Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970

by Bonnie J. Dow

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Dow discusses a wide variety of television programming and provides specific case studies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, One Day at a Time, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She juxtaposes analyses of genre, plot, character development, and narrative structure with the larger debates over feminism that took place at the time the programs originally aired. Dow emphasizes the power of the relationships among television entertainment, news media, women's magazines, publicity, and celebrity biographies and interviews in creating a framework through which television viewers make sense of both the medium's portrayal of feminism and the nature of feminism itself.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

Reviews

[Dana Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're teaching a class on the image of women in television, Bonnie J. Dow's text is perfect for undergraduate students. It is very thorough in it's texts at examining Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, etc. It's a timeline of the women's movement through media images and analyzes them in terms of the context of the how society depicted the decades rather than in terms of the feminist movement.

[Cynthia Bemis Abrams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really important look at how television mirrored and propelled significant social change in the latter part of the 20th century. It's essential reading for any number of academic disciplines where television's influence is identified as a force of change.