The Women’s Institute for Freedom of the PressChapter 8
The Development of Communication Networks Among Women, 1963-1983
by Martha Allen
Chapter 8: CONCLUSION
Between 1963 and 1983 women forged extensive communication networks in diverse forms of media, all owned and operated totally, or primarily, by women. Women communicated through print, broadcast, film, video and cable, and music. More than 1,380 periodicals owned and operated by women as well as 375 other media forms emerged between 1968 and 1983. The development of this network has been unprecedented in women’s history. No past media by women have arisen out of so wide a representation of the public nor contributed so much depth of issues and perspectives.
The pioneering periodicals spoke as the rising women’s movement. This identity is apparent from the first periodical in 1968 in its very title, The Voice of Women’s Liberation, and continued throughout their development in sharing and stimulating the new ideas and actions that we know as the women’s movement. From that first periodical in March 1968 through the next five years, the pioneer multi-issue periodicals called attention to the issues that were being ignored or distorted by mass media, as for example, the extent of violence against women. Women involved in these media continuously sought to analyze class and race issues as they affected women. They were communicating their perspectives as the women’s movement, hoping to widen their communication networks to ever more women. The more than 569 multi-issue periodicals that came into existence from 1968 through 1983 not only exposed women to the wide range of issues of concern to women but also, in doing so, gave direction to the movement itself and increased the formation of coalitions.
Single-issue periodicals also multiplied rapidly between 1968 and 1983, with over 620 coming into existence during these years. Women developed specialized periodicals particularly in five areas of interest: (1) health and safety, with over 98 periodicals, (2) media, with over 86 periodicals, (3) education, with more than 154 periodicals, (4) political, with over 104 periodicals, and (5) economic, with over 130 periodicals. Several other miscellaneous or overlapping single-interest periodicals also arose, including such periodicals as The Braille Feminist Review, a quarterly publication for blind women with selections from feminist periodicals throughout the country, periodicals for older women, and still others with a particular regional or international focus.
The many periodicals in each of these areas of interest formed a complex network of women. In all walks of life and with many specialized concerns, women founding single-issue periodicals thereby increased the depth and range of the women’s movement. Their papers brought together, as part of the movement, women who otherwise may not have connected their concerns to the overall movement. When a woman working on an issue of concern in her life began communicating through print or other medium, she would discover that she was not isolated but was part of a network. She would also find that her unique perspective contributed to the overall effort, by adding to the understanding of how women’s lives were changing and where women needed to take their movement. These single-issue networks, developing out of so many diverse areas of life, together strengthened the women’s network structure as a whole. In fact, the networking by single issues contributed most toward a movement web that was becoming too extensive, too complex, and too independent to be readily eradicated by the kinds of stereotyping and ridicule that had silenced women’s rights movements in the past.
Periodicals founded by women with special identities contributed particular perspectives not only essential to the whole picture of American women, but critical in providing other women with their unique insights gained from their very different life experiences. These perspectives, too, were rarely found in other media and were therefore especially needed. The three principal women’s special identities related to women’s origin, to their beliefs and to their sexual preference: black and ethnic women, religious women, and lesbian women. The women in each of these areas built communication networks within their special identities, exploring issues and formulating analysis in a more intensive way than could those working through multi-issue periodicals.
Leadership from black and ethnic women clarified issues that women have struggled with since the early years of the movement. Mass media had characterized the women’s movement as being a white middle-class movement, although many women knew this was not true. Mass media tended to choose spokeswomen for the movement who were either pretty, well-off and white, or who were blue-jeaned white radical-looking women. Yet most women could see that the majority of the activists around them were not well-off and included many women of color. But, as women often stated in their media, this by no means meant that most white women of the movement believed that there was no racism exhibited within the movement, or that there was no imperative to assure that women of color were involved at all levels. Women’s groups and organizations increasingly held workshops and conferences and printed extensive discussion in their periodicals about racism in society and within the women’s movement. The fact that black and ethnic women were building networks among themselves, publishing more than 37 periodicals up through 1983, strengthened the overall movement considerably as their information was picked up and extended more widely in other women’s media. In fact, the development of communication networks among black and ethnic women, and the sharing of their perspectives in their periodicals, was certainly one of the most vital of contributions to the progress of all women.
Lesbian women’s perspectives were also an important contribution, not only in defense of their civil rights and in the value of their insights, but because, as the lesbian women showed in their periodicals, divisiveness on the issue of lesbianism did indeed hurt all women and the women’s movement. The contributions of lesbian perspectives clarified many issues for heterosexual women as well as minimizing the isolation experienced by many lesbians. Heterosexual women also benefitted from the tremendous energy that lesbians contributed to almost every aspect of the women’s movement. The more than 92 lesbian periodicals arising during these years through 1983 indicated how large a part their networks were in the total and how important lesbians viewed the need to communicate their perspectives. To a lesser extent, religious women contributed valuable insights through their more than 60 periodicals that arose. Those of women in traditional religions who wished to eradicate the sexism within their denominations or within religion as a whole predominated though many others dealt with the development of women’s spirituality apart from the traditional male-dominated religions.
Women launched many other forms of communication beyond their periodicals, expanding outreach made possible by communicating through diverse forms of media, many of which did not exist in previous women’s movements. In the years through 1983, more than 15 news services, 136 presses and publishers, 35 radio and television groups, 60 video and cable groups, 53 film groups, and 75 music groups arose, reaching audiences never before exposed to the authentic information and perspectives directly from women who were speaking for themselves as the women’s movement.
As a result of this remarkable networking, in two decades hardly an area of life was without some periodical or other media voice of women contributing new facets of their lives to the collective understanding. These multi-issue and specialized media broadened and deepened the network-building of women who constituted the women’s movement. The immensely more accurate, more extensive, and more intricate communication networks now began to reveal the complexity of the real lives of women. Communication networks were everywhere. They were the movement speaking.
Yet, for all the diversity that this structure of networks provided to the women’s movement, eight characteristic elements were held in common in these movement media. They shared, in short, a common femaleness that not only made their diversity a single movement but that distinguished them from other media, both the traditional journalism of mass media and alternative media. While readers of women’s periodicals will recognize many of these eight characteristics, they may not realize that, as this study has revealed, these characteristics are present in all women’s media, from the earliest periodicals in the 1960’s to those that women began in 1983, and that they arose in every form of media whether the medium was print or broadcast, music or film.
But perhaps the greatest overall significance of these common characteristics lies in their contrast with traditional journalism. Traditional journalism expects the reporter to be an outsider, to be objective, to be persistent in digging out the facts that even the newsmaker might prefer not be told. Traditional journalism disclaims any obligation to to reform society or even to portray groups in a positive manner. It sees media as neutral.
The eight characteristics of women’s media provide a sharp contrast to conventional journalism. The first characteristic has women speaking for themselves rather than reporting for others, as we saw repeatedly throughout these chapters. A second characteristic, analyzing mass media’s attitude toward women, departs from conventional journalism’s view of media as neutral. Nearly all women’s media held in common an assessment of mass media as hostile to the women’s movement and to opening up new options for women. Another very sharp difference with traditional journalism lies in the women’s typical collective structure. Mass media and even much of the alternative media have a strict hierarchy from publisher on down through editors, reporters and copyboys (and copygirls). Editors blue-pencil copy as freely as they wish, even re-writing if they choose. Yet, as we have seen, women’s media very commonly did their editing in collective meetings with everyone present, often including even the writer of a submitted article who was free to take part in the editing process. The prohibition against any derogatory reference to any group of people also was quite different from customary mass media practice. Equally sharply at variance with traditional journalism’s claimed objective or neutral stance and disclaimer of any social role in political or economic life is the characteristic activist nature of women’s media. Women’s periodicals, and even more so their other media forms, held as an important goal the changing of economic and social customs and structure.
The women who founded the media networks were also the activists of the early women’s movement and that this was true throughout this entire period. At no time were they journalists simply writing about the women’s movement. This is apparent from looking at any list of the media women who were also leaders in the movement, as, for example, Robin Morgan, Toni Cade, Dana Densmore, Roxanne Dunbar, Jo Freeman, Alice Walker, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Gloria Hull, and Barbara Smith.
The growth of the communication networks among women is central to the history of the women’s movement as it re-emerged in the 1960’s. The study of the characteristics of women’s media particularly illuminate this history. Key aspects of the movement become evident, such as their non-hierarchal approach. The first characteristic — women speaking for themselves rather than reporting for others — allows us to hear directly from women and provides more original source material. The characteristic of women’s media that analyzed mass media’s attitude toward women and the women’s movement provides the historian with rich insights into women’s contributions to communication theory. It provides, most particularly, a more realistic understanding that explains why the women’s movement re-emerged and blossomed in these years. The characteristic provision of information not reported in the mass media allows historians of the women’s movement more accurately to identify the issues and concerns of women in reviving the women’s movement. By providing information ignored by mass media and by discussing the need for increasing options for women in political and economic life far beyond those that mass media had been presenting as acceptable roles for women, women’s media become indespensable sources for those studying the women’s movement.
Never before in the history of the United States, had there been so solid a communications base for women’s efforts to improve their status. Past women’s media had arisen essentially out of one class of women, those who were well-off and better educated. The media in the present study arose from women in all walks of life who felt the need to break the silence of the decade of the 1950’s, and to speak out against the discrimination and social injustices they saw increasingly around them. Their media appeared in all corners of the nation and involved nearly every issue of concern to women. Women even spoke from special identity perspectives that had never been heard from before, except in isolated instances that in no way compared to the nearly 200 local and national periodicals they now were founding. These women spoke up first to break the silence, the discrimination, and the distortion in mass media’s portrayal of women, but they soon discovered how much they had to learn from and about each other. Through this media network-building women planned strategy for maintaining and expanding the gains they were making collectively as a movement. Because these multiple networks met real needs for communication that were not being met by any existing communications structures, and because these networks have been built by and reflect such a wide spectrum of women, they have now come to represent a major force in American life.
The gains that women made in these two decades were made because women had a means by which they could exchange their experiences as well as debate and discuss alternatives. By their exchange of this information within and across media networks, they learned to include the great diversity of women’s actual experiences in their thinking and actions. Thus the communication networks among women provided the women’s movement its strength to make substantial progress possible. Without these media there would be no women’s movement as we know it today.
The networking that began in the 1960’s and developed over the next two decades was not an automatic process. It involved countless hours of typing and typesetting, mimeographing, paste-up and printing, telephoning, and the production of radio programs, films, videos, music — generally for no pay. Despite these personal costs, women built their networks in every segment of our society and on almost every conceivable issue. They did so because they saw that to improve the status of women they needed communication networks owned by women themselves through which to convey information by, for and about women, independent of mass media. During these years, 1963-1983, women created history’s first broadly-based, self-run, alternative communication structure, based on new journalistic concepts, and through which they discussed, shaped and supported, made and maintained, the gains society attributes to the contemporary women’s movement.
© Copyright 1988 by Martha Leslie Allen
