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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
1940 Calvert Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009-1502
phone: 202-265-6707
www.wifp.org