Feminist Theory: Second Wave

Overarching Approach

Central to much second wave feminist theory are critiques of patriarchy, conceptualized as an oppressive system of male domination that is enacted at institutional, social, cultural, and personal levels. Second wave feminists argued that patriarchy is not natural or inevitable but rather a result of social construction. Media are theorized as major contributors to the establishment and maintenance of this social system. Many feminist theorists tackled popular culture in particular, identifying it as a space where gender inequalities were reflected and upheld. They theorized that media have powerful effects, training women (and men) and keeping them in their prescribed, and profoundly unequal, roles. Linking their studies to the personal experiences of women, studies often focused on demonstrating the ways in which media construct gender roles and how stereotypical portrayals are linked to women's participation in public life and their feelings about themselves.

Key Studies

Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique (1963) is often credited with sparking the second wave and contributing greatly to the movement's analysis of media and gender. In the book, Friedan theorizes about her mediated society, where advertising, magazines, and other media create a definition of womanhood based on being a wife and mother and where commercial forces work to manipulate women into consumption based on these domestic roles. Women's striving and ultimate inability to conform fully to this idealized image is, Friedan argues, the source of a great unhappiness and lack of personal fulfillment for women in postwar America. Likewise, in 1978 Gaye Tuchman voiced concern about young girls modeling their beliefs and expectations on repeated portrayals of women as housewives on children's television. Tuchman forwarded a notion, building on the work of George Gerbner, that women are “symbolically annihilated” by mass-media products, which show them primarily in traditional, gendered roles, if they represent them at all. These portrayals, in effect, teach females that they “should direct their hearts toward hearth and home,” rather than pursuits in the public sphere, and train women to be passive, submissive, and dependent on men. Feminists working in the area of film studies offered similar critiques of their subject. Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which uses Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to forward a notion of the “male gaze,” theorizes that Hollywood films create an imbalance of power between the viewer and viewed, objectifying the women portrayed in film and putting the audience in the role of the heterosexual male gazing upon the female.

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