the conclusion of this essay.
Form
Although there is disagreement among documentary theorists about what characteristics
define or limit the genre of documentary, there is general consensus that
documentary is a vehicle for social commentary. John Grierson believed that the
documentary’s “creative treatment of actuality” must have a social purpose, as did
William Bluem. Bill Nichols claims that argument is central to documentary, and
Carl Plantinga writes of documentary’s “assertive stance,” arguing that it is fundamentally
rhetorical. 21 Of course, “social purpose” can be articulated in a variety of
ways, and film and television documentary have displayed a variety of aesthetic
techniques over the years, ranging from the traditionally journalistic to uses of direct
cinema and cinema verité techniques to self-conscious use of dramatic narrative.
Indeed, one of the elements that critics and creators identify as distinctive of the
“golden age” of television documentary in the 1960s is the range of innovative
aesthetic techniques that it produced. 22
“Women’s Liberation,” however, is highly conventional in form, reflecting the
dominant trend in television documentaries at the end of the 1960s. The documentary
is structured topically; there are seven segments, and the movement from one
to another is signaled by Sanders’s verbal transitions, which use a “voice of God”
narrational style to create the impression of commonsensical description of what the

60 B. J. Dow
viewer has seen or is about to see. The logic behind the segments appears to be
description of the major concerns of the movement: those she specifically links to
radical groups—such as socialization and the sexual objectification of women; those
she specifically links to reformist groups—such as employment opportunity, pay
equity, and the ERA; and those that she claims unite all feminists—such as abortion
rights. Within most of the segments, film footage of events and activities is
juxtaposed with brief interviews with participants and observers that “make sense”
of or evaluate what is shown. In a couple of cases, Sanders uses one of the most
common objectivity codes: the presentation of commentary by two persons with
differing points of view on an issue. Sanders’s is the only voice to directly address
the camera or the viewer; characteristic of the expository mode, she retains epistemic
privilege. Although her interviews include those easily categorized as “experts,” such
as former NOW president Betty Friedan or Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, as well as
those who are either participants in women’s liberation activities or merely observers
of it, all of these interviewees speak to Sanders, not to the camera itself. Thus, “the
voices of others are woven into a textual logic that subsumes and orchestrates them.
They retain little responsibility for making the argument, but are used to support it
or provide evidence or substantiation for what the commentary addresses.” 23
The structure of the segments in the documentary, then, tends to follow a pattern
in which Sanders introduces an issue and provides a brief orientation to it (usually
matching her introductory words with a standard establishing shot of a locale),
followed by a few minutes of unnarrated film that supports her contention and adds
to the overall impression of realism by underscoring that she is simply presenting to
us “objects … events, or situations [that] actually occur[red] or exist[ed] in the
actual world as portrayed” or what Rosteck terms “the myth of photographic
naturalness.” 24 In several cases, this footage is followed by brief interviews with
participants or observers who provide additional perspective; these interviews are
filmed in conventional style, the speakers depicted as talking heads in medium shots.
The documentary is governed by what William Bluem has called “word logic”; that
is, arguments are propositional and linear, major contentions are expressed by the
reporter in direct address to the audience, and photographs “merely illustrate the
verbal argument.” 25 “Women’s Liberation” fits easily into the category of expository
documentary, described by Bill Nichols as perhaps the most epistemologically
naïve—and the most common— mode of the genre. As he puts it, the expository
mode, typical of network news stories, privileges “realism” and “emphasizes the
impression of objectivity and of well-substantiated judgment.” 26 Objectivity, of
course, is a rhetorical stance, a particular mode of reasoning and presentation rather
than a “representation-free point of view.” 27 In a strict sense, we recognize that it is
epistemologically impossible to achieve absolute correspondence with a pre-existing
“reality”; on the other hand, it is possible to recognize the codes of objectivity at
work in journalistic discourse, and they are easily visible in “Women’s Liberation.”
This approach was typical for news specials, news magazines, and short-form
documentaries by the end of the 1960s, and adhering so closely to them accomplished
one of Sanders’ stated goals: to give women’s liberation the treatment that

Fixing Feminism 61
any other hard news story deserved and to avoid the irony and ridicule that she
believed had characterized earlier coverage. (Toward that end, it was helpful that the
spring season of the NOW documentary series in which “Women’s Liberation” was
broadcast also included episodes on the Black Panthers and on the Vietnam War,
thus placing women’s liberation in a programming context with other topics related
to major social movements.) Ultimately, the utter conventionality of its structure
and its placement within the NOW series can be seen as part of what I will later
discuss as the documentary’s overall refutational design: it implicitly asserts, in
contrast to earlier dismissive treatment, that women’s liberation is a legitimate story
that can and should be treated as credible and compelling within dominant
representational norms. As Nichols argues, “attaching a particular text to a traditional
mode of representation and to the discursive authority of that tradition may
well strengthen its claims, lending to these claims the weight of previously established
legitimacy.” Indeed, Rosteck asserts even more strongly that documentaries
encourage a mode of reading through which “audiences … decode or interpret a text
partly in line with their prior experience and assumptions about the work formed by
their experience with texts of a similar or identical genre.” 28 Thus, the form of
“Women’s Liberation” carries its own message: it asserts the legitimacy of women’s
liberation as a news story and attaches to its representation of the movement the
aura of objectivity that distinguishes expository documentary. This formal grounding
is important to the development of the documentary’s central framing strategy:
its analogy between women’s liberation and civil rights.
Framing
Although “Women’s Liberation” generally operates within the codes of objectivity
and realism, it is framed by Sanders’s narration, which is noteworthy for its
rhetorical work under the guise of making commonsensical “claims about the
‘real.’” 29 According to Nichols, expository documentary “take[s] shape around
commentary directed at the viewer; images serve as illustration or counterpoint,
[and] … the rhetoric of the commentator’s argument serves as the textual dominant,
moving the text forward in service of its persuasive needs.” 30 In “Women’s Liberation,”
Sanders exploits every opportunity for directly addressing her viewers: she
introduces and closes the half-hour with a traditional “stand-up” commentary
(speaking directly to the camera), she provides a voice-over introducing each discrete
segment of the program, establishing relevance and comparing or contrasting it to
what has gone before, and she introduces and credentials her interviewees. Her
discourse performs the conventional functions of framing: “to define particular
aspects of reality in ways that support specific social interests within the field of
public discourse,” and to shape “the symbolic platform on which members of society
think and talk about public issues.” 31
Two framing strategies dominate the narrative Sanders develops, and both are
signaled in her opening commentary: first, her emphasis on the geographical,
ideological, and political (although not racial or sexual) diversity of the women’s

62 B. J. Dow
liberation movement, and second, her attempt to situate the movement within the
general climate of protest that was well known to television audiences by 1970. The
latter strategy grows more dominant and more focused as the documentary develops.
For Sanders, this framing is about normalization; it is an attempt to make women’s
liberation less frightening by demonstrating that its adherents are not limited to a
radical fringe and, of more importance, by positioning it as a natural outgrowth of
the questioning of social and political inequality that had become visible in the
1960s, particularly in connection to the civil rights of African Americans.
Both the opening and the closing shots of the documentary focus on Sanders
sitting on a stone bench in front of a fountain in an unidentified outdoor urban
setting. After a disembodied male voice introduces Sanders (“And now, reporting for
ABC, Marlene Sanders”), she addresses the camera as follows:
Fifty years ago, women got the vote. It was a bitter battle, but an easy goal to explain.
Today, the things women want are more complex. Those involved in what has come
to be known as the women’s liberation movement do not necessarily agree on all of
the objectives. But there is a serious questioning of the role of woman in our society.
And the rhetoric of the civil rights movement has been contagious. The word
“equality” is powerful.
Sanders does a great deal of rhetorical work in a few seconds here. She connects
women’s liberation to the first wave of feminism, yet explicitly notes that the second
wave has a greater rhetorical problem, so to speak: it is not as easily reduced to an
understandable symbol of equality like the ballot. This argument requires a
significant amount of historical erasure, because the first wave took on many more
issues than gaining the franchise, but it is erasure toward a rhetorical purpose:
warning the viewer that women’s liberation is harder to understand, and that what
follows will reflect that. On the other hand, her other connecting move, toward the
civil rights movement, is an analogy designed to bolster credibility by giving
women’s liberation a place alongside other contemporary movements combating
discrimination. Ultimately, what Sanders establishes here is an authoritative presence
that puts her in a position to guide the viewers’ interpretations of what is to come.
Situating women’s liberation through historical and contemporary comparisons
gives the movement credibility through association with other movements whose
logic is more familiar to the audience.
These two themes, the diversity of the movement and its connection to what is
usually called “the Black movement” or “Black Power” in the documentary, consistently
recur in Sanders’s commentary and in the evidence she marshals to support it.
For example, Sanders introduces the first segment, focusing on sex-role conditioning,
as follows: “In big cities as well as on hundreds of college campuses, groups of
women have joined the movement. Their numbers are increasing.” Sanders’s words
are accompanied by an establishing shot of the campus of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a shot that narrows to focus on a poster advertising
a women’s liberation rally on campus. A focus on UNC is strategic in itself—as a
southern campus, far from a major city, the active presence of women’s liberation

Fixing Feminism 63
there demonstrates the geographical reach of the movement. The unnarrated film’s
focus then shifts to the advertised rally, where some White UNC feminists are acting
out a scenario dramatizing gender socialization. In the scene, an adolescent girl
repudiates her doll and attempts to play with her brother’s truck, asking why she
cannot wear pants to play in, only to be reprimanded by her mother and informed
that “Little boys wear pants. Little girls wear dresses and keep their skirts down.”
Another sketch that follows depicts a young woman at a job interview. Though she
lists her graduate degrees and academic honors, her interviewer asks only if she can
type and make coffee.
When Sanders interviews a White male spectator after the performance, he
supports the connection of women’s lib to other movements: “I think it was a good
show. I think it points out, maybe in a comical fashion, the real issues behind this
movement. And the issues are very real—they correlate somewhat to the Black
revolution and the youth revolution.” It is, of course, important that it is a man who
makes this supportive connection between feminism and other movements. For
purposes of objectivity, this supportive reaction is followed by a brief interview with
another White male spectator who is more skeptical of claims for discrimination,
and who claims that “if a woman really wants to be free, she may be.” This opening
segment is typical of the conventional expository style of the documentary: it
establishes context with visuals and narration, offers footage of an event, and closes
with differing reactions to that event.
Not only does the opening segment work to establish Sanders’s objectivity, it
furthers the connection to Black protest. Lest the point be lost, when she moves to
a segment on abortion activism in New York, Sanders again contextualizes women’s
activism within the familiar practices of social protest. As we see large numbers of
protestors marching down a city street, holding signs, and chanting “Free abortion
on demand, sisterhood is powerful,” she says: “Marches, sit-ins, confrontations. All
are part of protest in America today.” After Sanders establishes abortion rights as a
unifying goal for both the reformist and radical wings of the movement, we see
footage of a woman speaking to an abortion rally. Her words to the crowd analogize
feminism to Black protest tactics:
We’ve learned an awful lot from the Black movement and what it’s done in the last
ten years. We know that we’ve got to use every forum. Okay, so we’ve been trying in
the legislature and we’ve been failing. But even they’ve heard us now. They just can’t
ignore the fact that we’re all here. And we’re trying the courts, and dammit, y’know,
we’re in the streets!
This segment feeds Sanders’s pragmatic goals in two key ways. First, in a classic
example of the visual supporting verbal claims, the camera work shows the sheer
numbers and diversity of women behind this issue, data for Sanders’s claim that
abortion rights are a “unifying goal” for the movement’s diverse groups. It also
includes several shots of women carrying babies—a subtle argument that abortion
supporters are not necessarily anti-family or anti-child, a common stereotype of
feminists. Second, in a rhetorical move that justifies feminist protest tactics, we hear

64 B. J. Dow
the young woman at the abortion rally argue that, like African Americans, when
women’s attempts at conventional channels for social change are unsuccessful, they
will take to the streets to dramatize their demands.
This strategy of analogizing women and African Americans reaches its zenith in
the last segment of the documentary, in which Sanders discusses the ERA. Importantly,
this last segment comes on the heels of a segment on feminist activism over
employment and equal pay issues. That penultimate segment showcases the formation
of the “Professional Women’s Caucus,” which Sanders introduces as follows:
Professional women are taking the battle off the streets, away from the campuses, and
into the Congress and the courts. Members of the academic, professional, and business
world met recently in New York to form a Professional Women’s Caucus. The basic
reason Only one percent of all working women in the United States earn ten thousand
dollars a year or more.
She follows this introduction with additional evidence of inequality in wages, then
shows footage of a lawyer who offers yet more statistical proof of discrimination to
a rapt audience of women at a meeting of the Professional Women’s Caucus. Thus,
before Sanders even mentions the ERA, she takes care to establish the grounds for
its necessity. In this segment, the camera pans the crowd as the lawyer is speaking,
showing a group of primarily middle-class, middle-aged, professionally coiffed and
clothed White women. The contrast to the groups of students and protesters we have
seen earlier is hard to miss; indeed, this is the visual moment that signals the
completed transition in the documentary’s evolutionary narrative. At this point, the
crucial shift has been made—from radicalism to liberalism, from youth to maturity,
and from socialization to legislation—and has only to be solidified in the documentary’s
final segment.
Sanders’s treatment of the ERA in that segment includes yet another instance of
the civil rights analogy, yet this time, importantly, it is articulated by a White male
U.S. Senator. In a standard interview set-up—the interviewee behind a desk, Sanders
facing him with her back to the camera in a medium shot—that appears to take
place in his office in Washington, DC, she interviews Indiana Senator Birch Bayh:
Sanders: Most people assume that women already have full equality under the law. The
1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of sex, but discrimination
does not end by decree alone. Forty-seven years ago, an Equal Rights Amendment to
the Constitution was proposed but never passed. Senator Birch Bayh was chairman of
the most recent hearings on the Constitutional Amendment and he told me what it
would accomplish.
Bayh: It would do the same thing for women as was done for Negroes after the Civil
War when we amended the Constitution and said that no one should have their rights
abridged because of race, color, or creed. We would just merely say “or sex.”
Bayh has a larger speaking role in the documentary than anyone except for Sanders
herself. He speaks for virtually the entirety of the ERA segment, during which he
gives examples of several state laws that discriminate against women that would be
eradicated by the ERA. At the end of his interview, in the documentary’s last
discourse before Sanders’s closing comments, he reiterates the liberal goals of the ERA

Fixing Feminism 65
(and, by implication, of feminism itself) and closes with a rhetoric of choice and
equal opportunity:
I think many people can and have wrongly interpreted the women’s liberation
movement or whatever you want to call it. None of us who are concerned about this
discrimination feel that it’s our responsibility to tell a woman what she should
do—whether she should work or go to school or raise a family. This is none of our
responsibility in government. But I think it is our responsibility in government to give
all of our citizens, whether they are male or female, black, white, yellow or brown, the
opportunity to utilize their total talents as they want to use them to the ultimate of
their abilities.
In this climactic segment of the documentary, the analogy to civil rights occurs
twice: first in Bayh’s reference to the Reconstruction amendments (a comparison
that hardly bodes well for the efficacy of the ERA, given the problematic enforcement
history of those amendments which, importantly, applied only to Black men) and
then in his final sentence, in which women are again implicitly compared with those
who face discrimination based on skin color. Generally, the analogy to African
American civil rights and to the tactics of the civil rights movement that recurs in
the “Women’s Liberation” documentary is a legitimation strategy. It was not a new
strategy, certainly, having been a staple for first-wave feminists, many of whom came
to women’s rights activism through their work in abolition and also relied on the
race/sex or woman/slave analogy. 32 This pattern was repeated in the 1960s, as many
White women working for civil rights had their consciousness raised about their own
situation not only through analogizing their oppression with that of African
Americans, but also through the sexism that they experienced at the hands of both
White and Black men with whom they worked in civil rights activism. 33 That
situation was usefully summarized by Stokely Carmichael’s famous statement about
women’s role in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), originally
made in 1964 and repeated several times, that the position for women in the
movement was “prone.” 34 The analogy between the oppression of women and the
oppression of African Americans became a potent rhetorical resource for women’s
liberationists early in the movement, and they used it internally, to raise women’s
consciousnesses, and externally, to legitimize their grievances with a larger audience
(often leftist men in particular, whom they hoped to make their allies). 35 Lisa Maria
Hogeland calls the sex/race analogy “a founding rhetoric of second-wave feminism:
it permeated every kind of Movement writing and analysis, from outlines for
consciousness raising, to theoretical works, to literary criticism, to poetry and
fiction—permeating tactics, analyses, scholarship and literature.” 36
Sanders’s use of the analogy, then, is in many ways an adaptation of what was,
from the beginning, a common tactic of the second wave. However, by 1970, the
legitimacy offered by the analogy had spread beyond leftist circles. The successes of
the civil rights movement, the discourses and the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, and the embrace of the ideals of civil rights by
three presidents—one of them posthumously made a martyr to it—had given claims

66 B. J. Dow
about racism powerful legitimacy with the public at large. As Catherine Stimpson
puts it,
The civil rights movement scoured a rusty national conscience. Moral and political
struggle against a genuine domestic evil became respectable again.… Confrontation
politics became middle class again as the movement helped to resurrect the appealing
American tradition of rebellion. The real domino theory deals with the delusions of
contentment. Once these delusions are exposed for one group, they tend to be obvious
for others.… Being treated like Blacks became proof of exploitation. 37
Moreover, just like the civil rights movement, women’s liberation had its radical and
its reformist elements and its youthful and its professional factions, who worked
together on some issues and were at odds over others. Most important, just as was
the case with civil rights, it was the reformist, legalistic, and/or legislative solutions
that ultimately were rhetorically presented by dominant media as the most sensible
and tenable as the movement was domesticated. 38 Thus, although speakers featured
in the documentary use terms such as “Black revolution” and “the Black movement,”
which arguably refer to more militant brands of African American activism,
Sanders ultimately absorbs this potential dissonance into a liberal vision of civil
rights based in the promises of the U.S. Constitution. This strategy was fully in line
with the goals and media strategy of NOW, an organization that “borrowed the
rhetoric and moral authority of the Civil Rights movement,” and that noted in its
1968 Statement of Purpose that it wished to become the “NAACP for women.” 39
That the “Women’s Liberation” documentary concludes with a segment on the
ERA, a segment that is primarily built around an interview with a White male
senator discussing the need for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee
equality under the law, just as the Reconstruction amendments had done for African
Americans, is powerful proof of Sanders’s adherence to NOW’s media pragmatism
strategy and of her commitment to the liberal goals of the expository documentary.
Nichols notes that “the viewer will typically expect the expository texts to take shape
around the solution to a problem or puzzle,” and Sanders does not disappoint. 40
Despite its tour through both liberal and radical feminist activity, the documentary
builds toward the articulation of clearly identifiable, statistically verifiable gender
discrimination, the kind that can be remedied by legislation designed to level the
playing field, at least in legal terms. Sanders’s concluding remarks, which come
directly after the ERA segment, make this even more plain, as she implies that, when
the radicalism of the movement is spent, it is the demands based in equality—those
capable of being met within the system—that will endure:
The women’s liberation movement will not disappear after the singing, marching, and
shouting have died down. Man himself may not be the enemy, but his practices are
under attack, whether they are motivated by prejudice, profit, or habit. This is a search
for equality of opportunity, not the wish to be just like men. It is the desire for more
options, for choice, for a shattering of stereotypes. For women to choose more freely
the kinds of lives that they want to live, and if we choose to work, to be paid in full.
The status quo is being challenged by the women’s liberation movement. Today, it’s

Fixing Feminism 67
still a man’s world—and just look at it. Move over, gentlemen—maybe you can use
some help.
From her opening statement, which claimed that the second wave, in comparison to
the first, was more complex and harder to explain, Sanders has moved to a position
in her conclusion, thirty minutes later, in which the second wave’s complexity has
been reduced and its meaning has stabilized around the liberal mantras of choice
and equality of opportunity. This accomplishment requires invoking a nostalgic,
oversimplified vision of the civil rights movement, one in which that movement was
all about “equality,” and in which it had been successfully concluded at this point
in 1970 so that it could be used as a model for feminism. This perspective erases
contemporaneous activism by groups such as the Black Panther Party and assumes
that goals such as desegregation and voting rights composed the entire agenda of
Black activism. Likewise, Sanders’s framing relies on a narrow and nostalgic vision
of women’s liberation in which the work of the first wave merely has to be
completed by passing the ERA which, Sanders importantly notes, was first introduced
in 1923 (interestingly, the documentary’s subtitle, spoken by an announcer
after the NOW opening credits but not seen on screen, is “The Unfinished Revolution
of American Women”).
As I discuss next, in this vision of feminism, there are no lesbians, no African
American women, and many of the issues raised by radical factions—the issues that
most afflict the movement’s image—are recast in personal, rather than political
terms. If a crucial aspect of Sanders’s media pragmatism was to legitimate the goals
of the movement by framing them as analogous to a romantic memory of civil
rights, then an equally important task was to convince those who fear feminist
radicalism that they have, as Senator Bayh puts it, “wrongly interpreted the women’s
liberation movement.”
Refutation
Sanders’s last sentence in her closing, “Move over, gentlemen,” is offered somewhat
humorously, cushioned by her smile and the subtle joke that precedes it. Yet this
comment also explicitly marks the presence of a male audience for the documentary,
and it is not the only aspect of the program that indicates Sanders’s concern with
men’s reaction to the movement. In an earlier analysis of television news coverage
of the Women’s Strike for Equality, I argued that the presumed spectator for that
coverage was male, and that the camera reflected a male gaze by positioning the
women protestors as an entertaining and amusing spectacle. Sanders, who explicitly
critiques this media tendency in her memoir, takes pains not to reinscribe it in her
documentary. Rather than making feminism into a spectacle, she takes feminists very
seriously: she interviews them, and she marshals visual and verbal evidence to
support their claims. However, another tendency in the media rhetoric surrounding
the Strike for Equality is significantly similar to the “Women’s Liberation” documen-

68 B. J. Dow
tary: the display of—and attention to—men’s presumed gender anxiety. I argued
that this tendency
reveals an awareness of the profound threat to cherished gender roles that the feminists
represented. There is fear and anxiety beneath the dismissals and sexist humor, and
objectifying the feminists as entertaining spectacle kept them at a safe distance.…
[T]his coverage provides a symbolic frame that … [is] a shield against the unsettling
potential of gender disorder enacted by feminist protest. 41
Although her attention to it functions differently, Sanders also took male anxiety
quite seriously in her portrait of women’s liberation, and the discourse of the
documentary presumes an audience deeply concerned about the movement’s implications
for men. Indeed, perhaps the lion’s share of her refutational strategy is
targeted at the widespread belief that feminists hate men or that the movement is
necessarily bad for men. This emphasis is well within the bounds of media
pragmatism that NOW advocated; indeed, unlike radical feminist groups, NOW
welcomed male members, hence the careful wording of its name as the National
Organization for Women, rather than the National Organization of Women. The
attempt to bring men on board dovetails with the documentary’s reformist liberal
tone, which assumes that opponents need only to be educated, and is buttressed by
Senator Birch Bayh’s strong presence as a spokesperson for the ERA who argued that
the amendment “merely” represented further evolution of the Constitution.
The refutational strategy regarding opposition to—and from—men begins early in
the documentary and is the focus of the second segment on feminist activism at
UNC. Sanders introduces her interviews with campus feminists as follows:
Some men view the women’s liberation movement with scorn or amusement. The
rhetoric is sometimes strident and men often feel threatened by it. But these members
of a group at the University of North Carolina and nearby Duke are married, and
several have children. They’re militant, but Linda Fisher told me she thinks there’s
something in the movement for men.
Fisher’s subsequent commentary is worth quoting in full:
The very first thing is that men will no longer have to be solely responsible for the
financial health of their family—they don’t have to get ulcers and other things because
they’re the only wage earners. If a woman follows her desires throughout life and if
that desire happens to be to work, to have a career, or simply to work at a job that
she enjoys, then any given man that she is married to does not have to feel the sole
responsibility for taking care of her then, and later on, if say the marriage breaks up,
as under the law now he’s responsible. The other things that he has to gain have to
do with emotional needs. A lot of men have said, “I wish I could cry,” but they’re long
past learning how because they’ve spent so long believing that it’s inappropriate.
At the beginning of this segment, we have an example of an effective, if logically
flawed, rhetorical strategy: feminists can’t really hate men, because many of them are
married and have children (working within this logic, one would have to conclude
that there are no married misogynists). Moreover, although Sanders labels her a
militant, Fisher’s arguments represent conventional liberal feminist reasoning: men

Fixing Feminism 69
would be liberated from their restrictive gender roles that require financial responsibility
and emotional inaccessibility. What is left out, of course, is the point that this
is not just relief from responsibility, but the relinquishment of power. But such
analysis is absent here, and its absence underscores the inherently liberal, pedagogical
tone of the documentary, one that posits that men simply need to be enlightened
about the rewards they would reap from women’s liberation.
A more radical analysis of the relations between men and women emerges in a
later segment, one that Sanders introduces as an exploration of conflict within the
movement. As the camera pans over the shelves of a bookstore, showing the variety
of titles addressing different aspects of women’s liberation, Sanders notes that,
“There are many ideological battles being waged among the various factions. A vast
outpouring of literature on ‘the woman question’ has appeared since 1963, when
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique signaled the revival of the feminist movement.”
In what follows, four interviewees, all White women, purport to answer the
question “Who is the enemy” —a question that Sanders posits as central to the
movement, although, as the discourse from the segment indicates, only Betty Friedan
appears to find it important enough to answer it directly, seizing the opportunity to
refute the perception that feminists see men as the enemy. What follows is almost a
complete transcript of the remainder of the segment, edited only for repetition and
to omit paralanguage. The camera work in each interview is virtually the same:
Sanders is invisible, although each speaker is directing her remarks at the reporter
while facing the camera, and each interviewee is framed in a medium-distance head
shot. After Sanders’s introductory words, there are no verbal transitions separating
the interviews. The camera simply cuts to a new speaker, although Sanders inserts
a short identifying statement for each woman after she begins to speak.
Sanders: More radical voices have been raised since [1963]. The question of “Who is
the enemy” gets varied responses, like this one from a member of The Feminists.
Member of The Feminists: The purpose of women’s liberation … is to liberate women.
I mean, we see rape as an integral part of a terrorist activity to keep women down.
[Insert from Sanders: “What about marriage”] Well, marriage, as I’ve said, is unpaid
labor … it’s a free household slave for each man.
Pat Sculley: Well, we can’t take that position because so many of us are married …
[Voice-over from Sanders: “Pat Sculley, student.”] We don’t see many viable options
to marriage in this society, and we also think that marriage meets some important
human needs for intimacy … and prevents loneliness and things like that. And there
aren’t any viable alternatives. Even if we criticize marriage, it’s got to be in a
constructive way in terms of thinking of new institutions this society needs and new
values people have to have relating to marriage.
Mary Alice Waters: Society would have to take major collective responsibility for the
care and the raising of children … [Voice-over from Sanders: “Mary Alice Waters,
editor of The Militant.”] There would have to be a provision made for twenty-fourhour
daycare/childcare centers controlled by the people who use them, to make sure
that women are able to leave the home, that they aren’t tied to their children
twenty-four hours a day. The oppression of women is so tied in to class society, its
roots are so deep … that it will take a major social revolution for women to be truly
liberated.

70 B. J. Dow
Betty Friedan: Strangely enough, I don’t think man is the enemy. I think man is a
fellow victim. [Voice-over from Sanders: “Betty Friedan, author.”] Man is a fellow
victim with women in the burden of half equality we’re in now. He’s as much
oppressed by the burdens and the guilts and the hostilities that are bred by the current
sexual definitions and the lack of equal responsibilities and equal opportunities and
challenges that each man and woman has to suffer alone in his or her own family,
bedroom or kitchen, but yet must be solved by whole social and political change.
Man’s not … the enemy.
This is a fascinating segment in terms of its attempts to weave these disparate
perspectives into a coherent narrative. Despite Sanders’s verbal silence, the editing of
the segment accomplishes a great deal: as it progresses, radicalism is refuted, and
liberalism looks ever more reasonable. A brief interview with a member of one of the
most radical New York feminist groups—one that excluded male members and
forbade more than a certain percentage of its women members to be married or
living with men—stands in for radical feminism as a whole, and she very clearly
articulates an analysis based on issues of power, although she is given almost no time
to explain it. And she is immediately refuted, again, by a married feminist, who
focuses on the pragmatic problems of doing away with marriage. Sanders then gives
voice to another radical feminist who offers an analysis of familial roles that is
somewhat more systemic, given her references to class and to history—this is the
closest we get to Marxist-feminist analysis in the documentary. However, much of
the bite is taken out of it when it is followed by Betty Friedan, who ends the segment
by providing the answer to the question “Who is the enemy” Crucially for Sanders’s
purposes, Friedan is quite clear that men are not to blame.
When you take the segment as a whole, the likeliest candidate for blame seems to
be “tradition” or “ignorance,” the conventional enemies of liberal progress. In an
ingenious move on Sanders’s part, Friedan’s discourse merges the radical rhetoric of
“social transformation” with the same liberal claims about the benefits for men that
appear earlier in the documentary. The ultimate liberal feminist, Friedan somehow
manages to make the argument that feminism requires the elimination of patriarchy
while still maintaining that men will be better off. This works especially well because
the availability of childcare—the concrete issue raised by Mary Alice Waters when
she speaks of social revolution—had long been an issue for Friedan and the liberal
wing of the movement, given that a key message of The Feminine Mystique was that
White, middle-class, college-educated women needed to work outside the home in
order to feel fulfilled. Thus, childcare was one of the safer issues that a radical
feminist could be depicted as raising; it was an issue that united radicals and liberals
and would be one of the three central demands agreed upon by the disparate
feminist groups involved in the August 1970 Strike for Equality demonstration.
Moreover, advocating publicly funded childcare—unlike analogizing rape to terrorism
or characterizing married women as slaves, as the member of The Feminists had
done—was not as direct an attack on men’s character or their privilege, and it
seemed to support the traditional belief that children were women’s responsibility.

Fixing Feminism 71
That is, if feminists wanted more freedom, they had better figure out who was going
to mind the children. 42
Sanders’s concern to alleviate men’s anxiety about what feminism means to them
is part and parcel of the media pragmatism strategy, although I do not mean to
discount the ways that this strategy works for women as well, many of whom
were—and are—concerned that to identify as feminist requires hating men. This
strategy is striking in two respects: first, such a focus on making feminism palatable
to men is absent from earlier mainstream coverage of the movement, in which it was
generally assumed that men were the enemy; indeed, men’s relationship to feminism,
except as oppressors, was not a major focus for feminist discourse as a whole during
the early second wave. 43 Sanders’s spending considerable time and attention on the
issue must be seen as part of her goal to correct the poor media image of the
movement. Second, this focus indicates one of the unique rhetorical burdens of
women’s liberation, and a way in which the analogy to civil rights breaks down. It
would have been ludicrous to try to claim that relations between Blacks and Whites
were not based in power or that Black liberation would benefit Whites financially
and emotionally. Certainly, some civil rights rhetors, like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
avoided naming Whites as the enemy and appealed to a moral and religious rationale
for civil rights, but even King did not deny that it was White people who were
behind discrimination and brutality against Blacks and that many resisted the loss of
power—of White supremacy—that civil rights represented. Conversely, what White
people gained from civil rights—and this was implicit in much of the discourse
produced by rhetors like King as well— was the opportunity to demonstrate their
moral courage and the satisfaction of distinguishing themselves from racists. As we
know from the history of White involvement in civil rights activism, that reward was
quite meaningful to many.
Sexism, unlike racism, however, has never achieved the status of a moral issue in
U.S. culture. For feminists, promising men the satisfaction that would come from
renouncing sexism—from separating themselves from their fellow patriarchs—was
not enough; thus, the rewards described were pragmatic rather than moral, and men
were treated as ignorant or out-of-date rather than actively oppressive. Certainly,
many feminists, like the ones interviewed by Sanders, believed that their sexual and
emotional relationships with men could be preserved only by avoiding enmity.
Moreover, given that many women continued to willingly participate in—and to
defend—sexist relationships, practices, and institutions, declaring men to be the
enemy was hardly a good strategy for swelling the ranks of the movement. Finally,
and most interesting given Sanders’s downplaying of analyses of power, another way
to read this conciliatory strategy is as simple recognition of the power imbalance
between the sexes. Feminists were outmanned and outgunned, so to speak, and they
could not afford to alienate men more than they already had, especially given that
Sanders saw legislation, which had to be passed by predominantly male legislators,
as the best path for the movement.
A final compelling example of Sanders’s refutational strategy relating to male
anxiety occurs in the documentary segment dealing with karate. This segment

72 B. J. Dow
attempts to reconfigure an issue that had been troubling for feminism’s public image
as well as to transform a radical feminist analysis of power into a less threatening
issue about women’s self-esteem. The representation of feminists’ advocacy of
martial arts was, by this time, a mainstream media staple, as it condensed militancy
and man-hating into one image: women learning how to beat up men. Articles on
feminism in Life, Atlantic Monthly, and Newsweek in the year previous to the
broadcast of the documentary had all focused, to some degree, on the role of karate
within the second wave, and both the CBS and NBC special features on feminism in
March of 1970 had addressed the role of karate in feminism. 44 Many radical
feminists did, in fact, advocate learning self-defense as a response to male violence
against women, but for media that hardly acknowledged the systematic nature of
that violence, and that found the notion of physically aggressive women both absurd
and repugnant, the political analysis was almost always displaced by spectacle. In a
piece in The New York Times Magazine published in 1970, Susan Brownmiller, who
was working as a journalist, wrote of her experiences with male editors who insisted
that stories on the movement “get the bra burning and the karate up front.” 45
David Culhane’s discourse in the CBS series on feminism broadcast two months
before the “Women’s Liberation” documentary is a clear example of this dominant
approach to women and martial arts. The CBS segment begins with a sequence
showing a White woman and a White man in martial arts garb on a mat. As the man
throws the woman in a traditional judo move, Culhane narrates: “The woman being
thrown by a fellow student at the University of Chicago is a militant feminist. Many
of them are learning judo and karate, and they say it’s a splendid equalizer.” The
camera then shows the same woman circling a man, shouting aggressively, throwing
him over her shoulder, and pinning him to a mat while a group of women watches
from the sidelines and cheers. Culhane continues: “A match between a young man
and a young woman. Many feminists think this is an apt symbol of equal rights, that
as more women come to know their oppression, the symbol could become a reality.”
The implication is hard to miss: women are learning judo so that they can physically
assault the men who have oppressed them; in Culhane’s interpretation, martial arts
are an outlet for women’s rage, and men had better beware.
Sanders’s segment in the “Women’s Liberation” documentary is a stark contrast.
For example, no women or feminists speak about their attraction to martial arts in
the CBS report, and Culhane’s interpretation goes unchallenged while Sanders not
only offers a sympathetic introduction to the issue (in which, importantly, she puts
it under the rubric of “self-defense”), but she also allows a young feminist to
articulate a thoughtful rationale. Perhaps of most importance, the visuals in
Sanders’s segment do not emphasize a mano-a-mano “battle of the sexes” as
Culhane’s do. Instead, the camera’s wide shot pans across a college gym full of White
women in comfortable street clothes, kicking softly, trying out judo holds on each
other, smiling and laughing, as Sanders narrates:
On the campus of Duke University, women are learning to discard something they
have long felt inappropriate for them—their role as victims, weak and vulnerable. One

Fixing Feminism 73
of the offshoots of the women’s liberation movement has been the growth of
self-defense classes. Students and local residents hired an expert to teach them how to
overcome their physical limitations. The classes have an ideological basis, according to
student Mary Thad Ridge.
At this point the visual shifts to a medium shot of the interviewee, who offers the
following justification for self-defense:
Well, I think that if women are going to want to really take the position that belongs
to them, then one of the most important things is mobility. It means to be able to go
where you want to go, when you want to go, without the protection of a man. And
I think that this means that women should be able to walk the streets at night with
the same facility that men are able to. Not only does this mean self-defense … but I
think one of the most important things is a woman’s confidence.
The ideological basis for karate that is offered here (despite the references to
“being able to walk the streets,” which always implies, of course, the specter of the
male attacker) is about mobility, about equality of access to public space and,
importantly, about confidence. Here, karate is about therapy rather than physical
aggression; it is about something women are doing for themselves rather than a
weapon they want to use against men. What remains unspoken, again, is the radical
feminist analysis of power, in which the development of women’s physical skills is
a direct response to men’s violence against them. This is a very skillful segment in
which the threat that images of karate pose to men—and to the image of the
movement—is completely reconfigured. Images of attractive female college students,
tentatively learning to “overcome their physical limitations,” replace those of angry
militant feminists wrestling with men, and the rationale for self-defense is relocated
from the battle between the sexes to women’s battle for self-esteem—in short, from
the political to the personal. Indeed, men are not the enemy.
Conclusion
In the end, Sanders’s good intentions are evident in the “Women’s Liberation”
documentary, and the goals for the program that she revealed in her memoir
generally were accomplished: she did give a sense of the breadth of the movement,
of its ideological diversity, and of some of its major issues, all in a serious and
respectful tone. Moreover, the documentary is discussed in laudatory terms in at
least three accounts of the second wave; for example, Ruth Rosen’s The World Split
Open calls the documentary sympathetic and “lively,” and claims that it offered “in
depth coverage of women’s desires, needs, and issues.” Rosen reports, in fact, that
“viewers wrote appreciative letters to Sanders, asking how they could join the
‘cause.’” 46
In some important ways, however, Sanders’s treatment of the movement—even
with its sympathetic framing and its efforts to refute negative stereotypes—shared
some of the same shortcomings as earlier, less sympathetic coverage. For example,
despite her consistent analogy to civil rights, women of color were invisible in the
documentary, class was never raised except in oblique ways, and there were no

74 B. J. Dow
references to the role of lesbians in the movement. Of course, lesbians had been a
focus in some previous coverage, primarily for the purpose of discrediting women’s
liberation as a breeding ground for sexual deviance, not to mention that lesbians
were always handy evidence of de facto man-hating. Sanders probably neglects to
include a discussion of sexuality because she saw it as a distraction from more
“serious” issues; indeed, her friend Betty Friedan earlier had labeled the lesbians in
the movement a “lavender menace” for the danger they posed to feminism’s public
image. 47 So, not only did Sanders omit lesbians from her portrait of the movement,
but she overcompensated for their absence by emphasizing how many heterosexual,
married feminists she had found.
Presenting the movement’s membership (at least that part of it to which she pays
the most attention) as White, middle-class, and married was an attempt to move the
movement toward the center, to make it more available for identification by the kind
of women that she believed women’s liberation needed to attract. The emphasis on
clearly quantifiable types of discrimination and on remedies like the ERA functioned
similarly. The topics that received the most attention—women’s socialization as
wives and mothers, abortion, equality of opportunity and pay—were already the
topics most likely to gain favorable coverage in mainstream media. In that sense, this
documentary was not so different from what had come before. The major distinction
that can be drawn is that the program does not demonize those radical voices that
it includes, as past coverage had. Rather, it simply mutes them, allowing them to be
outweighed by voices urging reform rather than revolution and by analyses that talk
about equality and choice rather than power and violence. As is particularly clear in
the closing and in the segment on self-defense, this “primer” on women’s liberation
tells us that feminism is about (White) women and their self-improvement, not
about patriarchy and its dismantling. Sanders’s ultimate message is that the system
can and should absorb the changes that feminists seek. Given the wholesale dismissal
of women’s liberation in much previous coverage, it is easy to understand why that
rhetorical stance alone would be enough to provoke the gratitude of feminists.
Indeed, Sanders does not misrepresent the movement in the “Women’s Liberation”
documentary: as is always the case with mediated representations, the rhetoric
is in the choices of what is included and what is omitted and in how the former is
framed. As Julie D’Acci notes, this kind of expository documentary advances the
ideology of “liberal pluralism—that competing voices contribute equally to fashioning
public policy on difficult social issues. What gets repressed is the incontrovertible
fact that some voices are given legitimacy through representation and others are not,
some get airtime and others get stifled.” 48 “Women’s Liberation” is a clear example
of rhetoric that attempts to confer legitimacy, to “fix” feminism by analogizing it to
civil rights, by emphasizing its benefits for men, and by highlighting its possibilities
for individual opportunity and self-improvement. Rhetorically, it functions as
intended: in Sanders’s vision, the movement is easier to understand, less threatening,
and, of most importance, it is simply another forward move in a progressive
historical narrative that is malleable enough to absorb feminism once it is distilled
down to familiar concepts such as equality and choice.

Fixing Feminism 75
Of course, fixing feminism by tying it to a particular set of goals, motivations, and
tactics is always already an ideological move. As Katie King has said in speaking of
second-wave narratives, all such stories are “interested stories,” 49 and the narrative
offered in “Women’s Liberation” advanced the already normalized Whiteness and
classism and heterosexism of the movement and ignored its ongoing and earnest
conflicts over those issues. In a narrative that revolves around a race/sex analogy, the
absence of Black women’s concerns indicates not only the profound irony of the
analogy, it also demonstrates just how powerful the “all the women are white, all the
blacks are men” assumption was in public consciousness, as Black women were
excluded from dominant visions of civil rights because of their gender and from
dominant visions of feminism because of their race. 50 The only African Americans
in Sanders’s story are the romanticized (Black male) civil rights activists who asked
for and received the kind of equality that (White) feminists deserve as well.
“Women’s Liberation” is a classic example of what Stimpson terms the “depressing
habit white people have of first defining the black experience and then of making it
their own.” 51 Likewise, the only lesbians in Sanders’s story are those in the fervid
imaginations of her audience, and they are meant to be outnumbered by all the
straight married women on the screen. Poor women are invisible as well: when
“Women’s Liberation” features discourse on wage and job inequality, the focus is
specific to professional women. The White, middle-class women who dominate the
documentary may be making lots of noise, but ultimately, they bear no special
grudge against men and will be satisfied with the passage of the ERA.
The portrait of feminism that emerges in this documentary can be viewed as a
synecdoche for the trajectory of dominant media coverage of the movement and for
feminism’s resultant public identity. As was the case with civil rights, the reformers
would triumph over the revolutionaries (while also co-opting many of their ideas),
and the major function of the latter would be to make the former look reasonable
by contrast. By 1972, when Ms. magazine debuted and offered a visible, accessible
press outlet for feminist views, liberal feminism was already well on its way to
hegemonic status for the public. By 1975, radical feminism had largely disintegrated,
the victim of its own internal conflicts, and many of its members had retreated into
cultural feminisms that celebrated women’s differences and advocated differing
degrees of separatism. Alice Echols notes that “NOW was a major beneficiary of
radical feminism’s disintegration as first the schisms and later the countercultural
focus encouraged some radical feminists to join an organization which they had
initially disparaged.” 52 In 1970, two years before the ERA would be passed by
Congress, Sanders’s documentary was promoting it as a primary goal for the
movement. After its passage, the ERA emerged as the defining feminist issue of the
1970s for the public, and NOW was central to the ratification battle that ensued.
Moreover, the ERA and other equality battles waged by NOW (such as Title IX
enforcement and class action anti-discrimination suits against major U.S. companies)
received a level of serious news coverage by the mid-1970s that vastly exceeded
the earlier attention to radical feminism. 53
Given what we know about media coverage of social movements, it is not

76 B. J. Dow
surprising that this documentary absorbs a complex, diverse, and often revolutionary
set of political ideas into a vocabulary of equal rights, choice, and self-improvement,
and that dominant media eventually focused on those aspects of feminism that were
pursued through the legislatures and the courts, thus functioning to “sustain the
legitimacy of the economic-political system as a whole.” 54 Moreover, despite her
good intentions, Marlene Sanders’s personal agency is not especially determining in
this process. One of the arguments that runs through Sanders’s memoir—and that
fueled the activism of women media professionals that filed suit against organizations
like The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, and The New York Times and that
also fueled NOW’s actions against the television networks during the same period—
is that women will receive more positive media representations when there are more
women creating, editing, and producing those representations. Marjorie Ferguson
has called this belief the “feminist fallacy,” and it is a useful label. Sanders was not
just a woman, she was a self-identified feminist. Yet that the ideological thrust that
emerges in the “Women’s Liberation” documentary is not so different from that of
other mainstream treatments is not an indication of her lack of feminist values;
rather, it is an indication of what happens when feminism is fixed so that it can
become an acceptable public narrative. 55
Whether the motivations are good or bad (or even recognized) becomes largely
irrelevant: the act of stabilizing meaning is an ideological move in itself because, as
Rosteck notes, it is an “attempt to render otherwise incomprehensible social
situations meaningful and to construe them in such a way as to make it possible to
act purposefully within them.” 56 The decision to make the documentary was a
decision to package the movement, and Sanders’s vision, although more benign than
some that had come before and many that would come after, was still partial and
ideological, affirming Gaye Tuchman’s claim that news is “ideology in action.” 57 Yet
it ultimately seems less ideological because the current of liberal individualism that
runs through all of the discourses through which “Women’s Liberation” is filtered—
expository documentary, news pragmatism, and an evolutionary theory of social
change derived from a romantic memory of civil rights (not to mention Sanders’s
own beliefs about what was best for the movement 58 )—is so thoroughly naturalized
that it passes for objectivity. This is the rhetoric of television documentary: it offers
content “in the form of naturalism” and thus “presents itself as non-ideological and
aligns with a similarly non-ideological class-transcendent public and national interest.”
59 Increasing media attention to the second wave and the eventual ascendance of
liberal feminism to its status as the only kind of feminism that dominant media
would recognize were mutually reinforcing processes. As even the pro-movement
and well-intentioned “Women’s Liberation” documentary demonstrates, those
threatening aspects of radical feminism that had to be culled before women’s
liberation could become a truly mass movement were precisely the elements that did
not translate well to journalistic norms: systemic critique; an awareness of the
intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality; and, finally, recognition of the
difference between the liberal, pluralist concept of choice and the radical notion of
freedom.

Notes
Fixing Feminism 77
[1] Charles M. Hammond, Jr., The Image Decade: Television Documentary, 1965–1975 (New
York: Hastings House, 1991), 162.
[2] See Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New
York: Touchstone, 1991), 111–114, for a description of the Ladies Home Journal protest.
[3] Marlene Sanders and Marcia Rock, Waiting for Prime-Time: The Women of Television News
(New York: Harper and Row), 117.
[4] Sanders and Rock, 117.
[5] The term “second wave” is used by historians to differentiate the late-twentieth-century U.S.
women’s movement, beginning around 1963, from the “first wave” of feminist activism,
dated from roughly 1848 to 1920, which culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. First usage of the “wave” terminology is
found in Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” New York Times Magazine,
10 March 1968, 24.
[6] See Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,” Rhetoric and Public
Affairs 6 (2003): 127–149, for a description of the 1968 Miss America protest.
[7] Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York, Longman, 1975), 148. See also
Davis; Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New
York: Random House, 1994).
[8] See Sara Davidson, “An ‘Oppressed Majority’ Demands Its Rights,” Life, 12December 1969,
66–78; “The New Feminists: Revolt Against ‘Sexism,’” Time, 21November 1969, 53–56; Lucy
Komisar, “The New Feminism,” Saturday Review, 21 February 1970, 27–30; “Woman’s
Place,” Atlantic Monthly, 3March 1970, 81–126; Helen Dudar, “Women’s Lib: The War on
‘Sexism,’” Newsweek, 23March 1970, 71–74, 78; and Susan Brownmiller, “‘Sisterhood is
Powerful’: A Member of the Women’s Liberation Movement Explains What It’s All About,”
New York Times Magazine, 15March 1970, 26–27, 128–136, 140.
[9] See Bonnie J. Dow, “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Gender Anxiety in Television News
Coverage of the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality,” Communication Studies 50 (1999):
143–157.
[10] Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free
Press, 1978), 139.
[11] Douglas, 175, 186; see also Freeman, 111–114; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the
Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), Chapter 9;
Elizabeth A. van Zoonen, “The Women’s Movement and the Media: Constructing a Public
Identity,” European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 453–476.
[12] Sanders and Rock, 118–119. In addition, women’s status as media professionals was at issue
in 1970. In March, on the same day that Newsweek’s cover story on women’s liberation
appeared on newsstands, women employees of Newsweek held a press conference to
announce that they had filed sex discrimination charges against the magazine with the EEOC.
Within two months, in early May of 1970, women employees of both The Washington Post
and Time, Inc. gathered together to protest discrimination within their respective organizations.
In a four-page statement presented to the paper’s editors, women editorial employees
of The Washington Post objected to the paper’s coverage of the women’s movement—and
women in general—and charged that editors denied women reporters prestigious assignments
because of their sex. Time’s women employees went even farther, filing charges with
the New York State Division of Human Rights, citing instances of discrimination in several
of Time, Inc.’s divisions, including Time magazine, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and
Time-Life Books. See Davis, 110–111.
[13] Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: The Dial Press, 1999),
63, 140.
[14] Freeman, 113.

78 B. J. Dow
[15] Interestingly, the TV Guide description of the “Women’s Liberation” documentary, in its
May 23 issue, contained in one of the “Close-Up” boxes that the magazine used to highlight
noteworthy programming, includes the following line: “Marlene Sanders (a working
mother), produced, wrote, and narrated this report.” At no point in the documentary does
Sanders mention anything about her personal life, and the knowledge that she was a
“working” mother must have been derived from another source. This bit of personal
information about Sanders in TV Guide’s description of the documentary allows for the
speculative conclusion that TV Guide mentioned her complete control over the documentary
in conjunction with her “working mother” status as a way to signal suspicion about her
objectivity, especially because the description goes on to note that one of the topics discussed
in the documentary was the need for daycare centers for working mothers (“discussed” is
perhaps too expansive a term—day care is mentioned briefly by one interviewee in the
program and is not a major topic in the documentary in any sense). See “Close-up,” TV
Guide, 23May 1970, A35.
[16] See Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford, 1990); James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and
Broadcasting in America Since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Mary
Ann Watson, “The Golden Age of Television Documentary,” Television Quarterly 23 (1988):
58–75.
[17] Hammond, 106.
[18] Barnouw, 444–445. See Watson for a discussion of the role of television documentaries in
the shifting of public opinion toward the war in Vietnam.
[19] Rosen, 239–252.
[20] 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):
312. See also Bernadette Barker-Plummer, “Producing Public Voice: Resource Mobilization
and Media Access in the National Organization for Women,” Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly 79 (2002): 188–205.
[21] Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 27, 28, 17, 38.
[22] Michael Curtin, “Packaging Reality: The Influence of Fictional Forms on the Early Development
of Television Documentary,” Journalism Monographs 137 (1993): 1–37; see also
Hammond; Watson.
[23] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 37.
[24] Plantinga, 18; Thomas Rosteck, See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary
and the Politics of Representation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 45.
[25] Rosteck, 32.
[26] Nichols, 35.
[27] Plantinga, 30; see also Rosteck, 30–33.
[28] Nichols, 34; Rosteck, 183.
[29] Plantinga, 38.
[30] Nichols, 34, 35.
[31] Lauren R. Tucker, “The Framing of Calvin Klein: A Frame Analysis of Media Discourse
About the August 1995 Calvin Klein Jeans Advertising Campaign,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 15 (1998): 141–157.
[32] Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[33] See Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1979).
[34] Rosen, 109.
[35] See Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (NewYork: Columbia

Fixing Feminism 79
University Press, 2002), 84–85; Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press), 112.
[36] Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and
Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 130.
[37] Catherine Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces (New York:
Routledge, 1988), 32–33.
[38] John M. Murphy, “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides,” Communication
Monographs 59 (1992): 61–79.
[39] Barker-Plummer, “Producing Public Voice,” 198.
[40] Nichols, 38. See Rosteck for a discussion of the liberal ideology of television documentary.
[41] Dow, “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Gender Anxiety,” 155.
[42] Indeed, in 1970, feminists were still hopeful about federal attention to childcare. In 1971, the
Comprehensive Child Development Act, which was supported by a coalition of feminists and
would have provided for a national childcare system, passed both houses of Congress;
however, President Nixon vetoed the act, and its allies were unable to override the veto. See
Rosen, 90–91. To this day, the U.S. remains the only Western industrialized nation without
federally subsidized childcare.
[43] See Hogeland, chapter 4, for a discussion of this issue in radical feminist discourse. One
exception to mainstream media’s general neglect of the movement’s implications for men
appears in the August 1970 issue of Time that focused on the movement. The issue included
an essay by Gloria Steinem, who was newly emerging as a feminist “leader” in the eyes of
the media. In her essay, Steinem talks at length about the ways that men’s lives will improve
if feminism succeeds, and concludes with this line: “If Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do.”
Steinem’s arguments are an exemplar of the liberal feminist emphasis on choice and greater
opportunities for both sexes, once they are freed from restrictive gender roles, and her claim
that “Men will have to give up ruling-class privileges, but in return they will no longer be
the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility”
is an echo of the kind of statements that Sanders’ interviewees make about the movement’s
benefits for men. See Gloria Steinem, “What It Would Be like If Women Win,” Time, 31
August 1970, 22–23.
[44] See Davidson; Dudar; Diana Gerrity, “Miss Superfist,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1970, 91–93.
[45] Brownmiller, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” 27. For a discussion of the role of karate in the
movement, see Kyra Pearson, “Mapping Rhetorical Interventions in ‘National’ Feminist
Histories: Second-Wave Feminism and Ain’t I A Woman,” Communication Studies 50 (1999):
158–173.
[46] Rosen, 299–300. See also Brownmiller, In Our Time, and Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The
True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
[47] Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–75 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 212.
[48] Julia d’Acci, “Leading Up to Roe v. Wade: Television Documentaries in the Abortion
Debate,” in Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth
Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 135–136.
[49] Katie King, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s Movements
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 124.
[50] Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, & Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the
Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press,
1982).
[51] Stimpson, 34.
[52] Echols, Daring to be Bad, 284–85; for another discussion of the decline of radical feminism
and the ascendance of liberal feminism, see Willis.
[53] Barker-Plummer, “Producing Public Voice.”

80 B. J. Dow
[54] Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the
New Left (Berkeley: University of California, 1980), 273.
[55] Marjorie Ferguson, “Images of Power and the Feminist Fallacy,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 7 (1990): 215–230.
[56] Rosteck, 4.
[57] Tuchman, 155.
[58] For example, in an April 1970 interview she gave to the campus newspaper while shooting
portions of the documentary at UNC, Sanders is quoted as observing that “the most success
for the movement will come in the areas where the movement is making specific requests,
such as legislation to end discrimination in jobs and wages.” See Mike McCall, “ABC
Newswoman Pictures WLM,” Daily Tarheel, 8April 1970, n.p.
[59] Rosteck, 198.