Producing Feminism

"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"--