Hey there,

I am back with my final post.  There was a typo in one of the author's name in the American way of Death article.  It should read Sharon "Crook" not Sharon "Cook."

Rebecca C. Hains, “Power Feminism, Mediated: Girl Power and the Commercial Politics of Change”, Women’s Studies in Communication 32, no. 1 (2009): 89-113.

In this article, the author talks about how feminism has driven away a lot of the female population to its cause because it is so intent on using scare tactics. She states the reasoning behind this type of thinking is due to the fact feminist believe that since men have the power in the public sphere such as politics and business, they will not give it up, meaning in order to get what they want they will have to take it by force. So where do females turn to? The answer is the media and we all know that the media only interest is in capturing an audience. One such way is through the use of children’s programming which was gaining speed in the 1990’s. But what seemed to attract children the most was programming, which included girl power. Such shows were Powerpuff Girls, Kim Possible, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and Totally Spies. Most of the time she talked about the villains which represented what she called “victim feminists” for example Femme Fatale, a villain feminist robot attempted to turn the girls using the idea that they were being “kept down” by the males of Townsville. Eventually, the girls came to their senses and realized she was using the “victim feminist” excuse for her actions and lock her in jail. The other big thing is that “Girl Power” merchandise has also been introduced around the same time, but she believes that by doing so you have changed the meaning to “Buy this.”

Sharon Crook West and Joseph P. McKerns, “Death and Communists: The Funeral Industry’s Attack on Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death”, American Journalism 26, no. 1 (2009): 31-53.
The big topic of the article was how the media received the “American Way of Death” by Jessica Mitford and how funeral directors and the Right Wing attacked it in a desperate attempt to save their reputations. Funeral directors described the American Funeral as a “beautiful memory picture;” while Mitford described it as “the pickled and prettified corpse arranged in a suitably costly box.” The main argument Mitford made in her book was that many times when burying a union worker, the unions would provide for the service but little would go to the widow, mainly because the funeral was so expensive. One solution Mitford provided was cremation, but funeral directors knew this would lose them money so as a counterargument they would call her a communist, because of ties with a Communist Party she had ten years ago that she is no longer part of. What was more amazing was the fact that when the funeral directors would fund for a journal article to go against Mitford, they would immediately see flaws not because Mitford’s book was very popular when first published, but because her work is so well researched that any argument against it would be futile unless it was also well researched. But because they were intent on making an argument to invalidate the book, they made stupid errors. This is probably most amazing because the media sided with a woman and her ideas rather than well respected men in high paying jobs in 1963, when the feminist movement was only starting to gain momentum.

Kathleen Endres, “In Their Own Voices: Women Redefine and Frame Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, American Journalism 26, no. 1 (2009): 55-80.
This article deals with the author going through newspaper articles written by NOW members such as News and Opinions of Women, NOW Hear This, and Women Are People, as well as articles written the radical right wing such as Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Everywoman Is Our Sister, Pandora, and It Ain’t Me Babe. Her main goal was to look at the articles and show how they defined Title VII of the Civil rights act. The background began when Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the EEOC was created to create equal job opportunities for those of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Unfortunately, it did not have time to enforce Title VII for women. So of women of NOW and the radical right wing create newspaper chapters in the major cities of the US. NOW articles referenced different people of race such as Jo-Ann Gardner’s one summary relating her plight to Malcolm X. The radical right wing articles mainly focused on how NOW was doing everything completely wrong. Funny how both had so different views on how each other was trying to get what they wanted.

Barbara Friedman, “Unlikely Warriors: How Four U.S. News Sources Explained Female Suicide Bombers”, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2008): 841-859.
The idea of this article is to look into how US media responses to female suicide bombers. Originally, male suicide bombers had a motive such that there were “72 virgins in heaven” but the media had no explanation for why women did it. Eventually, they concluded that there were five possible reasons such that a female would become a suicide bomber: (1) strategic desirability, for example nearly all news items studied displayed that a women could get through to many places undetected; (2) influence of men, for example one new report stated that there were traces of heroin or morphine; (3) revenge, for example one women caught before she committed the act said she was going to do it because Israeli soldiers pointed a gun at her father’s head and killed him; (4) desperation, such that one Palestine bomber came under control of the Israelis leaving her with little choice; and (5) liberation, such as many women in these countries were considered second-class citizens and wanted to send a message. All of these motives have come from the idea that since men are the dominant sex to be suicide bombers with them being masculine, the only way to describe a female suicide bomber is to make her more masculine. It shows how media feels the need to explain what is not already explained even if it means removing a women’s femininity.

Karen Slattery and Ana C. Garner, “Mothers of Soldiers in Wartime: A National News Narrative”, Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 5 (2007): 429-445.
What is an archetypal patriotic mother? According to this article is it a mother that supports the both her child fighting in the war and the actual war itself. With regard to past war, we have no record to disprove of any mother being an archetypal patriotic mother, but he says that it is not as important as being an archetypal good mother, where the mother supports her child but may having conflicting issues with regard to the war. The author goes into detail about the qualities of an archetypal good mother in the sense of the different modes she may be in and the type of support she gives to her child. For example, the “in danger” mode is where she will give mostly material support such as food, blankets, and clothing where as the “captured or injured” mode she will give mostly spiritual support according to the study. Of the 134 mothers done in this study, he has found that all are archetypal good mothers but only a third of the mothers are archetypal patriotic mothers. This is big because it was originally said that most mothers fit the archetype of the patriotic mother, but we in this war have seen a shift in the thinking of the idea of war to nurturing mothers and need to make a definition to define what it means to be maternal.

As you can see a lot of these articles are based on femininity and the media.  If I could make one generalization about the articles I have read, it is that they tend to focus either on one particular one moment in time such as the Betty Ford article or The American Way of Death, or they include a lot of separate yet unimportant articles to the public such as the Suicide bombers article or the Mother's of Soldiers articles.  I don't know if that is what is considered necessary for an article to be published, but a general tend makes it look so.  Also they tend to repeat a lot of what has already been said earlier in their articles.  However with most articles regarding femininity and the media, I also have noticed how they tend to glorify femininity and make journalism the bad guy, every time.  It makes me wonder if media is so bad, then how would femininity have grown rapidly without it.  Sometimes it makes me wonder how a journalist can be objective when he writes from a biased stance.  That is all I have for you, thanks for reading.

Chris