Feminism on the Air: Women and Public Broadcasting in the 1970s

This article was authored by Michelle Kelley, AAPB Media Historian and Curator.

In the 1970s, public broadcasting provided a platform for women to address issues impacting women and to articulate the goals of the women’s liberation movement. It also afforded unprecedented opportunities for women to work as journalists and in radio and television production. For many feminists, gaining access to production jobs was critical, not only to combat discriminatory hiring practices but also to gain control over women’s representation in the media. In Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation, Jennifer S. Clark writes that “regional and public television productions led the way in revising women’s television during the 1970s.”¹ Public radio was also at the forefront of efforts to transform radio programming for women listeners. In many ways, public broadcasting was the obvious choice for feminists seeking access to the airwaves. Unlike network television and commercial radio stations, which, to remain profitable, catered to the widest possible audience, public broadcasting stations were mandated to take creative risks, share diverse viewpoints, and serve the interests of audiences that commercial media largely neglected. 

Feminist public television series of the era, such as In Her Own Right (WGBH, 1970), Woman Alive (KERA, 1974; WNET, 1975-1977), and Woman (WNED, 1972-1977) featured panel discussions, filmed reports, and on-set interviews with prominent writers, artists, and activists. Clark notes that these programs departed from prevailing notions of what constitutes “women’s television” – namely, genres such as soap operas, cooking programs, and game shows. They were also produced by women and predominantly female production crews. Premiering in 1970, In Her Own Right was one of the earliest feminist series on public television. Producer Katherine Kinderman envisioned In Her Own Right as an experiment in cooperative television production–during the first episode, the audience was asked to offer suggestions for the program’s title, content, and future guests. Woman Alive!, produced by Joan Shigekawa, was noteworthy for its regional sensibility. KERA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas produced the series’ pilot, and although subsequent episodes were produced in New York by WNET, Woman Alive! remained attuned to the perspectives of women in “middle America” and worked to counter the idea that feminism was a movement exclusively of young, middle- and upper-class white women in coastal cities. In Buffalo, New York, WNED’s Woman, produced by Sandra Elkin and hosted by Samantha Dean, tackled issues such as women’s health, reproductive rights, careers, motherhood, sexism in the media, and women’s prisons. Woman also featured some of the movement’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, co-founders of Ms. magazine; Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963); and Margaret Sloan, co-founder of the National Black Feminist Organization.

In public and community radio, women also found new opportunities both behind the scenes and on the air. In Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, Lisa Napoli describes how journalists Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, and Cokie Roberts shaped National Public Radio during its formative years and broke new ground for women in broadcast journalism. On community radio station KOPN-FM in Columbia, Missouri, feminists took to the airwaves to discuss women’s health, spirituality, lesbian separatism, and the legal rights of women. And at KDNA-FM in Granger, Washington, Chicana radio producers were central to the success of one of the nation’s first full-time Spanish language community radio stations. Beginning in 1979, KDNA produced programs such as Mujer (Woman), which tackled topics relevant to the station’s audience of migrant farmworker women and their families, such as the dangers that agricultural pesticides posed to pregnant women.²

However, public broadcasting was not without its shortcomings, and feminist activists did not hold back from criticizing it. In 1972, the National Organization for Women (NOW) organized a national day of action to protest sexist stereotyping on Sesame Street. NOW also participated in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s (CPB’s) Advisory Committee of National Organizations (ACNO). Through the ACNO, NOW pushed public stations to improve their lackluster record for hiring women and people of color.³ In 1975 the CPB published a study on the treatment of women by publicly owned radio and television stations that found “pervasive underrepresentation of women, both in employment and program content.” According to the study, women were not misrepresented in public programming; they were simply absent. A review of a week’s worth of public radio and television shows found that men occupied 85 percent of speaking roles; in children’s programming, 69 percent of the characters were male (the New York Times reported that the discrepancy in the number of male and female characters on Sesame Street was even greater). The study also found that women occupied less than 30 percent of positions at public broadcasting stations despite constituting 40 percent of the workforce. Women workers at public broadcasting stations were also largely relegated to low-wage jobs.

The story Clark tells about the cancellation of In Her Own Right also counters the idea that public broadcasting was a haven for women seeking to escape the sexism that plagued commercial broadcasting.  She suggests that In Her Own Right was canceled after only seven episodes not because it was unsuccessful, but because the women-helmed series upended gender norms at WGBH, unnerving the station’s program director, Michael Rice. “In Her Own Right was defined by the control these women had over the show’s production and the authority they wielded on set,” writes Clark. “These qualities, in the opinion of the show’s production team, disturbed Rice so much that he canceled the program.”⁴ Evan Napoli’s mostly triumphant tale of women climbing the ranks at NPR nuances the notion that public broadcasting was a progressive haven for women. Although NPR afforded women journalists opportunities they were unlikely to find in commercial radio, Napoli’s account suggests that this was less a reflection of NPR’s commitment to gender equality and more a consequence of its limited hiring budget. Napoli notes that, although half of the team hired by NPR program director Bill Siemering to produce its flagship program All Things Considered were women, Siemering’s desire to buck industry conventions wasn’t the primary reason behind this:

Hiring all these women wasn’t a conscious decision. Siemering hired the best people he could find. If they happened to be female, good. It helped that some were subsidized by parents or husbands, which made them able to agree to the low pay he could offer. A man expecting to support a family on what NPR could pay couldn’t make do.⁵

In subsequent years, public radio and television stations worked to diversify their staff. Facing threats of federal funding cuts if hiring practices didn’t change, stations added more women and people of color to their employee rosters. As a result, in 1977, public television reported a 10.1 percent increase in the employment of women over the previous year.⁶ Although public broadcasting in the 1970s was not free from sexism and discrimination, it did offer something that commercial broadcasting did not: frankly feminist programming produced by and for women. Nothing approaching the formal and political radicalism of a program such as In Her Own Right would have appeared on network television at the time, and community radio programs on stations such as KOPN and KDNA tackled topics that shows on commercial stations never would. While commercial broadcasters were attempting to render feminism palatable to a mass audience through shows like Wonder Woman (ABS, 1975; CBS, 1975-1979) and Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981), public radio and television stations were producing feminist programs and series largely unadulterated by commercial imperatives.⁷ And, despite the challenges they faced, the women working behind the scenes at these stations made a lasting impact on women’s representation in media and how “programming for women” is defined.

1. Jennifer S. Clark, Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (University of California Press, 2024), 121. ↩︎
2. Monica De La Torre, Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley (University of Washington Press, 2022), 9. ↩︎
3. Allison Perlman, Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television (Rutgers University Press, 2016), 91-92. ↩︎
4. Clark, Producing Feminism, 127. ↩︎
5. Lisa Napoli, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR (Abrams Press, 2021), 70. ↩︎
6. Clark, Producing Feminism, 125. ↩︎
7. For an account of network television’s engagement with feminism in the 1970s, see Elana Levine, “Symbols of Sex: Television’s Women and Sexual Difference” in Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke University Press, 2007), 123-168. ↩︎