The Framing of Feminism

The Framing of Feminists and Feminism

in News and Public Affairs Programs in
U.S. Electronic Media

By Rebecca Ann Lind and Colleen Salo

This research analyzes the representation of feminists and feminism in media (in
part by comparing such representation to that of women) via content analysis of
35,000 hours of ABC, CNN, PBS, and NPR news and public affairs content. Femi-
nists appear rarely and are often demonized. Although they are shown in a per-
sonalized and trivialized fashion, though, feminists are so represented less often
than “regular” women. Feminists are less often victims, more often have agency,
and more often are associated with the goals of the women’s movement than regu-
lar women. Yet feminists’ realm is not that of regular women; feminists are less
often associated with day-to-day work/leisure activities of regular women, and
more often with public sphere activities including media/the arts and politics.

Considering the lengthy history of the women’s movement in the U.S. (Cott, 1987),
there are surprisingly few scholarly analyses of how the movement, or feminism,
has been represented in the electronic media. Understanding how media portray
feminism is important because research has shown that people’s attitudes and
judgments can be affected by the media’s framing of issues (Domke, Shah, &
Wackman, 1996; Gamson, 1992; Iyengar, 1991; McLeod, 1995; Price, Tewksbury,
& Powers, 1996; Shoemaker, 1982; Terkildsen & Schnell, 1997), especially
when people lack firsthand knowledge of and experience with the issue at
hand (Gitlin, 1980).
Framing is the process by which sense is made of events (Edelman, 1993;
Entman & Rojecki, 1993; Gamson, 1989; Goffman, 1974; Pan & Kosicki, 1993).
According to Gamson (1989, p. 157), “facts have no intrinsic meaning. They take
on their meaning by being embedded in a frame or story line that organizes them
and gives them coherence, selecting certain ones to emphasize while ignoring
others.” Gamson further urged us to “think of news as telling stories about the

Rebecca Ann Lind (PhD, University of Minnesota) is an associate professor at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. Colleen Salo (BA, University of Illinois at Chicago) was an undergraduate student in the
Department of Communication whlie working on this article and is currently president and co-owner
of Your Mom’s Dog Marketing Inc., an Orlando, Florida-based marketing firm focused on the college
and youth markets. The authors wish to thank James A. Danowski of the University of Illinois, Chi-
cago, for his assistance and guidance during preparation of this manuscript.

Copyright © 2002 International Communication Association

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Journal of Communication, March 2002

world rather than as presenting ‘information,’ even though the stories, of course,
include factual elements” (1989, p. 157). Yet, even though news stories include
factual elements, Gitlin’s (1980) analysis of coverage of the New Left movement in
the 1960s revealed

the media were far from mirrors passively reflecting facts found in the real
world. The facts reported were out there in the real world, true: out there
among others. The media reflection was more the active, patterned remaking
performed by mirrors in a fun house. (p. 29)

What stories have the news media told us about feminism? This article analyzes
the representation of feminists and feminism in U.S. electronic media, in part by
comparing such representations to those of women in general via content analysis
of the transcripts of approximately 35,000 hours (about 135 million words) of
television and radio content aired on ABC, CNN, PBS, and NPR from May 1993 to
January 1996. We utilize a form of computerized network analysis that, according
to Danowski (1993), provides qualitative analysis by using quantitative proce-
dures (see, for example, Lind & Danowski’s 1998 study of the portrayal of Arabs).
Danowski’s Wordlink program allows us to discover and map the relationships
among words within messages; it allows us to interpret the underlying themes and
frames present in mediated representations of feminists. It allows us to discern the
frequency with which certain words, terms, concepts, attitudes and values are
associated with feminists and, in so doing, explicate the frames within which
feminists and feminism are presented to the American public.
This study extends previous work on mediated representation of feminism by
analyzing an extremely large body of text, investigating the universe of programs
from the time frame and media analyzed rather than a sample thereof, and using
a more rigorous methodology than is typical of much content analysis. Also, our
analysis is of broadcast news and public affairs texts, rather than print. This is valu-
able because according to Roper (1985), most Americans cite television as their most
important source of news. Finally, supplementing our analysis of feminism with an
analysis of how women in general are represented allows a baseline to which the
framing of feminists and feminism can be compared and thus better understood.

Literature Review

Goffman’s (1974) argument that the framing of an event or activity establishes its
meaning seems to have struck a chord with many media studies scholars, perhaps
in part due to the basic understanding that the media provide symbolic represen-
tations of society rather than literal portrayals thereof (Tuchman, 1978a). Although
most researchers have investigated the media’s framing of events at a macrolevel
(i.e., coding or considering entire articles as the unit of analysis), the concept of
framing seems amenable to study at various levels, including microlevel linguistic
analysis. After all, reporters’ perceptions of an event, like all communicative mes-
sages, must first be encoded before they are sent––hence, language has, as Robinson

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wrote, a “crucial role . . . in the conceptualization of everyday life” (1978, p. 88).

Roeh (1981, p. 78) argued the encoding process is value-laden: “No author or
speaker is free of the necessity to choose words, syntax, and order of presenta-
tion. It does make a difference if ‘friction’ and not ‘dispute’ is chosen.” Thus,
values and attitudes are embedded in even the simplest descriptions; according to
Stuart Hall (1980), it is in the process of encoding that the media do their ideologi-
cal work. Even though television airtime is limited, which means the stories can-
not be as full and detailed as would otherwise be possible, such constraints, as
Gitlin (1980) put it, “don’t themselves explain what will be omitted” (p. 45), and
ideology again comes to the fore.
Edelman (1993) considered the media’s encoding of an event, or the “construc-
tion of the political spectacle,” a powerful method of social control. Giddens
(1976, p. 48) would likely agree: “Even language . . . expresses asymmetries of
power.” Giddens’s theory of structuration articulates the dynamic process––rooted in
language––by which social structures are created and maintained. To Giddens (1976),
language constitutes the social world, and the study of social reproduction is best
undertaken at the level of language. He argued that “the constitution of this world as
‘meaningful,’ ‘accountable,’ or ‘intelligible’ depends upon language, regarded . . . not
simply as a system of signs or symbols but as a medium of practical activity” (p. 155).
What Giddens called practical activity may at times also be seen as political
activity. “The battle over news frames is itself a political process” (Norris, 1997, p.
9) when language or social practices become contested. Gurevitch and Levy
argued that “the media ought to be seen as a site on which various social groups,
institutions, and ideologies struggle over the definition and construction of social
reality” (1985, p. 19).
The activities and media coverage of social movements represent obvious in-
stances of such struggles. Participants in social movements actively challenge a
society’s norms, values, practices, policies, and so forth. Their main tasks include
mobilizing public sentiment and activity, and this requires the news media (Gamson
& Wolfsfeld, 1993), but any stories about the movement will be framed by journal-
ists. Thus, though the movements engage in significant framing processes by be-
ing “actively engaged in the production of meaning for participants, antagonists,
and observers” (Snow & Benford, 1988, p. 197), the media apply their own frames
when reporting on the movements. As Gamson and Wolfsfeld (1993) put it, “move-
ments and media are both in the business of interpreting events (p. 17).” This is
particularly evident in Gitlin’s (1980) detailed analysis of how the media framed a
nonmainstream movement (the 1960s New Left), how the movement responded
to its coverage, and how media coverage affected the movement and its history.
When the underlying ideologies of the frames collide, the movements are at a
disadvantage. The media have direct access to the public in a way that partici-
pants in social movements do not, and according to Tuchman (1978b) news workers
are among a society’s most powerful social actors when it comes to constructing
social reality by producing and reproducing social meanings. Further, the mean-
ings produced as media frame social movements can have negative effects, argue
Entman and Rojecki (1993), who wrote that “unfavorable media coverage of a
movement discourages involvement by those ordinary citizens who support the

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initiative but remain outside its activities; these potential recruits may not be able
to tell that they are a part of a majority” (p. 155).
What about feminism? How do the media frame feminism? Do the media even
pay attention to feminism? Although print and TV coverage of women has in-
creased (Cancion & Ross, 1981), coverage of feminism and the women’s move-
ment has been (despite improvements since the early 1960s) relatively sparse
(Morris, 1973a; Rhode, 1997; Robinson, 1978). Even the amount of scholarly re-
search into the news media’s framing of feminism is sparse. We were able to
discover but a handful of systematic content analyses of this topic (works such as
those by Dow, 1996, D’Acci, 1994, and Baehr, 1980 are not included here because
they look at feminism in entertainment rather than in news and public affairs).
Much early research focused more on the presence of coverage (Morris, 1973a)
than on the context in which the movement appeared, although Morris (1973b)
did consider whether such coverage was neutral, unfavorable, or favorable. More
recently, Huddy (1997, p. 193) scrutinized the context within which feminism
appeared and found that feminism was rarely defined in the media and “the
meaning of feminist and feminism has to be gleaned from an article’s text.” Her
analysis of The New York Times and several weekly newsmagazines from the
1960s to the 1980s showed that “feminist” tends to be used mainly to describe a
few key players in the women’s movement, such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan,
and NOW, and that “feminism” is used more often in conjunction with women’s roles
in the family and with reproductive rights than with women’s roles outside the home.
The most useful works by researchers have explicitly applied the concept of
framing to analyses of mediated representations of feminism, even though few
scholars have undertaken such efforts. Unfortunately these investigations are driven
by diverse, often unrelated, sets of frames––which may be surprising, given that all of
the content analyses mentioned below except one (van Zoonen, 1992) use The New
York Times, the weekly newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Re-
port), or some combination thereof. On the other hand, the variation of frames may
not be surprising, given the fact that many of the works were published at about the
same time, depriving the authors of an opportunity to draw upon the other studies.
Terkildsen and Schnell (1997) presented five frames for women’s movement
coverage in weekly newsmagazines during 1965–1993: Sex roles, feminism, politi-
cal rights, economic rights, and antifeminism. Ashley and Olson (1998) consid-
ered the following four frames when analyzing The New York Times, Time, and
Newsweek from 1966 to 1986: Importance, illegitimacy, deviance, and events (as
compared to issues). Costain, Braunstein, and Berggren (1997) found the civil
rights/ERA, work/job, family, and the women’s movement frames in their analysis
of The New York Times during 1955–1995. Howell (1990) called her rhetorical
analysis of the New York Times during 1961–1981 a “metaphorical analysis,” but
the four metaphors she discovered function as frames: woman as N——-1, woman
as object, woman as person, and woman as victim. Van Zoonen’s (1992) discourse
analysis of 1968–1973 Dutch media coverage of the women’s movement identified

1
Although we vigorously uphold Howell’s right to use “the N word,” we do not wish to reproduce it
here.

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three frames: the legitimacy of emancipation/deviance of feminism, the nonrepre-

sentative, nonordinary nature of women’s movement activists; and the antimale
attitude of the movement. And, although Rhode (1997) didn’t conduct a content
analysis, she claimed that the media have applied the following five frames in
their coverage of feminism and feminist issues: Neglect/inattention, demonization,
personalization and trivialization, polarization, and blurring the focus (i.e., focus-
ing on self- rather than social transformation).
As a group, these studies take a historical rather than a contemporary perspec-
tive; focus on print rather than electronic media; tend to analyze only those ar-
ticles indexed under particular headings such as “women’s movement,” “women
in work,” “women,” and so on; utilize a macrolevel analysis (the article as a
whole); and look only at the representation of feminism or the women’s move-
ment, ignoring how other (“regular”) women are portrayed.
The present research attempts to fill some of the gaps in this literature. Our
focus on recent news and public affairs content in electronic media allows us to
examine how feminists and feminism are being represented in contemporary so-
ciety, in the media most commonly used as a source of news (Roper, 1985).
Because we analyze the entire output of the available news and public affairs
sources rather than relying on indexed categories, we are able to get a stronger
sense of how feminism and feminists are portrayed across the full range of news
and public affairs programs. By investigating the phenomenon at the level of
language, we are overtly acknowledging the function of language in constructing
our social reality. Finally, by complementing our analysis of feminists and femi-
nism with a separate investigation into the representation of women in general,
we have an important basis of comparison.
We acknowledge the limitations of our research, particularly our inattention to
the visual elements of the television newscasts. Because television is an audiovi-
sual medium, visual images may either reinforce or contradict the verbal narrative.
Audiences may attend primarily either to the words or to the pictures. Issues such
as these must be acknowledged but are beyond the scope of the present research.
Although producers encode messages both verbally and visually, this research
focuses only on the former. Similarly, some might initially think that the represen-
tation of men (or even Americans) might make a more appropriate basis of com-
parison than the representation of women, but we believe that is not the case.
Assuming that most people associate feminists with women rather than with men
(whether to do so is correct or not), the best comparison is with women. The
representation of men should be used when studying the representation of women,
and the representation of women should be used when studying the representa-
tion of feminists.

Method

Wordlink. Wordlink is a form of computerized network analysis (Danowski, 1993)

that can discover and map the relationships among words. We can assess the
extent to which certain words, concepts, attitudes, and values are associated with

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feminism and feminists. By also determining the frequency with which those same
words are associated with women in general, we can more fully interpret the
underlying themes and structures present in mediated representations of femi-
nism and feminists.
Computational linguistics researchers, studying statistical patterns in large bod-
ies of text, argue that macrolevel meanings of words are widely shared and may
be linked with membership in particular social, ethnic, or language communities.
Wittgenstein provides the theoretical basis for using statistical text analysis to
identify societal or macrolevel meanings for words. To Wittgenstein, “the meaning
of a word lies in how it is used in the language, in how it is applied” (Brand, 1979,
p. 109). “There is no mistaking the importance Wittgenstein attaches to the per-
spective shift from meanings to uses,” according to Wilson (1998, p. 45). We
estimate the macrolevel meanings of words by looking at the frequency with
which words appear in close proximity or co-occur. Because “you shall know the
meaning of a word by the company it keeps” (a concept frequently presented by
computational linguists that clearly reveals these scholars’ debt to Wittgenstein),
we can infer the meanings of particular words (e.g., “feminism” and “feminists”)
by investigating their surrounding word context.
Our unit of analysis is the word pair. Using Wordlink, we sifted through the text
and found all words appearing within seven words before or after our target
words, “feminism,” “feminist,” “feminists,” “women,” and “woman.” Wordlink re-
corded and counted all of the word pairs, which we then compared with the
media frames being investigated in this study. An analysis of word pairs may
initially seem decontextualized to some communication scholars, because such
analyses are not common in our field. However, co-word analysis (or analysis of
collocations) has been used in many fields for about 20 years, and is “a powerful
tool” (Qin, 1999, p. 137). To computational linguistics researchers, the collocated
word pair is the context. According to Aone, Okurowski, Gorlinsky, and Larson
(1999, p. 72), consideration of word collocation provides a “context” that allows a
word’s meaning to be “disambiguated.” Collocation is a widely accepted
contextualizing device (Aone et al., 1999; Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1994; Qin,
1999), especially when analyzing very large corpora. In such cases, Biber, Conrad,
& Reppen (1994) argue, more detailed alternatives to collocation “can provide too
much information, so that [researchers] are overwhelmed by the amount of data”
(Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1994, p. 176.) Further support for our practice of using
the word pair rather than the sentence in our conceptualization and presentation
is derived from Hallett’s (1967) close investigation of Wittgenstein’s definition of
meaning as use. According to Hallett, Wittgenstein purposely and specifically fo-
cused on words, not sentences. The meaning of the word is primary and funda-
mental, argued Hallett, whereas a sentence is not: “An individual sentence is, after
all, something accidental, transient, ad hoc, whereas Wittgenstein’s main interest
was always the a priori” (Hallett, 1967, p. 6; italics in the original).
Therefore, we join the ranks of computational linguistics researchers in assum-
ing that collocation (the use of word pairs) provides appropriate context, and in
our results will not provide sentences to illustrate the use of our target words in
the language. Hallett (1967, p. 171) reminded us that “no one owns the word. . . . a

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word’s meaning is not your use or mine, but its use in the language” (emphasis in
the original). Exemplar sentences, therefore, could each provide nothing more
than the use of a word by one person—whether your use, or ours, or someone
else’s. To understand what “feminism” means in the language of news and public
affairs programs, we must consider use more broadly than just one, two, or even
150 people’s individual sentences. By considering literally all appearances of the
word in the corpus, co-word analysis allows us to do just that.
One contextualization that some may initially consider lacking is actually not
an issue when determining a word’s meaning by its use. The word pair method
does not consider whether concepts are linked affirmatively or negatively, be-
cause the linkage itself is important, not its valence. For example, whether the
sentence takes an affirmative (“President Nixon said ‘I am a crook’”) or a negative
stance (“President Nixon said ‘I am not a crook’”), the net effect is an association
of Nixon with the idea “crook.” Similarly, “The feminist author was never victim-
ized” functions just as strongly to associate the feminist with being victimized as
does “The feminist author was victimized.” The association to victimization evi-
dent in the latter sentence could be avoided, but only if an alternate association
were made: “The feminist author was always assertive.”
Corpus. We studied two and a half years’ worth of transcripts of news and
public affairs programs aired from May 1993 through January 1996 on ABC, CNN,
NPR, and PBS2. We analyzed every word in every story on every news and public
affairs program, for a total of 135,759,087 words. The content we analyzed was
obtained through an agreement between the authors’ university and the media
transcription service, Journal Graphics. We received daily satellite feeds of literally
every transcript that Journal Graphics produced from the time such a service was
available until it ceased. (The company has since gone out of business.) Our
corpus could be characterized as a convenience sample; it is not a random sample,
and generalizations to other texts should be made with caution, if at all.
Six guiding frames. Building on the foundation laid by existing research, we
synthesized the diverse sets of frames we discovered in the literature to create a
set of six frames of interest to this study. We used these six frames to guide our
analysis. We searched the corpus for evidence of demonization (Ashley & Olson,
1998; Rhode, 1997; van Zoonen, 1992) in which feminism and feminists are framed
as deviant. We looked for a personalization and trivialization frame (Howell, 1990;
Rhode, 1997; Terkildsen & Schnell, 1997)—a focus on appearance, style, or per-
sonal qualities. In addition, we searched for the presence of a goals frame, reflect-
ing attention to civil rights, reproductive rights, workplace rights, and the goals for
equality generally held by feminists (Costain, Braunstein, & Berggren, 1997; Howell,
2
All segments of these programs aired between May 1993 and January 1996 were analyzed: ABC:
Breaking News, Good Morning America, News Special, Nightline, Prime Time Live, This Week with
David Brinkley, Turning Point, World News Saturday, World News Sunday, World News Tonight, 20/
20; CNN: Both Sides with Jesse Jackson; Capital Gang, Crossfire, Diplomatic License, Evans & Novak,
Future Watch, Health Week, Health Works, Inside Business, Inside Politics, Larry King Live, Moneyline,
Moneyweek, News, Newsmaker Saturday; Pinnacle, Reliable Sources, Science and Technology Week,
Showbiz Today, Special Assignment, Talkback Live, Your Money; NPR: All Things Considered, Morning
Edition, Weekend Edition; and PBS: American Experience, Charlie Rose, Frontline, Nova, Wall Street
Journal Report, Washington Week in Review.

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Journal of Communication, March 2002

1990; Terkildsen & Schnell, 1997; van Zoonen, 1992). Fourth, the victimization
frame (Ashley & Olson, 1998; Howell, 1990; McClusky, 1997) reveals feminists as
weak and vulnerable. The fifth frame was suggested by McClusky (1997) in her
cogent discussion of the tension between feminists’ victimization and agency; an
agency frame represents feminists as strong and capable. Finally, we wanted to
focus on exactly where feminists were found, and added site of struggle as the
sixth frame, reflecting the variety of locations (home, school, religion, work, etc.)
of feminist activities. This category includes some items others have considered
separately, such as family and work (Costain, Braunstein, & Berggren, 1997). Some
words may appear in more than one category; for example, the word violence is
pertinent to both the goals and the victimization frames, the word worker is perti-
nent to both the goals and the site of struggle (workplace) frames, and the word
wife is pertinent to both the personalization and the site of struggle (home) frames.
Operational definitions of all frames are presented in the results section.
Statistical analyses. To test whether feminists and women are more or less
likely to be framed in a given fashion (e.g., “Are women or feminists more likely
to be framed as deviant?”), we use the z test for comparing two sample propor-
tions (Moore & McCabe, 1993).

Results

Before addressing the framing of feminists and women, we first consider Rhode’s
(1997) charge, echoing Tuchman’s (1978a) description of symbolic annihilation,
that women and women’s issues in general are neglected in the mass media.
Rhode (1997) and Morris (1973a) argued that the women’s movement receives
minimal coverage. Our corpus contained 135,759,087 words. In it, the target words
“woman” and “women” appeared 1,158,756 times, or 0.85% of all words. The
target words “feminist,” “feminists,” and “feminism” appeared 25,139 times, or
0.02% of all words. A z test showed this to be a statistically significant difference,
with “woman/en” appearing much more frequently than “feminist/s/ism” (z =
1044.14, p < .0001). Thus, feminism continues to receive relatively little attention
in the media.
The demonization frame. Prior research argues feminists are demonized when
portrayed in the media as crazy, ill-tempered, ugly, man-hating, family-wrecking,
hairy-legged, bra-burning, radical lesbians. We looked through the corpus for the
co-occurrence of such words with our target words. Women/woman co-occurred
with demonizing words 3,287 times, meaning that 0.28% of all references to women/
an appeared in a demonizing frame. (Table 1 presents an overview of the results
for all frames.) Some of the most common co-occurrences were women-bad (202
appearances), women/an-lesbian/s (184), women/an-jerk/s (89) and women/an-
bitch/y/es (87). Feminist/s/ism co-occurred with demonizing words 507 times, or
2.02% of all references. The most common co-occurrence was feminist/s/ism-
radical (57 times), followed by militant (13), lesbian/s (12), amuck/amok (12),
raging (6), and masculine (6). A z test showed the difference in the proportion of
demonizing references to women/en and feminist/s/ism to be statistically signifi-

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cant (z = -48.10, p < .0001). Consistent with prior research, feminists are demon-
ized more often in the media than are women.
The personalization and trivialization frame. This frame includes media atten-
tion to an individual’s personal attributes, such as appearance, marital status, per-
sonal habits, or personal style. A focus on style over substance, if found, serves to
trivialize people and their positions. Rhode (1997) argued that a focus on femi-
nists’ appearance is particularly troublesome because those who reject traditional
standards of femininity are ridiculed, whereas those who do not are deemed vain
and perhaps even hypocritical.
Our analysis revealed 40,148 co-occurrences between women/an and person-
alizing words (3.46% of all woman/en references), which seemed to reflect em-
phases on romance and marital status, clothing and appearance, motherhood,
sex, and body parts. The media paid a great deal of attention to women’s romance
and marital status. For example, the word pair women/an-married appeared 1,217
times; women/an-divorce appeared 98 times. Other common word pairs included
women-single (291), women-marriage (215), woman-husband (528), woman-wife
(252), and woman-mrs (106). Women’s clothing and appearance were also of
interest, with woman-beautiful co-occurring 299 times, women/an-attractive (266),
women/an-hair/ed (215), women/an-clothes/ing (208), women-fat (74), women-
thin (41), women/an-fashion (88), and woman-ugly (17). Motherhood was also a
great concern to the media. References to children and babies abounded, with
woman-child co-occurring 519 times, woman-children 473 times, women/an-kids
322 times, woman-pregnant 332 times, and women-pregnancy 125 times. An em-
phasis on sex is revealed by the co-occurrence of woman/en and lexical variants
of sex (491 co-occurrences), women-erotic (65), and women-lovers (60). Women’s
body parts also received extensive attention in the media; woman/en-breasts co-
occurred 161 times, women/an-eyes appeared 123 times, woman-leg/s/ged ap-
peared 41 times, and women-hands appeared 81 times.
Our target feminist words co-occurred with personalizing words 733 times, or
in 2.92% of feminist/s/ism references. Attention to marital status was reflected in
word pairs such as feminist-marriage (15 co-occurrences), feminist-wedding (4),
and feminist/s-single (4). Clothing and appearance were reflected in word pairs
such as feminist/s-fashion/ed (9), feminist/m-bras (8), and feminism-ugly (1). Femi-
nists’ maternal status was shown by the co-occurrence of feminist/ism-mother (9),
feminist-child (8), feminist-kids (3), and feminist/s/ism-baby/ies (6). Media atten-
tion to sex, when considering feminists, focuses on “deviant” sex. There were 13
co-occurrences of the words feminist/s/ism and sex/sexual, but this is overshad-
owed by 8 co-occurrences with homosexuals/ity, 12 with lesbian/s, and 19 with
gay/s. The personalization of feminists did not seem to extend to body parts:
There were very few word pairs associating feminists with legs, breasts and the
like. A z test showed the difference in the proportion of personalizing references
to women/en and feminist/s/ism to be statistically significant (z = 4.72, p < .0001).
Surprisingly (given the findings of prior research), feminists are personalized and
trivialized by the media less often than are women.
The goals frame. The literature argues that when feminists or women are per-
sonalized and trivialized, there is a concomitant decrease in attention to substance

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(e.g., the issues, goals, or agenda of the women’s movement). Whereas we ac-
knowledge there is no single agenda or set of goals on which all feminists would
agree, we have defined this frame as one which is concerned with civil rights,
workplace rights, reproductive rights, preventing violence toward women, and
improving general conditions for women. Our target words women/an co-oc-
curred with such goals words 26,770 times. That is, 2.31% of all references to
women reflected the goals frame. Workplace issues seemed to dominate; for ex-
ample, the word pair women/an-work/ing appeared 2236 times, and woman/en-
pay co-occurred 341 times. Words reflecting general improvements also received
heavy attention, as seen by the word pairs women/an-rights (715), women-help
(631), women-better (498), women/an-equal/ly/lity (410), women-change (334),
and women/an-sexist/ism (56). A civil rights concern is also present. Women or
woman co-occurred with lexical variants of discrimination 333 times. Reproduc-
tive rights are linked with women through the word pairs women/an-abort/s/ion/
ions (686), women/an-choice/s (537), and women/an-contraceptive/ion (42). At-
tention to issues of violence toward woman is evident through word pairs such as
women/an-violence (941 co-occurrences), women/an-abuse (452), women/an-
harassment (364), and women/an with lexical variants of rape (773).
The words feminist, feminists, and feminism appeared with goals words 1302
times, 5.18% of all feminist/s/ism references were related to the goals frame. In
these references, a concern for improving general conditions for women, and for
the women’s movement in general, seemed more evident than did a concern for
the workplace. For example, feminist/s/ism co-occurred with movement 107 times
and with agenda 14 times, feminists-beliefs co-occurred 10 times, feminist/ism-
revolution co-occurred 12 times, and feminist/ism-sisterhood co-occurred 5 times.
The feminist target words co-occurred with lexical variants of sexism 6 times, and
with equity/equal 15 times. Workplace-oriented words were much less commonly
linked to feminists, with feminist/s/ism-work co-occurring 21 times, and feminist/
s/ism-working 5 times. In terms of civil rights, no lexical variants of discrimination
co-occurred with the feminist target words. Reproductive rights issues appeared in
word pairs such as feminist/s/ism-abortion/s/ist (27 co-occurrences) and feminist/
s-choice (7). The most common co-occurrences of words representing concerns
with violence toward women were feminist/s-violence (32) and feminist/s with
lexical variants of rape (10).
A z test showed the difference in the proportion of goals-oriented references to
women/en and feminist/s/ism to be statistically significant (z = -29.58, p < .0001).
Feminists are more closely associated with what might generally be considered
the women’s movement’s goals than are women. However, although feminists are
more closely associated with these goals, the associations seem qualitatively dif-
ferent from those of “regular” women. Qualitative analysis reveals that goal-ori-
ented words, when linked to feminists, tend to reflect general concerns (e.g., for
conditions and for solidarity), whereas, when linked to women, these goal-ori-
ented words address more specific issues such as the workplace, discrimination,
and violence toward women.
The victimization frame. Women and feminists are portrayed in a victimization
frame when their representation includes references to weakness, vulnerability,

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mental illness, crime (especially rape and abuse), fear, dysfunctionality, and so
forth. Our target words women and woman co-occurred with victimization words
13,756 times, representing 1.19% of all women/an references. The most com-
monly occurring victimization word pairs were associated with crime: women/an
and lexical variations of abuse (1078), rape (773), victim (477), and fear (456).
Women/an-vulnerable co-occurred 80 times, and women/an-wounded co-occurred
65 times.
Feminists were framed in a victimized fashion in 1.00% of references to femi-
nist/s/ism, for a total of 252 times. The leading word pairs were feminist/s-vio-
lence (32) and feminist/s-violence (31), feminist/s with lexical variants of rape
(10), and feminist/s/ism with victim (8). A z test showed the difference in the
proportion of victimization words associated with women/en and with feminist/s/
ism to be statistically significant (z = -2.68, p = .009). Although previous research
has decried the media’s tendency to portray feminists as victims, our finding is that
women are portrayed as victims to a greater extent than are feminists.
The agency frame. This frame reflects an active individual having strength,
capability, a voice, leadership, power, and the like. The words women and woman
appeared in an agency frame 6920 times, or in 0.59% of all women/an references.
The most common word pairs were women/an and lexical variants of power
(861), strong (822), respect (274), leader (266), advocate (132), and activist (118).
Feminist words co-occurred with agency words 295 times, or 1.17% of all feminist
references. The most common word pairs were feminist/s/ism and variants of
activist (38), leader (34), power (28), voices (10), advocate (8), victory (6), and
won (6). A z test showed the difference in the proportion of agency words asso-
ciated with women/en and with feminist/s/ism to be statistically significant (z =
-11.61, p < .0001). Although neither women nor feminists are overwhelmingly
framed as having agency, feminist references appear within an agency frame pro-
portionally more often than do references to women.
The site of struggle frame. Our perusal of the corpus led us to wonder, “where
are feminist ideas and actions located?” The stage or site of struggle is an impor-
tant consideration because it is one means by which the media frame the aspects
of our social reality in which feminism and feminist ideas may be relevant. We
identified 10 sites, each of which will be discussed briefly: home, geographic
location, health, media and the arts, workplace, court/law, education, politics,
sports and leisure, and religion. Table 1 contains more detail.
“Home” words are those orienting the subject to the family, home, house,
marriage, furniture, guests, kitchen, patio, apartment, and so forth. Our target
women words co-occurred with home words in 1.73% of all references, whereas
our target feminist words co-occurred with home words in 0.88% of all references.
Women were significantly more likely to be linked with the home than were
feminists (z = 10.38, p < .0001). “Geographic location” words are those words
linking our target words to some actual city, state, or country. Women/an co-
occurred with geographic location words in 1.53% of all references, feminists in
1.16%. Thus, women were significantly more likely to be oriented to a specific
location than were feminists (z = 4.70, p < .0001). “Health” words reflect states of
illness and wellness and include disease, health, cancer, and doctor. Such words

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Table 1. Six Frames for Feminism and Women

Women Feminism
Frame Frequency % Frequency % z value Probability

Demonization 3,287 0.28 507 2.02 -48.10 <.0001

Personalization & trivialization 40,148 3.46 733 2.92 4.72 <.0001
Goals of movement 26,770 2.31 1,302 5.18 -29.58 <.0001
Victimization 13,756 1.19 252 1.00 -2.68 0.0090
Agency 6,920 0.59 295 1.17 -11.61 <.0001
Site of struggle:
Home 20,101 1.73 220 0.88 10.38 <.0001
Location 17,709 1.53 292 1.16 4.70 <.0001
Health 16,829 1.45 129 0.51 12.40 <.0001
Media/arts 14,272 1.23 432 1.71 -6.89 <.0001
Workplace 12,245 1.06 138 0.55 7.83 <.0001
Courts/law 11,754 1.01 166 0.66 5.56 <.0001
Education 10,094 0.87 203 0.81 1.07 ns
Politics 7,468 0.64 402 1.60 -18.43 <.0001
Sports/leisure 4,985 0.43 36 0.14 -6.93 <.0001
Religion 3,944 0.34 156 0.62 7.48 <.0001

co-occurred with women/an in 1.45% of all references, and with feminist/s/ism in

0.51% of all references. This is a statistically significant difference (z = 12.40, p <
.0001). Although they may well be feminist concerns, issues of health and repro-
ductive care are more closely associated with women.
“Media and the arts” words include audience, theatre, television, book, maga-
zine, author, radio, movies, painting, and song. Of all references to women/an in
the corpus, 1.23% were media and the arts words, as were 1.71% of all references
to feminist/s/ism. Feminists are significantly more likely to be framed in terms of
media than are women (z = -6.89, p < .0001). “Workplace” references include all
references to jobs, working, management, labor, and careers. Women/an co-oc-
curred with workplace words 1.06% of the time, whereas feminist/s/ism did so in
0.55% of all cases. Despite the fact that work issues are part of the feminist agenda,
women are significantly more likely to be framed in terms of work than are femi-
nists (z = 7.83, p < .0001). “Court/law” words include all words pertaining to the
legal system, such as judge, jury, lawyer, attorney, lawsuit, police, crime, and trial.
Of all references to women/en, 1.01% co-occurred with court/law words, whereas
0.66% of references to feminist/s/ism did so. Thus, women are significantly more
likely to be framed in terms of the legal system than are feminists (z = 5.56, p <
.0001). “Education” words address concerns of teaching, learning, studying, school,
colleges, and universities. They appeared in 0.87% of all references to women/an
and in 0.81% of all references to feminist/s/ism. This is not a statistically significant
difference.

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“Politics” words deal with the political system and include government, con-
gress, senate, senator, elections, voters, politicians, and the like. Politics words co-
occurred in 0.64% of woman/en references, and in 1.60% of feminist/s/ism refer-
ences. Our target feminist words were significantly more likely to co-occur with
politics words than were our target women words (z = -18.43, p < .0001). “Sports
and leisure” words include recreational activities of all types, such as play, sports,
baseball, team, exercise, aerobics, and jogging. They appeared in 0.43% of all
references to women/an, and in 0.14% of all references to feminist/s/ism. Women
were more likely to be associated with sports and leisure than were feminists (z =
-6.93, p < .0001). “Religion” words address religious beliefs of all types: god,
catholic, muslim, bible, religious, and so on. They appeared in 0.34% of all refer-
ences to women/an, and in 0.62% of all references to feminist/s/ism; feminists
were more likely to be associated with religion than were women.

Discussion and Conclusions

This investigation uses a computerized content analysis to study how feminists are
represented in two and a half years’ worth of news and public affairs programs on
ABC, CNN, NPR, and PBS. It builds upon prior literature to investigate 6 major
frames: demonization, personalization and trivialization, goals of the movement,
victimization, agency, and sites of struggle (home, location, health, media/arts,
workplace, courts/law, education, politics, sports/leisure, and religion). It extends
previous work in several ways. Most importantly, it analyzes a large volume of
text, and it compares the representation of feminists to the representation of women.
It is only within the context of the representation of “regular” or “normal” women
that the meaning of the representation of feminists becomes clear. Is 1%, for
example, a small or a large amount? Without a basis of comparison, the answer
remains unclear.
In this investigation, we found that feminists are portrayed in a remarkably
different fashion than “regular” women are, yet that is not necessarily a negative
finding. Although much of the prior research argued that feminists are portrayed
in a negative fashion, this investigation indicates they are in many ways portrayed
more positively than are other women. Feminists are less often framed in a per-
sonalized and trivialized fashion than are women. Feminists are less often framed
as victims, and more often framed as having agency, than are women. The goals of
the women’s movement are more closely associated with feminists than with women.
However, the picture of feminism and feminists in the media is not necessarily
positive, either. As Tuchman (1978a) argued, symbolic annihilation occurs when
social groups (such as feminists) are absent from, condemned by, or trivialized in,
the media. Our research shows that feminists are not subjected to trivialization to
the same extent as are women in general, but we note that feminists are person-
alized and trivialized in nearly 3% of all references. The media clearly consider
information such as a feminists’ appearance and marital status important. The fact
that such information is deemed even more important for “regular” women should
not obscure the reality that, of all the frames, only the “goals of the movement”

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frame is more likely to be applied to feminists than is the personalization and

trivialization frame.
In terms of their presence in the media, we see that feminists are indeed absent
from the news and public affairs programs analyzed for this study. The finding
that the words “woman” or “women” appear more than 40 times as often as the
words “feminist/s/ism” supports our claim that feminism is still routinely ignored
by the media. We argue that, by failing to attend to feminists and feminism, the
news and public affairs programs we have investigated are actually framing femi-
nism as unimportant. After all, if feminism were of value, it would receive media
attention, wouldn’t it? This is a separate concern from the frames analyzed in the
rest of this article. Whereas the six main frames we investigated in this research
function actively, through word choice and word association, inattention pas-
sively frames feminism as unimportant, via silence. It seems as though, if potential
threats to the dominant ideology and the status quo are perceived as undesirable,
silence is indeed golden.
Feminists also continue to be condemned in the media, as revealed by our
finding that feminists and feminism are significantly more likely to be demonized
than are women. Feminists are nearly 10 times as likely to be associated with
words such as jerks, bitches, radical, or bad than are women. Of all the frames,
demonization is the third most common for feminists, a finding that becomes even
more striking in light of our discovery that demonization is the frame least com-
monly applied to women.
In terms of our analysis of the site of the struggle, we have found feminists less
likely to appear in the context of the home, less likely to be placed into any
specific geographic location, less likely to be participating in the court or legal
system, less likely to be in the workplace, less likely to be involved in issues of
health and well-being, and less likely to be engaging in sports or leisure activities
than are “regular” women. The sites where feminists appear more often than
women include media and the arts, politics, and religion.
We argue that the media’s presentation of the domain in which feminism and
feminists operate is important for several reasons. First, it implicitly informs the
audience as to the appropriateness of feminist concerns, and hence a feminist
perspective, in these domains. According to our research, the media present a
vision of a social world in which feminism doesn’t really belong in the home, or
the workplace, or the legal system. Feminism doesn’t seem, at least from what is
presented in the media, to function within the private sphere—it is more often
found in the public sphere (media and the arts, politics, religion). All told, this
pattern may serve to reinforce the perception that feminism is neither relevant nor
particularly applicable to the bulk of daily life for the majority of citizens.
Second, the pattern of mediated representation of the site of feminist struggles
may further implicitly show the audience that feminists are not quite “normal,” not
quite “regular,” not quite “real.” Real women have homes, live in real places
(cities, towns, etc.), and engage in regular day-to-day work and leisure activities.
Real women do the types of things we (audience members) do, but feminists are
much less likely to be portrayed in such situations than are “regular” women.
Feminists, on the other hand, are involved with the types of things that most of us

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(the audience) will never become active in—politics, and media and the arts. (Our
finding that feminists are more likely than women to be associated with religion
does not seem to fit this pattern, unless the association reflects feminism’s chal-
lenges to the status quo of traditional religion. This may be the case, but our
methodology cannot provide that insight.) To the extent that feminists do not do
the same things as “regular” women, the media audience might assume that femi-
nism and its concerns are not relevant to regular people and, perhaps, are actually
abnormal.
Future research could be conducted on several fronts. Similar studies could
analyze the text of news and public affairs content appearing in other media or in
other countries. Entertainment content in a variety of media could also be investi-
gated. Certainly a comparative analysis of news and entertainment content would
be worthwhile, as would cross-cultural comparisons. Such comparisons could not
only be international in nature, but could also compare (for example) English-
and Spanish-language news within the United States. Research could also attempt
to explicate the linkage between this type of content and the media audience:
what are the effects of being exposed to feminism when it is framed in this fashion
rather than some other? Some scholars have investigated how audiences are af-
fected by the framing of political issues, and we would be well served by experi-
ments testing the effects of framing on people’s perceptions of feminists. Further
research could ameliorate a shortcoming of this present research (one shared by
all the content analyses cited herein)––a focus only on verbal content. Both elec-
tronic and print media rely heavily on nonverbal channels (print media utilize
visual images, radio employs all manner of paralinguistic and other audio cues,
and television uses all of the above), and these channels should not be avoided.
Although this presents a major challenge to scholars, we would welcome research
efforts that acknowledge and investigate the power of visual images and/or non-
verbal audio cues. Finally, additional research might undertake an analysis of how
men are represented in the media. If the portrayal of feminism is best understood
via a comparison to the representation of women, then the portrayal of women
can be best understood when contextualized by a comparison to the representa-
tion of men.
This study has shown that, across nearly all of the relevant frames, news and
public affairs programs treat “feminists” differently than they treat “women.” To
the extent that audience attitudes and judgments are influenced by the media’s
framing of issues, this could result in, at best, a conflicted perspective toward
feminists and feminism. “Feminists” have more agency and are less victimized
than “women” and are personalized and trivialized to a lesser degree, which might
make feminism seem appealing to individuals who find the perceived goals of
feminism worthy. However, the use of the target words in the language reveals an
additional facet of feminism’s meaning: Feminists are odd. If audiences reflect the
media’s framings of feminists and women, we should not be surprised if future
research discovers that people believe something like, “Feminists don’t do the
same types of things that ‘regular’ women do, and there aren’t that many of ‘them’
out there, anyway.” Such a perspective probably does not encourage people to
embrace feminist goals and ideals; indeed, it may well do just the opposite.

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Journal of Communication, March 2002

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