Although it is common nowadays to talk about feminisms (e.g. first-wave-second-wave, third-wave, radical, socialist, liberal, psychoanalytic, to name but a few), each of them is essentially concerned with explaining and challenging women’s oppression and sexual inequality. Hence, most feminist studies see patriarchy – the rule of the father – as the main historical form of social division and site of political contestation. Furthermore, within this patriarchal culture, many feminists regard the family as the chief institution for mediating between the individual and the social status quo, as it is within familial relations that identities based on sex and age take on their sharpest definitions. Such analyses typically portray family life as a prison in which women – qua housewives, mothers and daughters – are confined to a life of domesticity and reproduction.
The historical representation and idealization of women as the servile domestic is largely attributable to the Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, and his domestic epic The Angel in the House (1854–62). Of course, the angel ideal not only affected women in the domestic sphere. This quasi-canonization of women as homely saints greatly restricted women’s participation in the workplace and public life generally. That women were second-class citizens for much of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century is unquestionable. And while working class males were still far from equals with their middle class counterparts, they had at least secured significant advances in their social and political rights. Women, on the other hand, regardless of their social class, were still not citizens for much of this period insofar as they did not have the same educational rights, voting rights, property rights or, even, union rights. Hence what is sometimes referred to as ‘two spheres’ ideology.
Not surprisingly, the media has played a significant part in reinforcing these traditional ideas about domesticity and familial relations, a view that is endorsed in Michael Bailey’s contribution to this section. The main thrust of Bailey’s chapter is to argue that women’s political duty in the early twentieth century continued to be defined in terms of their activity in the private sphere, as it was in the nineteenth century. Even though women were now permitted ‘to put a cross on a ballot paper’, their principal civic responsibility was still conceived to be one that necessarily involved self-sacrifice in support of husband, family and nation. The crucial difference between the two periods was that, in the early twentieth century, the home was constructed as a source of alternative power, a space for women to make decisions that could affect the life of the nation. They were thus exhorted to identify the domestic realm of the home with the political and social well-being of the nation. The reality, however, was that women were still excluded from positions of any real power; and what political agency they did have in the form of enfranchisement was not sufficient to alter the hegemonic gendered social roles that continued to define women as housewives and mothers.
More specifically, Bailey illustrates how broadcasting during the interwar period was complicit in maintaining or redefining feminine subjectivities for the good of the nation’s moral and physical well-being. Like other media technologies, broadcasting sought to capture and to regulate the rhythm of women’s daily life, by simultaneously domesticating and gendering certain cultural practices, reinforcing demarcations between the spheres of public and private and thereby establishing the home as a site for cultural governance. In other words, the recovery of traditional family moral values was dependent, to a large extent, on the part that women would have to play in transmitting the cultural values of broadcasting into the sanctum sanctorum of the home. Hence the importance accorded to household talks for women listeners, particularly ones that addressed public health issues such as nutrition, domestic economy, mothercraft, childcare, etc. All such programmes were aimed at increasing public awareness of body politics and, more specifically, providing the necessary instruction for a new generation of mothers and housewives, reinvigorating and reinforcing hegemonic familial ideals and practices.
The chapter by David Deacon is a more subtle interpretation of this particular narrative and is in keeping with more recent feminist scholarship. The main focus of his chapter is an examination of the important and distinctive contribution made by female journalists in the reporting of the Spanish Civil War in the UK and USA news media. As well as providing biographical details about the key female correspondents who directly reported on the war in Spain (e.g. Virginia Cowles, Gerda Taro, Martha Gellhorn, Hilde Marquand and Nancy Cunard), Deacon’s analysis shows that many of the female correspondents shared remarkably similar views of their reporting roles and responsibilities. In the main, these were to provide empathetic insights into the everyday lives of the civilians caught up in the conflict. The remainder of the chapter considers the immediate and deeper reasons for this shared emphasis upon the everyday, emotional experiences of civilians. For this focus in the female correspondents’ work, although to some extent self-determined, also reflected a pragmatic appreciation of the edicts of the international news market and the uncertainties of their employment status.
Those interested in feminist media history would do well to familiarize themselves with women’s social history to acquire a better understanding of the key issues and debates within this broader field of study and its relationship with the emergence and subsequent development of feminist theory and criticism. Useful overviews of feminist women’s history in Britain include: Bennett (2007), Caine (1997), Dyhouse (1981, 1989), Giles (1995), Lewis (1984, 1986), Purvis (1991, 2000) and Rowbotham (1973). Of these, Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden From History is widely regarded as the catalyst for women’s history. There are also a handful of dedicated journals, e.g. Women’s History Review, Journal of Women’s History and Gender and History.
In terms of media history, there are a growing number of feminist interpretations, some of which are largely concerned with the oppressive ideology of media representations and their effects on women, while others focus more on the ways in which women actively resist patriarchal media practices or, indeed, ways in which the media have become progressively supportive of the ‘modern woman’. For analyses of the newspaper press and women’s popular literature, see Bingham (2004), Braithwaite (1995), Chambers et al. (2004), Gorham (1982), Holland (1998), Leman (1980), Tinkler (1995), White (1970) and Winship (1987). Examples of feminist film histories include Doane (1987), Geraghty (2000), Gledhill (1987), Gledhill and Swanson (1996), Kaplan (1980) and Lloyd and Johnson (2003). Surprisingly, in spite of the growing popularity of television studies, feminist television histories are relatively few. Furthermore, what work there is tends to concentrate on the arrival of television in the domestic home space in the 1950s, for example Holmes (2005), Leman (1987) and Thumim (1998, 2002); cf. Baehr (1980) and Wheatley (2005). Similarly, radio – ever the Cinderella medium – remains under-developed as a specific field of study. This said, there is a scattering of specialized publications, autobiographies and passing references: see, for example, Leman (1996), Giles (2004), Hilmes (2007), Matheson (1933), Murray (1996) and Shapley (1996); Mitchell (2000) is especially informative and includes an assortment of feminist radio histories.
Maria Dicenzo (2004) provides an interesting and lucid critique of Curran’s original attempt to summarize the feminist narrative by problematizing the way in which he overlooked ‘feminist media’, that is to say alternative media that are produced to overtly challenge the patriarchy of the mainstream media (something Curran addresses, incidentally, in his introductory chapter for this book). Publications of this sort include: Baehr and Ryan (1984), Beetham (1996), Cadman et al. (1981), Chambers et al. (2004), Dicenzo (2000, 2003), Doughan and Sanchez (1987), Harrison (1982), Kaplan (1983), Mercer (2004), Mitchell (2000), Oram (2001), Tusan (2005) and Winship (1987).
Finally, there is an ever-xpanding body of contemporary feministinformed media theory and criticism. The following references are just a very small random sample of some quite recent publications that usefully summarize and/or advance this canon of work: Brunsdon (2000), Brunsdon et al. (1997), Gill (2006), Hollows and Moseley (2006), Johnson (2007), Kaplan (2000), McRobbie (2006), Shattuc (1997) and Thornham (2000). The very latest scholarly research and book reviews can be found in Feminist Media Studies.