2024/12/12 by Francesca Polletta, Debra Boka, Caroline Martínez +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender, Feminism, and Media
paper · doi:10.1086/734377
openalex publication_date 2024/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
Social movements have impact by getting their issues into the public sphere, but scholars have conceptualized the public sphere narrowly, focusing on how movements are covered in the news. However, movements appear also in film, television, and other popular cultural forms and in ways that variously amplify, dilute, or transform their claims. We argue that movements’ representation in the public sphere owes less to producers’ personal ideological commitments than to industry norms for providing content to imagined audiences. To make this argument, we reexamine the popular women’s magazines that have been seen as promoting a cult of domesticity against which second-wave feminists struggled. Our comparison of the movement’s representation in five women’s magazines and the New York Times shows that, for entirely commercial reasons, women’s magazines encouraged their more than 50 million readers to care about inequality, not only in the workplace but also in the home. Popular cultural feminism helped liberalize gender attitudes.