What 1967 looked like, and what came later
In 1967 the feminist movement had a national organisation but little mass media presence. The most famous media event associated with it, the protest at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, took place in September 1968, not 1967. The newsroom lawsuits that followed, such as the one at Newsweek, came in 1970. For 1967 itself, the story is about women in 1960s media: how they were portrayed and employed in media before those events, and about the books and magazines that were already changing the conversation.
The Feminine Mystique, 1963
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, argued that many educated American women were dissatisfied with a domestic role that magazines, advertising and popular culture presented as their only fulfilment. Friedan had written for women’s magazines, and her book drew on that experience. It sold widely, and many readers wrote to say it described their own lives, though critics noted that she addressed mainly white, middle-class suburban women.
The book did not start the women’s movement by itself. Government reports, civil rights law and women’s work in other movements all contributed. But it gave many women a name for a problem and helped create a readership for later feminist writing. Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966, with its stated aim of pushing for equality in work and public life.
Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan
A very different message came from Helen Gurley Brown. Her 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl told unmarried women that they could enjoy work, independence and sexual lives of their own. In 1965 she became editor of Cosmopolitan and remade it for young, single, working women, with frank articles on dating, careers and sex.
Brown’s approach was criticised by some feminists, who thought it placed too much weight on pleasing men and on appearance. Others saw it as a real challenge to older ideas about respectability. It is a good example of how the media of the time could both widen women’s options and keep them tied to a narrow ideal.
Portrayals on page and screen
Advertising in the mid-1960s often showed women in the home, cleaning, cooking and caring for children, or as decoration beside products aimed at men. Women’s magazines mixed recipes and household tips with beauty advice and marriage stories. Television comedies commonly featured housewives and secretaries, although some shows did show women with jobs. That Girl, with Marlo Thomas, began in September 1966 and followed a young woman trying to build an acting career in New York; it was unusual for presenting a single woman living on her own.
Youth culture brought other images. Fashion, shaped by the mod fashion of London and models like Twiggy, put emphasis on youth and thinness, and the mini-skirt was seen as either liberating or objectifying depending on who was asked. Rock music, too, offered a few prominent women, but the scene in the Haight and elsewhere was often dominated by men, and many women in it found that old roles persisted.
Women who worked in media
Women worked in newspapers, magazines, publishing and broadcasting, but usually in limited roles. Many held secretarial posts, researcher jobs or positions on women’s pages. Reporters, editors and on-air journalists were mostly men. Help-wanted advertisements in many newspapers were still divided into male and female columns, a practice that the new equal-employment law was beginning to challenge.
These jobs were also often paid less. The conditions led, in 1970, to organised action: women at Newsweek announced a sex-discrimination complaint in March of that year, and women staff at Ladies’ Home Journal staged a sit-in at the editor’s office. Those are 1970 events, and they show where the pressure was heading.
The Miss America protest, 1968
On 7 September 1968, a group of women protested outside the Miss America pageant on the Atlantic City boardwalk. They crowned a sheep, and they put items they considered symbols of oppression, such as bras, girdles and magazines, into a “freedom trash can.” Contrary to a popular belief, bras were not burned; the phrase “bra-burning” came from press coverage. The protest was widely reported, and it helped introduce the idea of a more radical “women’s liberation” movement to the public. It came a year after the period this article is mostly about.
Why the media mattered to the movement
Feminists in the late 1960s argued that images in the press and advertising shaped what women felt they could do. That view made the media both a target and a tool. Activists staged events to attract coverage, started their own newspapers, and challenged the way women were described. By 1967 the conditions for that were being laid, in books, in debates over equal-employment law, and in the readiness of some women to say publicly that the old images no longer fit.