Producing Feminism - (Feminist Media Histories) by Jennifer S Clark (Paperback)

About the Book

"The story of the U.S. women's movement and television in the 1970s has been told primarily in two, often coordinating, ways: through feminist reform efforts that originated outside of the television industry and through feminist impact on on-air representations of women. Producing Feminism augments these accounts by exploring the effects of the women's movement on television production. Centering women who worked in television across a variety of occupations--including writers, producers, clerical staff, researchers, consultants, hosts, actors, and commentators--illustrates the changes they brought to workplace dynamics and protocols and norms of making television. These workers' interventions demonstrate the need to look at work processes and experiential qualities of television workplaces, along with onscreen representations that emerge from these sites of production, to understand more fully how feminism affected television. Research conducted for Producing Feminism features archival research and interviews; these materials reveal feminist influences on television that were not always visible to the public nor manifested onscreen, the conditions of television workplaces and experiences of women working in television, and the myriad strategies women workers used to reform the industry"--

Book Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In this deeply archival work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which women's labor in the American television industry of the 1970s furthered feminist ends. Carefully crafted around an impressive assemblage of interviews and primary sources (from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas), Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform-oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynamics of a workplace and the cultural products created there.

From the Back Cover

"A terrific model of feminist media historiography! Jennifer S. Clark expands our understanding of 1970s American television, the women's liberation movement, and the deep connections among gender, labor, and activism while innovating new strategies to examine the media industries."--Elana Levine, author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History

"A massively important and enlightening contribution to the field, offering a nuanced treatment of industry cooperation and compromise. Clark uses rare archival findings and a wide range of cultural objects and case studies to generate fresh, bold conclusions around second-wave feminism and American television."--Annie Berke, author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television ​

Review Quotes

"Many of these women's behind-the-scenes stories have not been told because they don't follow neat or uplifting narratives, but, as Clark shows, they are still worth telling to understand the struggles that have slowly, frustratingly, and messily led to eventual progress."-- "Society for US Intellectual History"

About the Author

Jennifer S. Clark is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.