1970s Feminisms

For more than a decade, feminist historians and historiographers have engaged in challenging the "third wave" portrait of 1970s feminism as essentialist, white, middle-class, uninterested in racism, and theoretically naive. This task has involved setting the record straight about women's liberation by interrogating how that image took hold in the public imagination and among academic feminists. This issue invites feminist theorists to return to women's liberation--to the texts, genres, and cultural productions to which the movement gave rise--for a more nuanced look at its conceptual and political consequences. The essays in this issue explore such topics as the ambivalent legacies of women's liberation; the production of feminist subjectivity in mass culture and abortion documentaries; the political effects of archiving Chicana feminism; and conceptual and generic innovations in the work of Gayle Rubin, Christine Delphy, and Shulamith Firestone.

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC--the “Big Three” of the pre-cable television era--discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes. In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks’ eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists’ efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement. Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.

A scholarly book about the 1970s in the UK, and the relevance of the Women's Liberation Movement to contemporary feminism. Details: www.rawnervebooks.co.uk/feministseventies.htmlCompanion web book: www.feminist-seventies.net

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and Definitions, grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Heidelberg (Institute for Translation, Heidelberg), course: Bad Girls, New Men': Gender in Britain Since 1960, 42 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The analysis "The Womens Movement in the 70s" examines the rising of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s in Britain; it discusses and debates the different steps taken by women towards greater freedom and the continual fight for their rights. It does not only focus on the achievements made in this time, but also points out the change the Liberation Movement underwent and the conflicts which arose as a consequence of it.

When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their lives only through a family and a home. Friedan's controversial book about these women - and every woman - would ultimately set Second Wave feminism in motion and begin the battle for equality. This groundbreaking and life-changing work remains just as powerful, important and true as it was forty-five years ago, and is essential reading both as a historical document and as a study of women living in a man's world. 'One of the most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century.' New York Times 'Feminism ...... began with the work of a single person: Friedan.' Nicholas Lemann With a new Introduction by Lionel Shriver

Feminist reform comes to Hollywood -- 1970s cultures of production: studio, art house, and exploitation -- New women: women directors and the 1970s new woman film -- Radicalizing the directors guild of america -- Desperately seeking the eighties: 1970s perseverance turns to 1980s progress