Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left.

1979 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 624
Author(s):  
June Sochen ◽  
Sara Evans
Author(s):  
Bonnie J. Dow

This chapter focuses on the ABC documentary on the Ladies' Home Journal sit-in entitled “Women's Liberation,”, produced by reporter Marlene Sanders. The documentary is 1970's key example of a supportive reporter's self-conscious effort to represent the movement fairly. It also serves as the most developed example of network news' reliance on race–sex and feminism–civil rights analogies. In her memoir of her reporting career, Sanders makes clear that she saw the documentary as an intervention into poor media treatment of the movement, echoing the contention of many feminists that the movement's image problems resulted from reporting by men. Refuting negative stereotypes about women's liberation (including, importantly, man-hating) was among the program's central strategies, as was an analogy to the moderate civil rights movement. Sanders's effort to package feminism in comprehensible and commonsensical terms that would make sense to her imagined white male viewer resulted in an evolutionary liberal narrative that narrowed the meaning of the movement in crucial ways, diminishing rather than demonizing its radicalism and presenting the Equal Rights Amendment as the answer to what ailed women.


Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.


2018 ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Grace Elizabeth Hale

In “Participatory Documentary: Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” Grace Hale examines the work of noted New Left documentary makers Guy and Candie Carawan, who recorded documentary albums of mass meetings and protest actions during the southern civil rights movement. The production of these albums, Hale argues, which render the voices of African Americans denied official political representation in a segregated society, enacted a mode of participatory documentary, prefiguring the world to which its participants aspired.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document