Liberated Women in Television Serials
Most of feminist research into the image of women in the media has concentrated on woman presented as submissive, passive, or in terms of sexuality. Recently, however, a "new woman" has appeared in films, TV, and advertising. She is aggressive and active — she is "liberated". But she is still feminine — never a feminist.
Who is this "new woman" and if being "liberated" has gained social acceptance, what Is the status of being a feminist ("women's libber")? Helen Baehr in her article (excerpted
below) on "The 'Liberated Woman' in Television Drama" discusses the findings of her research and lays the foundation for answering these two questions.
"We can only understand culture if we understand the real social process on which It depends - I mean the process of incorporation".
The mass media have established a decisive and fundamental leadership in the production and transmission of patriarchal culture in contemporary society. They are more and more responsible for the construction and consumption of social knowledge and 'represent a key repository of available meaning which people draw on In their continuing attempts to make sense of their situation and find ways of acting within and against it'.
And yet culture is not a static system-it is a process, as the above quote of Raymond Williams suggests, which Is constantly changing to accommodate emergent alternative and oppositional meanings, values, and practices. In this paper I want to try to examine the role the mass media, in particular 'serious' television drama, have played In accommodating and delegitimizing feminism and feminist issues through their construction of a stereotype of 'the liberated woman'.
The power of the mass media
The media occupy a central position in culture in two important ways. Firstly, contact with the various media provides the majority of the population with their dominant
leisure activity and secondly, the media constitute a main source of Information about, and explanation of, social and political processes. Structured closely to other powerful institutions, they help establish an order of priorities about a society's problems and objectives.
In prime-time television, in TV soap operas, and in TV advertisements, women are subject to 'symbolic annihilation' through their condemnation, trivialisatlon and absence.
Research on women's image puts forward a reflection model — that is, the media simply reflect the values of a society and the position of women in that society. Some work has turned the model on its head to suggest that media images themselves determine what women are: "We think we should look more closely at how our attitudes are conditioned and even manipulated by the media". The media do not simply reflect representations of women. They are one site of the construction of women's marginality in culture and are themselves a point of production of definitions.
On the media agenda
Earlier treatment by the media in the late sixties and early seventies discredited 'women's libbers' as being hostile, aggressive man-haters who lacked a sense of humor. Women's libbers appeared as a minority of women who stood apart, deviated, from the majority of non-aggressive 'normal' women. They acquired a set of 'secondary status' attributes in press reports - they were described as lesbians, frigid and too ugly to get a man. More recently the Women's Liberation Movement has been co-opted onto the media agenda resulting in less hysterical coverage and according a degree of legitimate status to women's demands for 'equal rights'.
But the liberated woman constructed by the mass media Is the woman who wants to get on in a man's world. Press reports of the first woman bullfighter, jet pilot, prime minister etc., describe women who have secured jobs that were formerly totally male preserves. 'Women's firsts' represent the success stories of equal opportunity defined by the law as the right of every woman. The new, independent, modern woman is portrayed as a woman who wants, and occasionally achieves, equal status with men. The mass media have helped set up a new majority/minority paradigm. Minority status has shifted away from independent, ambitious women to feminists who continue to question the very notion of equality within existing structures and who continue to be omitted and discredited in the media. Thus when 'first women' are asked the inevitable question about their views on 'women's lib', they usually oblige by dissociating themselves from the Women's Movement: 'I am not terrifically Women's Lib; I simply ignore
all these anti-attitudes. I am a conductor and just get on with it' {Sunday Times interview with orchestral conductor Jane Glover) (Barr. 1977).
George Gerbner observes the introduction onto American television of independent, powerful women who are portrayed as enforcing rather than challenging the laws that
oppress them. They play policewomen, detectives or soldiers e.g. Policewoman, Charlie's Angels Gerbner, 1978). These characters bear little resemblance to feminist aspirations — they usually end up needing to be rescued by their male partners. But the fact that heroic women have supplemented heroic men on the screen, points to the way in which the media have tal<en note of, and re-constructed, feminist issues. Here we see strong women reconstructed into redeemers of the patriarchy.
Over the last year, a British newspaper. The Guardian, has introduced a 'fortnightly column of feminist news and opinions' onto the woman's page. This ghettoisation places
women's issues and feminism in a marginally depoliticized relation to the rest of the news. Another national newspaper marked 1978 as The Year of the Feminist' and went on to confuse films about women (directed by men) with 'films on feminist themes' (The Observer, December 31, 1978). Films like The Turning Point, An Unmarried Woman and Julia have packaged images of the new, independent, liberated woman for mass consumption. The 'new woman' is a new media cliche — the New Hollywood brand of feminism. In An Unmarried Woman independence stands for not capitulating too easily when Mr Right makes his inevitable appearance.
So particular images of feminism have already been 'sold' to the commercial culture — 'the assertive, ambitious woman is no longer an oddity but has become a new cultural type' (Cagan, 1978). The 'new woman' has just as much potential for being a profitable consumer as the 1950s 'traditional homemaker' described by Betty Friedan (Friedan, 1963). Female sexuality, often confused with female liberation, has become big business. There has been a multiplication of areas of the body accessible to marketability: 'What is happening is that a new definition of women's sexuality is being produced. It is a definition which produces new areas as sensual and equates that sensuality with work' (Coward, 1978). The work referred to involves the purchase of appliances, accessories and cosmetics and Elizabeth Cagan argues that the new cultural type of the liberated woman has been manufactured to serve the commodity market of a capitalist economy:
Thus, we begin to observe an increase in ads which feature
female models which address themselves to the aspirations of women for the "good life" but which in actuality might just have easily been written for the male market.Cagan stresses the need for the Women's Movement to 'divorce itself from this image and distinguish its own approaches to liberation'. However, within a media structure
heavily influenced and determined by market forces, the means of producing and disseminating alternative media artifacts and progressive images of women remain severely limited.
The 'liberated woman' in television drama
One early introduction of 'the liberated woman' to the British television audience came in the BBC's serious drama slot Play for Today. Within the short space of four months in 1976/1977 three new plays, all of which centred around characters and themes relating to women's liberation, and all of which were written, produced and directed by men, were broadcast. Play for Today has a long tradition of showing plays 'with a message' and the inclusion of women's liberation on its agenda marked a rare opportunity to accord media legitimacy to feminist issues. This chance was, however, lost.
Instead we saw plays which constructed the liberated woman in a way which effectively worked to delegitimize feminist issues and the feminist movement.
Housewives' Choice
In the Play for Today the liberated woman is portrayed by Marcia, middle-class and surrounded by homely comforts and domestic appliances. Marcia, to her disadvantage, is juxtaposed with the other central character, Joyce. Joyce is everything Marcia is not. She is married, childless (longing to have a baby) and homeless. (She and her unemployed husband, Eric, are living in their car). Contrasted to Joyce's needs, Marcia's feminist ideas are not those facing the average housewife
Unaware of Joyce's predicament, Marcia's feminism comes across as an abstraction, bourgeois, unrelated to 'real' problems or the real world:
'The point is Joyce, we've got to break out of our stereotypes... the set two dimensional roles — housewife, mother, whore, you know .. that the male supremacy thing makes us play. Would you like some more coffee?'
It seems all very well for Marcia to 'preach' women's rights surrounded as she is by all material comforts and an ex-husband who pays all the bills. In the play feminist concerns remain too theoretical and 'middle-class' to have any application to the real problems and situations facing women's everyday lives.
Feminism is reduced to Marcia's armchair dogmatism. She spouts feminist theory, but her life-style denies its practice.
Further, her indictment of men and marriage stands in contradiction to the example of Eric's relationship with Joyce. Joyce and Eric are happy together despite their 'real' problems. Their marriage survives - even flourishes under - unemployment, childlessness and homelessness. Marriage and the family are the only true values. Their happy marriage stands as an affirmation of the family that Marcia condemns. Marcia's feminism, here confined to 'women's rights', operates at the level of metaphysics.
Eric to Marcia:
'If you weren't so busy with women's rights, you'd see there's a lot more wrong with the world.'
Thus feminists are portrayed as pretentious, overly intense propagandists, pre-occupied with 'womens' rights' to the exclusion of the 'real' problems of the world. They are 'with-it', implying that their feminist concerns are a fad — a phase they
will grow out of. Being a feminist is 'in' but feminists cannot
be taken too seriously because they will soon be 'out'. Feminist
characters swear, stride across the set, and are angry i.e.
'unfeminine'.
Housewive's choice illustrates the way feminist issues and
women's 'liberation' are co-opted onto the media agenda where they are accommodated within a patriarchal discourse which empties them of progressive meaning. The themes and issues of feminism are drawn on and presented in a way that leads to the ultimate re-affirmation of the patriarchal family — a critique of which lies at the core of feminist ideology. Marcia and other feminist characters are rendered unnatural, ridiculous and wrong.
The above is an excerpt from Woman and Media, a book edited by Helen Baehr. It is available from Peggy Ducker, Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hale, Oxford, England for £ 6.