Fixing the Meaning of the Movement

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.