The women’s movement and the media: Constructing a public identity

Despite being an issue of much concern, the relationship of the women’s movement with news media has rarely been subjected to systematic analysis. This article presents the results of an extensive study of the interaction between the media and the women’s movement in the Netherlands at the time of the movement’s resurrection in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The core questions of this study concern the construction of a public identity of the movement in the media, which is conceived as the product not merely of a collision of discourses of gender and politics, but also of conflicting organizational routines of movement and media, and of diverging individual preferences of journalists and activists. Discourse analysis of news coverage shows that the movement’s public identity is constructed within a liberal feminist framework and is built upon three ‘foundations’: ‘emancipation’ is legitimate, ‘feminism’ is deviant; movement activists are quite different from and not representative of ‘ordinary’ women; the movement is directed against men. The article argues that the observed construction of women’s political activity is not particular to the Netherlands or to the particular time period.