Woman’s Appropriation of the Media in The Women’s Liberation Movement

The documentary Maker: Women Who Make America demonstrates how the individual rebellious acts of women eventually catapulted a powerful social movement that forced the legislative and cultural sectors to adopt the equality rights that females demanded. The beginning of the film showcases how media disempowers the Women’s Liberation Movement and portrays it in a way that echoed and promoted the fears of the traditional American household. But as women began to percolate into media-oriented careers, they began to leverage the opportunity to educate a population that increasingly grew frustrated with the prevalent inequalities between the sexes. Therefore, instead of perceiving the media as a manipulative force, the film highlights how media functions as an objective tool that reflects the empowering or disempowering narratives that females adopt, consciously or unconsciously. The avenue ultimately helped women liberate themselves from the mythical female role by allowing them to become self-conscious of their personal narratives.

The beginning of the film shows how advertisements, news reports, and journals work in conjunction with one another to reinforce the traditional female role until women began to appropriate the medium to become aware of their subservient social role. Media critic Jean Kilbourn argues how she noticed that the repetitive patterns of dismembered bodies that appeared in advertisements promoted violence. The subsequent montage includes advertisement images objectifying a women’s body to the extent that they become indistinguishable from crime scenes. Such repetition of images censors the moral invalidity of the content because it gives the impression that the majority of the American population upholds such views. In other words, the conscious becomes so ingrained in the unconscious of consumer culture and it anesthetizes them from recognizing the moral implications of such material. It is not until the Thurman and Buck case and the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas case, that the media ceases to reflect a culture’s prevalent narrative and transforms into a mirror that allows women to identify themselves as victims in oppressive situations. Thus, even though the media seems to condone violence, the legal cases display how there exists an implicit rapport between the media and its female audience members. Not only did women learn how to appropriate the media to promote their rights, but they also used the platform to reinvent themselves.

With the help of television broadcasts and journal publications, American women were able to rebel against the unobtainable identity of the female role as presented in beauty pageants, but unfortunately, they aligned themselves with another unobtainable identity- that of a super mother who successfully juggles her career and family goals. The end of the documentary reveals the shortcomings of the feminist movement and its failure to carve a place for motherhood. In a rather open-ended conclusion, the documentary recognizes that the modern-day woman continues to contribute to the feminist movement even though the actual term has fallen out of favor. Though the visibility of the Women’s Rights Movement has been lost, impassioned demonstrations now take on the form of supportive online communities such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Circles, a website that allows a woman to find teammates that support their individual interests. Where the media used to give a woman a collective voice, technology now individualizes the female voice through social media platforms.

Works Cited

"Circles - Lean In." Lean In Circles Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2013. <http://leanin.org/circles.

Makers - Women Who Make America. Dir. Barrack Goodman. Perf. Several. Pbs, 2013. Film.