Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

PhD Research

Print media’s coverage of the women's movement in Britain and the U.S.: 1960-1980 - A cross-cultural comparison.

This project aims to examine and compare how print media in the US and the UK covered the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s-1980s, using mass circulation newspapers of differing political leanings and target audiences (high, middle and low-brow).

Despite the fact that both media and women’s studies have become increasingly popular subjects for academics in past years, there has been relatively little work that looks at changing portrayals of women in the news media, particularly in historical or nationally comparative research.

This study plans on using qualitative (interviews and textual analysis) and quantitative analysis (content analysis).

Research questions include:

• How did the different print media cover the movement?
• How do media/organizational structures and techniques affect media coverage?
• What are the similarities/differences of the media’s representation of the women’s movement between the countries?
• How were women’s groups framed?
• Did the media’s portrayals of the movement change over time? If so, how?
• What was positive/negative about coverage?

Like other studies examining press coverage of the women’s liberation movement, I argue that the media covered the movement in a negative manner, but they were negative in different ways due to ideological, political and economic differences in the movement and each country.

Supervisor: Dr. Cynthia Carter

Research Interests

British and American print media, women’s liberation groups, 1960-1980, gender roles, children's news, citizenship and new media, representation of disfigurement, representations of terrorism.

Research Groups

• Politics and Media Group
• Prison Media Monitoring Unit, Cardiff
• Children and the media
• Feminism, Gender and Sexuality
• Risk, Science and Health

Teaching

History of Mass Communication and Culture