Social Movements in the Commercial Public Sphere: How Women’s Magazines Popularized Second-Wave Feminism

Social movements have impact by getting their issues into the public sphere, but scholars have conceptualized the public sphere narrowly, focusing on movements’ coverage in the news. Movements appear also in film, television, and other popular cultural forms, however, and in ways that variously amplify, dilute, or transform their claims. Movements’ representation in the public sphere, we argue, owes less to producers’ personal ideological commitments than to industry norms for providing content to imagined audiences. To make this argument, we reexamine the popular women’s magazines that have been seen as promoting the cult of domesticity against which second-wave feminists struggled. Our comparison of the movement’s representation in five women’s magazines and the New York Times shows that, for entirely commercial reasons, women’s magazines encouraged their more than 50 million readers to care about inequality, not only in the workplace, but also in the home. More than feminism in the news, popular cultural feminism helped liberalize gender attitudes.