CHAPTER 9

The Symbolic Annihilation cifWomen by the Mass Media

Gaye Tuchman

Originally published as the introduction to

Hearth and Home: Images of women in the mass media, 1978.

READING INTRODUCTION

In this introduction to a larger edited volume, Tuchman surveys the substantive

content of the mass media-television, newspapers, magazines-and the adver-
tising they carry to gather support for her argument that, by largely ignoring
women or portraying them in stereotypical roles of victim and/or consumer, the
mass media symbolically annihilate women. Tuchman notes that most media
portray women, if at all, in traditional roles: homemaker, mother, or, if they are
in the paid workforce, clerical and other "pink-collar" jobs. Correspondingly,
there are few, if any, depictions of strong female characters in positions of respon-
sibility or authority, even inside the home. Similarly, women's magazines focus
on the "domestic" pursuits-marriage, child rearing, and the like-while not
encouraging education, training, and other choices that tend to bring individuals
into positions of power, authority, and independence. Instead, women generally
are shown to be defined in terms of their relationships with men--suggesting
that women are, in the end, dependent, incapable of living their own lives with-
out male "guidance."
What makes these patterns particularly troubling for Tuchman is the role that
the mass media may play in shaping young girls' wants, needs, and expectations.
To the degree that the institutions of mass communication influence behavior
and attitudes, consistent repetition of such themes can be expected to encour-
age the maintenance of women's subordinate position in society. Additionally,
because the media r41ect the dominant values of society, they add a powerful link
in the chain of socialization that keeps women dependent. Women as inde-
pendent, creative actors, then, are annihilated in favor of what Tuchman per-
ceives as a false, repressive "ideal."

L. Crothers et al. (eds.), Culture and Politics

© Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart 2000
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 151

READING TEXT

Americans learn basic lessons about social life from the mass media, much as
hundreds of years ago illiterate peasants studied the carvings around the apse or
the stained glass windows of cathedrals. As Harold Lasswell (1948) pointed out
almost thirty years ago, mass media have replaced yesterday's cathedrals and
parish churches as teachers of the young and of the masses. For our society, like
any other society, must pass on its social heritage from one generation to the
next. The societal need for continuity and transmission of dominant values may
be particularly acute in times of rapid social change, such as our own. Then,
individuals may not only need some familiarity with the past, if the society is to
survive, but they must also be prepared to meet changing conditions. Nowhere
is that need as readily identifiable as in the area of sex roles-sex roles are social
guidelines for sex-appropriate appearance, interests, skills, behaviors, and self-
perceptions.
It is in this area, in the past few decades, where social expectations and social
conditions have been changing most rapidly. In 1920, twenty-four percent of
the nation's adult women worked for pay outside the home and most of them
were unmarried. Fifty years later, in 1976, over half of all American women
between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four were in the labor force, most of
them married and many of them with children who were of preschool age.
One-third of all women with children between the ages of three and five were
employed in 1970. Such a transformation not only affects women: it affects their
families as members make adjustments in their shared life; and as working men
in the factory and office increasingly encounter economically productive
women who insist on the abandonment of old prejudices and discriminatory
behaviors. In the face of such change, the portrayal of sex roles in the mass media
is a topic of great social, political, and economic importance.
This book* concerns the depiction of sex roles in the mass media and the
effect of that portrayal on American girls and women. In each chapter, social sci-
ence researchers ask, what are the media telling us about ourselves? How do they
say women and men should behave? How women should treat men? How
women should view themselves? What do the media view as the best way for a
woman to structure her life? What do they tell a little girl to expect or hope for
when she becomes a woman?
Based on original research, each of these chapters helps break a new path in
communications research. Not surprisingly, little research appeared on these
topics until the modern women's movement gained strength in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Until then, psychology, sociology, economics, and history were
mainly written by men, about men, and for men. As Jessie Bernard (1973) points
out, the interactions of men were viewed as the appropriate subject for social
science research, and upwardly mobile male researchers were fascinated with the
topics of power and social stratification. No one considered the way women

* In original publication.
152 Caye Tuchman

experienced the world. Instead, they were seen as men's silent or unopinionated
consorts. (The term "unopinionated" is used because studies of attitudes by sur-
vey researchers frequently neglected to ask women their opinions, concentrat-
ing instead upon the attitudes of men. The most well-known exception to this
role is a study of influences upon women's consumer habits, funded by a
women's magazine in the 1940s [Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955).
These generalizations are, unfortunately, equally true of communications
researchers. Generations of researchers studied the impact of the media upon
political life. In the past, the main topic of concern was male voting behavior.
(It was assumed women voted like their husbands; women were swayed by a
husband's or father's personal influence [see McCormack 1975] .) More recently,
researchers have become fascinated by agenda setting-the way the media struc-
ture citizens' priorities and definitions of political issues. Since the women's
movement is not a top priority for the news media, little is known about its
place in citizens' political agendas. Nobody seemed to care about the effect of
the mass media upon the generation and maintenance of sex-role stereotypes.
And why should they? Before the advent of the women's movement these
stereotypes seemed natural, " given." Few questioned how they developed, how
they were reinforced, or how they were maintained. Certainly the media's role
in this process was not questioned.
But the importance of stereotyping was not lost on the women's movement;
for stereotypes are confining. Sex-role stereotypes are set portrayals of sex-
appropriate appearance, interests, skills, behaviors, and self-perceptions. They are
more stringent than guidelines in suggesting persons not conforming to the
specified way of appearing, feeling, and behaving are inadequate as males or
females. A boy who cries is not masculine and a young woman who forswears
makeup is not feminine. Stereotypes present individuals with a more limited
range of acceptable appearance, feelings, and behaviors than guidelines do. The
former may be said to limit further the human possibilities and potentialities
contained within already limited sex roles.
This volume* hopes to delineate a national social problem-the mass media's
treatment of women. It is a crucial pr9blem, because as Lasswell (1948) points
out, the mass media transmit the social heritage from one generation to the
next. In a complex society, such as ours, the mass media pass on news from one
segment of society, classes, regions, and subcultures to another. Additionally, they
enable societal institutions to coordinate activities. Like the Catholic Church in
the middle ages "that great broadcasting center of medieval Europe" (Baumann
1972,65), the mass media can disseminate the same message to all classes at the
same time, with authority and universality of reception, in a decidedly one-
directional flow of information. But, if the stereotyped portrayal of sex roles is
out-of-date, the media may be preparing youngsters-girls, in particular-for a
world that no longer exists.
Suppose for a moment that children's television primarily presents adult
women as housewives, nonparticipants in the paid labor force. Also, suppose that

* Original publication.
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MAss MEDIA 153

girls in the television audience "model" their behavior and expectations on that
of "television women." Such a supposition is quite plausible for

what psychologists call "modeling" occurs simply by watching others,

without any direct reinforcement for learning and without any overt prac-
tice. The child imitates the model without being induced or compelled to
do so. That learning can occur in the absence of direct reinforcement is a
radical departure from earlier theories that regarded reward or punishment
as indispensable to learning. There now is considerable evidence that chil-
dren do learn by watching and listening to others even in the absence of
reinforcement and overt practice. (Lesser, quoted in Cantor 1975,5)

And psychologists note that "opportunities for modeling have been vastly
increased by television" (Lesser, quoted in Cantor 1975,5). It is then equally
plausible that girls exposed to "television women" may hope to be homemak-
ers when they are adults, but not workers outside the home. Indeed, as adults
these girls may resist work outside the home unless necessary for the economic
well-being of their families. Encouraging such an attitude in our nation's girls
can present a problem in the future : As noted, over forty percent of the labor
force was female in 1970, and married women dominate the female labor force.
The active participation of women in the labor force is vital to the maintenance
of the American economy. In the past decade, the greatest expansion of the
economy has been within the sectors that employ women. Mass-media stereo-
types of women as housewives may impede the employment of women by lim-
iting their horizons.
The possible impact of the mass media sex-role stereotypes upon national life
seems momentous. As the studies* collected here demonstrate, this supposition
may accurately predict the future. As an illustration of that possibility, the fol-
lowing sections of this introduction examine the media used by an American
girl as she completes school, then becomes a worker and, probably, a spouse and
mother. 1 Following the format* of this book, this introduction starts with an
examination of the dominant medium American children and adults watch-
television-and then turns to two media especially designed for women-the
women's pages of newspapers and women's magazines. But because of the
plethora of research about television, we concentrate upon that medium. Finally,
we review studies of the impact of the media upon girls and women, again
stressing studies of television.
Two related ideas are central to our discussion. These are the riflection hypoth-
esis and symbolic annihilation. According to the reflection hypothesis, the mass
media reflect dominant societal values. In the case of television (see Tuchman
1974, 1976), the corporate character of the commercial variety causes program
planners and station managers to design programs for appeal to the largest audi-
ences. To attract these audiences (whose time and attention are sold to com-
mercial sponsors), the television industry offers programs consonant with

* Original publication.
154 Caye Tuchman

American values. The pursuit of this aim is solidified by the fact that so many
members of the television industry take those very values for granted: Dominant
American ideas and ideals serve as resources for program development, even
when the planners are unaware of them, much as we all take for granted the air
we breathe. These ideas and ideals are incorporated as symbolic representations if
American society, not as literal portrayals. Take the typical television family of the
1950s: mother, father, and two children living in an upper-middle-class, single-
residence suburban home. Such families and homes were not the most com-
monly found units in the 1950s, but they were the American ideal. Following
George Gerbner (1972, 44), we may say that "representation in the fictional
world," such as the 1950s ideal family, symbolizes or "signifies social existence";
that is, representation in the mass media announces to audience members that
this kind of family (or social characteristic) is valued and approved.
Conversely, we may say that either condemnation, trivialization, or "absence
means symbolic annihilation" (Gerbner 1972,44). Consider the symbolic rep-
resentation of women in the mass media. Relatively few women are portrayed
there, although women are fifty-one percent of the population and are well over
forty percent of the labor force. Those working women who are portrayed are
condemned. Others are trivialized: they are symbolized as child-like adornments
who need to be protected or they are dismissed to the protective confines of the
home. In sum, they are subject to symbolic annihilation.
The mass media deal in symbols and their symbolic representations may not
be up-to-date. A time lag may be operating, for nonmaterial conditions, which
shape symbols, change more slowly than do material conditions. This notion of
a time lag (or a "culture lag," as sociologists term it) may be incorporated into
the reflection hypothesis. As values change, we would expect the images of soci-
ety presented by the media to change. Further, we might expect one medium to
change faster than another. (Because of variations in economic organization, each
medium has a slightly different relationship to changing material conditions.)
The reflection hypothesis also includes the notion that media planners try to
build audiences, and the audiences desired by planners may vary from medium
to medium. For instance, television programmers may seek an audience of men
and women, without distinguishing between women in the labor force and
housewives. But the executives at women's magazines may want to attract
women in the labor force in order to garner advertisements designed for those
women. (Magazine ads essentially support that medium, since each copy costs
much more to produce than it does to purchase. Accordingly, we might expect
the symbolic annihilation of women by television to be more devastating than
that of some women's magazines.
Without further ado, then, let us turn to images of women in the mass media.

Television: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women

To say television is the dominant medium in American life is a vast understate-
ment. In the average American household, television sets are turned on more
than six hours each winter day. More American homes have television sets than
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 155

have private bathrooms, according to the 1970 census. Ninety-six percent of all
American homes are equipped with television, and most have more than one
set. As Sprafkin and Liebert note in Chapter 15,* by the time an American child
is fifteen years old, she has watched more hours of television than she has spent
in the classroom. And since she continues watching as she grows older, the
amount of time spent in school can never hope to equal the time invested view-
ing television.
The use of television by children is encouraged because of parental use. The
average adult spends five hours a day with the mass media, almost as much time
as she or he spends at work. Of these five hours, four are occupied by the elec-
tronic media (radio and television). The other hour is taken up with reading
newspapers, magazines, and books. Television consumes forty percent of the
leisure time of adult Americans. To be sure, despite increased economic concen-
tration there are still 1,741 daily newspapers in this country. And studies indicate
that 63,353,000 papers are sold each day. But the nation's nine hundred-odd
television stations reach millions more on a daily basis. In 1976, over seventy-
five million people watched one event via television, football's annual Super
Bowl spectacular (Hirsch 1978); and when "All in the Family" first appeared on
Saturday night, it had a weekly audience of over 100,000,000, more than half the
people in the nation. Each year, Americans spend trillions of hours watching
television.
What are the portrayals of women to which Americans are exposed during
these long hours? What can the preschool girl and the school girl learn about
being and becoming a woman?
From children's shows to commercials to prime-time adventures and situa-
tion comedies, television proclaims that women don't count for much. They are
underrepresented in television's fictional life--they are "symbolically annihi-
lated." From 1954, the date of the earliest systematic analysis of television's con-
tent, through 1975, researchers have found that males dominated the television
screen. With the exception of soap operas where men make up a "mere major-
ity" of the fictional population, television has shown and continues to show two
men for every woman. Figure 1.1 indicates the proportion has been relatively
constant. The little variation that exists, occurs between types of programs. In
1952 sixty-eight percent of the characters in prime-time drama were male. In
1973, seventy-four percent of those characters were male. Women were con-
centrated in comedies where men make up "only" sixty percent of the fictional
world. Children's cartoons include even fewer women or female characters
(such as anthropomorphized foxes or pussycats) than adult's prime-time pro-
grams do. The paucity of women on American television tells viewers that
women don't matter much in American society.
That message is reinforced by the treatment of those women who do appear
on the television screen. As seen in Figure 1.2, when television shows reveal
someone's occupation, the worker is most likely to be male. Someone might
object that the pattern is inevitable, because men constitute a larger share of the

* In original book.
156 Caye Tuchman

pool of people who can be professionals. But that objection is invalidated by the
evidence presented by soap operas, where women are more numerous. But the
invariant pattern holds there too, despite the fact that men have been found to
be only about fifty percent of the characters on the "soaps" (see Downing 1974;
Katzman 1972).
Additionally, those few working women included in television plots are sym-
bolically denigrated by being portrayed as incompetent or as inferior to male
workers. Pepper, the "Police Woman" on the show of the same name (Angie
Dickinson) is continually rescued from dire and deadly situations by her male
colleagues. Soap operas provide even more powerful evidence for the portrayal
of women as incompetents and inferiors. Although Turow (1974) finds that soap
operas present the most favorable image of female workers, there too they are
subservient to competent men. On "The Doctors," surgical procedures are per-
formed by male physicians, and although the female M.D.'s are said to be com-
petent at their work, they are primarily shown pulling case histories from file
cabinets or filling out forms. On other soap operas, male lawyers try cases and
female lawyers research briefs for them. More generally, women do not appear
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 157

in the same professions as men: men are doctors, women, nurses; men are
lawyers, women, secretaries; men work in corporations, women tend boutiques.
The portrayal of incompetence extends from denigration through victimiza-
tion and trivialization. When television women are involved in violence, unlike
males, they are more likely to be victims than aggressors (Gerbner 1972).
Equally important, the pattern of women's involvement with television violence
reveals approval of married women and condemnation of single and working
women. As Gerbner (1972) demonstrates, single women are more likely to be
victims of violence than married women, and working women are more likely
to be villains than housewives. Conversely, married women who do not work
for money outside the home are most likely to escape television's mayhem and
to be treated sympathetically. More generally, television most approves those
women who are presented in a sexual context or within a romantic or family
158 Caye Tuchman

role (Gerber 1972; cf. Liebert, Neale, and Davidson 1973) . Two out of three tel-
evision-women are married, were married, or are engaged to be married. By
way of contrast, most television men are single and have always been single. Also,
men are seen outside the home and women within it, but even here, one finds
trivialization of women's role within the home.
According to sociological analyses of traditional sex roles (such as Parsons
1949), men are "instrumental" leaders, active workers and decision makers out-
side the home; women are "affective" or emotional leaders in solving personal
problems within the home. But television trivializes women in their traditional
role by assigning this task to men too. The nation's soap operas deal with the
personal and emotional, yet Turow (1974) finds that on the soap operas, the male
sex is so dominant that men also lead the way to solving emotional problems.
In sum, following the reasoning of the reflection hypothesis, we may tentatively
conclude that for commercial reasons (building audiences to sell to advertisers)
network television engages in the symbolic annihilation of women.
Two additional tests of this tentative conclusion are possible. One examines
noncommercial American television; the other analyzes the portrayal of women
in television commercials. If the commercial structure of television is mainly
responsible for the symbolic annihilation of women, one would expect to find
more women on public than on commercial television. Conversely if the struc-
ture of corporate commercial television is mainly responsible for the image of
women that is telecast, one would expect to find even more male domination
on commercial ads. To an even greater extent than is true of programs, adver-
tising seeks to tap existing values in order to move people to buy a product.
Unfortunately, few systematic studies of public broadcasting are available. The
best of these is Caroline Isber's and Muriel Cantor's work (1975) funded by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the source of core programming in the
Public Broadcasting System. In this volume, in an adaptation of her report for
the CPB, Cantor asks, "Where are the women in public television?" Her answer,
based on a content analysis of programming is "in front of the television set."
Although a higher proportion of adult women appear on children's program-
ming in public television than is true of commercial television, Cantor finds
"both commercial and public television disseminate the same message about
women, although the two types of television differ in their structure and pur-
pose." Her conclusion indicates that commercialism is not solely responsible for
television's symbolic annihilation of women and its portrayal of stereotyped sex
roles. Rather, television captures societal ideas even when programming is par-
tially divorced from the profit motive. 2
Male domination has not been measured as directly for television commer-
cials, the other kind of televised image that may be used to test the reflection
hypothesis. Since so many of the advertised products are directed toward
women, one could not expect to find women neglected by commercials. Given
the sex roles commercials play upon, it would be bad business to show two
women discussing the relative merits of power lawn mowers or two men chat-
ting about waxy buildup on a kitchen floor. However, two indirect measures of
male dominance are possible: (1) the number of commercials in which only men
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 159

or only women appear; and (2) the use of males and females in voice-overs. (A
"voice-over" is an unseen person speaking about a product while an image is
shown on the television screen; an unseen person proclaims "two out of three
doctors recommend" or "on sale now at your local. ... ")
On the first indirect measure, all-male or all-female commercials, the findings
are unanimous. Schuetz and Sprafkin (1978), Silverstein and Silverstein (1974)
and Bardwick and Schumann (1967), find a ratio of almost three all-male ads to
each all-female ad. The second indirect measure-the use of voice-overs in
commercials, presents more compelling evidence for the acceptance of the
reflection hypothesis. Echoing the findings of others, Dominick and Rauch
(1972) report that of 946 ads with voice-overs, "only six percent use a female
voice; a male voice was heard on eighty-seven percent." The remainder use one
male and one female voice.
The commercials themselves strongly encourage sex-role stereotypes.
Although research findings are not strictly comparable to those on television
programs because of the dissimilar "plots," the portrayals of women are even
more limited than those presented on television dramas and comedies. Linda
Busby (1975) summarized the findings of four major studies of television ads . In
one study,

• 37.5% of the ads showed women as men's domestic adjuncts

• 33.9% showed women as dependent on men
• 24.3% showed women as submissive
• 16.7% showed women as sex objects
• 17.1% showed women as unintelligent
• 42.6% showed women as household functionaries

Busby's summary of Dominick and Rauch's work reveals a similar concen-

tration of women as homemakers rather than as active members of the labor
force:

• Women were seven times more likely to appear in ads for personal hygiene
products than not to appear [in those ads]
• 75% of all ads using females were for products found in the kitchen or in
the bathroom
• 38% of all females in the television ads were shown inside the home, com-
pared to 40% of the males
• Men were significantly more likely to be shown outdoors or in business
settings than were women
• Twice as many women were shown with children [than] were men
• 56% of the women in the ads were judged to be [only] housewives
• 43% different occupations were coded for men, 18 for women.

As Busby notes, reviews of the major studies of ads (such as Courtney and
Whipple 1974) emphasize their strong "face validity" (the result of real patterns
rather than any bias produced by researchers' methods), although the studies use
160 Caye Tuchman

different coding categories and some of the researchers were avowed feminist
activists.
In sum, then, analyses of television commercials support the reflection
hypothesis. In voice-overs and one-sex (all male or all female) ads, commercials
neglect or rigidly stereotype women. In their portrayal of women, the ads ban-
ish females to the role of housewife, mother, homemaker, and sex object, limit-
ing the roles women may play in society.
What can the preschool girl, the school girl, the adolescent female and the
woman learn about a woman's role by watching television? The answer is sim-
ple. Women are not important in American society, except perhaps within the
home. And even within the home, men know best, as the dominance of male
advice on soap operas suggests. To be a woman is to have a limited life divorced
from the economic productivity of the labor force.

Women's Magazines: Marry, Don't Work

As the American girl grows to womanhood, she, like her counterpart elsewhere
in industrialized nations, has magazines available designed especially for her use.
Some, like Seventeen, whose readers tend to be young adolescents, instruct on
contemporary fashions and dating styles. Others, like Cosmopolitan and Redbook,
teach about survival as a young woman-whether as a single woman hunting a
mate in the city or a young married coping with hearth and home.
This section reviews portrayals of sex roles in women's magazines, seeking to
learn how often they too promulgate stereotypes about the role their female
readers may take-how much they too engage in the symbolic annihilation of
women by limiting and trivializing them. Unfortunately, our analyses of images
of women in magazines cannot be as extensive as our discussion of television.
Because of researchers' past neglect of women's issues and problems, few pub-
lished materials are available for review.
Like the television programs just discussed, from the earliest content analyses
of magazine fiction (Johns-Heine and Gerth 1949) to analyses of magazine fic-
tiop published in the early 1970s, researchers have found an emphasis on hearth
and home and a denigration of the working woman. The ideal woman, accord-
á å ú = to ·these magazines, is passive and dependent. Her fate and her happiness rest
with a man, not with participation in the labor force. There are two exceptions
to this generalization: (1) The female characters in magazines aimed at working-
class women are a bit more spirited than their middle-class sisters. (2) In the
mid-1970s, middle-class magazines seemed less hostile toward working women.
Using the reflection hypothesis, particularly its emphasis upon attracting readers
to sell advertisements, we will seek to explain the general rule and these inter-
esting exceptions to it.
Like other media, women's magazines are interested in building their audi-
ence or readership. For a magazine, attracting more readers is indirectly profitable.
Each additional reader does not increase the magazine's profit margin by buy-
ing a copy or taking out a subscription, because the cost of publication and dis-
tribution per copy far exceeds the price of the individual copy-whether it is
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 161

purchased on the newsstand, in a supermarket, or through subscription. Instead

a magazine realizes its profit by selling advertisements and charging its advertis-
ers a rate adjusted to its known circulation. Appealing to advertisers, the maga-
zine specifies known demographic characteristics of its readership. For instance,
a magazine may inform the manufacturer of a product intended for housewives
that a vast proportion of its readership are homemakers, while another magazine
may appeal to the producer of merchandise for young working women by laud-
ing its readership as members of that target group. Women's magazines differ-
entiate themselves from one another by specifying their intended readers, as well
as the size of their mass circulation. Additionally, they all compete with other
media to draw advertisers. (For example, Life and Look folded because their
advertisers could reach a larger group of potential buyers at a lower price per
person through television commercials.) Both daytime television and women's
magazines present potential advertisers with particularly appealing audiences,
because women are the primary purchasers of goods intended for the home.
Historically, middle-class women have been less likely to be members of the
labor force than lower-class women. At the turn of the century, those married
women who worked were invariably from working-class families that required
an additional income to assure adequate food, clothing, and shelter (Oppen-
heimer 1970). The importance of this economic impetus for working is indi-
cated by the general adherence of working-class families to more traditional
definitions of male and female sex roles (Rubin 1976). Although middle-class
families subscribe to a more flexible ideology of sex roles than working-class
families, both groups of women tend to insist that the man should be the bread-
winner. The fiction in women's magazines reflects this ideology.
Particularly in middle-class magazines, fiction depicts women "as crea-
tures ... defined by the men in their lives" (Franzwa 1974a, 106; see also
Franzwa 1974b, 1975). Studying a random sample of issues of Ladies' Home Jour-
nal, McCall's, and Good Housekeeping between the years 1940 and 1970, Helen
Franzwa found four roles for women: "single and looking for a husband, house-
wife-mother, spinster, and widowed or divorced-soon to remarry." All the
women were defined by the men in their lives, or by their absence. Flora (1971)
confirms this finding in her study of middle-class (Redbook and Cosmopolitan)
and working-class (True Story and Modern Romances) fiction. Female dependence
and passivity are lauded; on the rare occasions that male dependence is por-
trayed, it is seen as undesirable.
As might be expected of characterizations that define women in terms of men,
American magazine fiction denigrates the working woman. Franzwa says that work
is shown to play "a distinctly secondary part in women's lives. When work is por-
trayed as important to them, there is a concomitant disintegration of their lives"
(1974a, 106). Of the 155 major female characters depicted in Franzwa's sample of
magazine stories, only 65 or forty-one percent were employed outside the home.
Seven of the 65 held high-status positions. Of these seven, only two were married.
Three others were "spinsters" whose "failure to marry was of far greater impor-
tance to the story-line than their apparent success in their careers" (106-107) . One
single woman with a high status career was lauded: She gave up her career to marry.
162 Caye Tuchman

From 1940 through 1950, Franzwa found, working mothers and working
wives were condemned. Instead, the magazines emphasized that husbands
should support their spouses. One story summary symbolizes the magazines'
viewpoint: "In a 1940 story, a young couple realized that they couldn't live on
his salary. She offered to work; he replied, 'I don't think that's so good. I know
some fellows whose wives work and they might just as well not be married' "
(Frazwa 1974a, 108). Magazines after 1950 are even less positive about work. In
1955, 1960, 1965, and 1970 not one married woman who worked appeared in
the stories Franzwa sampled. (Franzwa selected stories from magazines using
five-year intervals to enhance the possibility of finding changes.)
Since middle-class American wives are less likely to be employed than their
working-class counterparts, this finding makes sociological sense. Editors and
writers may believe that readers of middle-class magazines, who are less likely to
be employed, are also more likely to buy magazines approving this lifestyle.
More likely to work and to be in families either economically insecure or fac-
ing downward mobility, working-class women might be expected to applaud
effective women. For them, female dependence might be an undesirable trait.
Their magazines could be expected to cater to such preferences, especially since
those preferences flow from the readers' life situations. Such, indeed, are Flora's
findings, presented in Table 1.1.
However, this pattern does not mean that the literature for the working-class
woman avoids defining women in terms of men. All the women in middle-class
magazines dropped from the labor force when they had a man present; only six
percent of the women in the working-class fiction continued to work when they
had a man and children. And Flora explained that for both groups "The plot of
the majority of stories centered upon the female achieving the proper depend-
ent status either by marrying or manipulating existing dependency relationships
to reaffirm the heroine's subordinate position. The male support-monetary,
social, and psychological-which the heroine gains was generally seen as well
worth any independence or selfhood given up in the process" (1971,441).
Such differences as do exist between working-class and middle-class maga-
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 163

zines remain interesting, though. For they indicate how much more the
women's magazines may be responsive to their audience than television can be.
Because it is the dominant mass medium, television is designed to appeal to hun-
dreds of millions of people. In 1970, the circulation of True Story was "only"
5,347,000, and of Redbook, a "mere" 8,1173,000. Drawing a smaller audience
and by definition, one more specialized, the women's magazines can be more
responsive to changes in the position of women in American society. If a mag-
azine believes its audience is changing, it may alter the content to maintain its
readership. The contradictions inherent in being women's magazines may free
them to respond to change.
A woman's magazine is sex-typed in a way that is not true of men's maga-
zines (Davis 1976). Esquire and Playboy are for men, but the content of these
magazines, is, broadly speaking, American culture. Both men's magazines feature
stories by major American writers, directed toward all sophisticated Americans,
not merely to men. Both feature articles on the state of male culture as Ameri-
can culture or of male politics as American politics. Women's magazines are
designed in opposition to these "male magazines." For instance, "sports" are
women's sports or news of women breaking into "men's sports." A clear dis-
tinction is drawn between what is "male" and what is "female."
Paradoxically, though, this very limitation can be turned to an advantage.
Addressing women, women's magazines may suppose that some in their audi-
ence are concerned about changes in the status of women and the greater par-
ticipation of women in the labor force. As early as 1966, before the growth of
the modern women's movement, women who were graduated from high school
or college assumed they would work until the birth of their first child. Clarke
and Esposito (1966) found that magazines published in the 1950s and addressed
to these women (Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Cosmopolitan) stressed the joys of
achievement and power when describing working roles for women and identi-
fying desirable jobs. Magazines addressed to working women were optimistic
about these women's ability to combine work and home, a message that women
who felt that they should or must work would be receptive to. Indeed, in 1958
Marya and David Hatch criticized Mademoiselle, Glamour, and Charm as "unduly
optimistic" in their "evaluation of physical and emotional strains upon working
women." Combining work and family responsibilities may be very difficult, par-
ticularly in working-class homes, since working class husbands refuse to help
with housework (Rubin 1976). But even working-class women prefer work
outside the home to housework (Rubin 1976; Vanek forthcoming) since it
broadens their horizons. Wanting to please and to attract a special audience of
working women, magazine editors and writers may be freed to be somewhat
responsive to new conditions, even as these same writers and editors feature
stereotyped sex roles in other sections of their magazines.
Additional evidence of the albeit limited responsiveness of women's maga-
zines to the changing status of women in the labor force is provided by their
treatment of sex-role stereotypes since the advent of the women's movement.
The modern women's movement is usually said to begin in the mid-1960s with
the founding of the National Organization for Women. The date is of conse-
164 Caye Tuchman

quence for the study of sex roles in women's magazines because of Betty
Friedan's involvement in the National Organization for Women. Her book, The
Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, provided much of the ideology for the
young movement. And, its analysis of sexism ("the problem with no name") was
based in part on an analysis of the portrayal of sex roles in women's magazines.
In an undated manuscript cited in Busby (1975), Stolz and her colleagues com-
pared the image of women in magazines before and after the advent of the
women's movement. Like others, they found no changes between 1940 and
1972. However, a time lag ("culture lag") is probably operating since nonmate-
rial conditions (ideas and attitudes) change more slowly than do material con-
ditions (such as participation in the labor force.)
Several very recent studies affirm that women's magazines may be introduc-
ing new conceptions of women's sex roles that are more conducive to support-
ing the increased participation of women in the labor force. Butler and Paislef
note that at the instigation of an editor of Redbook, twenty-eight women's mag-
azines published articles on the arguments for and against the Equal Rights
Amendment, a constitutional change prompted by the women's movement and
the increased participation of women in the labor force. Franzwa's impression
of the women's magazines she had analyzed earlier is that they revealed more
sympathy with working women in 1975. 4 Sheila Silver (1976) indicates that a
"gentle support" for the aims of the women's movement and a "quiet concern"
for working women may now be found in McCall's. By the terms "gentle sup-
port" and "quiet concern," she means to indicate that the magazine approves
equal pay for equal work and other movement aims, although it does not
approve of the women's movement itself. That magazine and others, such as the
Ladies' Home Journal, continue to concentrate upon helping women as house-
wives: They still provide advice on hearth and home. The women's magazines
continue to assume that every woman will marry, bear children and "make a
home." They do not assume that every woman will work some time in her life.
In sum, the image of women in the women's magazines is more responsive
to change than is television's symbolic annihilation and rigid typecasting of
women. The sex roles presented are less stereotyped, but a woman's role is still
limited. A female child is always an eventual mother, not a future productive par-
ticipant in the labor force.

Newspapers and Women: Food, Fashion, and Society

Following the argument developed thus far, one might expect the nation's
newspapers to be even more responsive than magazines to the changing status
of women in American society. With smaller circulations than the magazines
and supposedly more responsive to a local population rather than a national one,
newspapers might cater to their female readers in order to maintain or even
increase the base of their circulation. Such an expectation seems particularly
plausible because contemporary newspapers face increased costs and are suffer-
ing from the economic competition of the electronic media. But this expecta-
tion flies in the face of the actual organization of newswork, for newspapers are,
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 165

not, strictly speaking, local media. Rather, local newspapers' dependence upon
national news services is sufficiendy great for them to be considered components if
a national medium, designed to appeal to as many Americans as possible. As we have
just seen, such a design encourages a rigid treatment of sex roles. An historical
review of newspapers' treatment of news about women makes this result clearer.
Unlike the women's magazines, newspapers seek to appeal to an entire fam-
ily. Historically, they have sought to attract female readers by treating them as a
specialized audience, given attention in a segregated women's page, an
autonomous or semi-autonomous department whose mandate precludes cover-
age of the "hard news" of the day. Although women's magazines have been pub-
lished in the United States since the early nineteenth century, it took the
newspaper circulation wars of the 1880s to produce the notion of "women's
news." At that time, it appeared that every man who would buy a newspaper
was already doing so. To build circulation by robbing each other of readers and
attracting new readers, newspapers hired female reporters to write about society
and fashion, as well as to expand "news" to include sports and comic strips.
Items of potential interest to women were placed near advertisements of goods
that women might purchase for their families. The origin of women's news
reveals how long newspapers have traditionally defined women's interests as dif-
ferent from men's and how items of concern to women have become non-
news, almost oddities. That view continues today. The budget for women's
pages rarely provides for updating those pages from edition to edition, as is done
for the general news, sports, and financial pages, sections held to be of interest
to men. Finally, as is true of other departments as well, women's page budgets
are sufficiendy restricted to force that department's dependence upon the wire
serVIces.
During the nineteenth century's circulation wars, newspapers banded into
cooperative services intended to decrease the costs of total coverage for each
participating newspaper. A reporter would cover a story for newspapers in dif-
ferent cities, decreasing the need for scattered newspapers to maintain extensive
bureaus in a variety of cities, such as Washington and New York. Furthermore,
a newspaper in a small out-of-the-way town could be requested to share its story
about an important event with newspapers from distant places that would not,
under normal circumstances, have a reporter on hand. Aside from playing a lim-
ited role in the development of journalistic objectivity (Schudson 1976), since
stories were designed to meet the political-editorial requirements of diverse
news organizations, the news services encouraged the expansion of definitions
of news. Some provided features, such as comics and crossword puzzles. Others
provided sports items, financial stories, and features of concern to women, as
well as "hard news." Sometimes the women's items were scandalous revelations
of the activities of "Society." More often, they were advice for the homemaker,
such as recipes and articles about rearing children. In this century, syndicated
and wire-service features include gossip columns about the celebrated and the
notorious and advice to the lovelorn, such as that fictionalized in Nathanael
West's Miss Lonelyhearts or that represented by "Dear Abby."
For women's pages, items like these represent more than an economic invest-
166 Caye Tuchman

ment purchased by a newspaper on behalf of its women's department. They are

also an investment of space in the paper. Expected by readers to appear on a
Monday, the column inches set aside for advice or gossip cannot be withdrawn
for news of the women's movement. Similarly, it may be difficult to turn aside
essentially prepaid feature stories about clothing and fashions supplied by the
Associated Press or some other news syndicate in order to hire additional
women's page staff interested in covering the changing status of women in Amer-
ican society. Commitments like these "nationalize" the local media, because the
news syndicate or wire service reaches virtually every daily newspaper in the
United States. Because the wire services as businesses are necessarily committed
to pleasing all (or as many as possible) of their subscribing newspapers, they must
shrink from advocating vast social changes. As in the case of television, what goes
in New York may not go in Peoria, Illinois or Norman, Oklahoma. National in
scope, syndicated and wire-service items for the women's page must seek an
American common denominator. For the sex stereotyping of the women's
pages to cease, the leadership of the Associated Press and the syndicates would
have to be convinced that most of their subscribing papers wanted a different
kind of story for their women's pages. Only then, it seems safe to say, would the
papers serviced by the syndicates run the kinds of news about changes in the sta-
tus of women that may be found in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times,
whose women's pages develop their own stories through independent staffs.
For now, a characterization of women's pages provided by Lindsay Van
Gelder (1974) seems apt. She speculates thus: Suppose a Martian came to earth
and sought to learn about American culture by reading the women's pages.
Bombarded by pictures of wedding dresses, the Martian might suppose that
American women marry at least once a week. Mter all, a Martian might reason
that newspapers and their women's pages reflect daily life. That view, we might
add, would seem justified by the women's pages' intense involvement with the
social life of the upper class, because upper-class power is a daily aspect of Amer-
ican life. Women's pages feed upon the parties, marriages, engagements, and
clothing and food preferences of the wealthy and the celebrated. In this, like
newspapers in general (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948), the women's pages
encourage all citizens to emulate the upper class and to chase after positions of
high status and institutionalized importance.
Newspapers' very emphasis upon established institutions and those with
institutionalized power may account in part for their denigration of women and
the women's movement (Morris 1974) . Most information in the general sec-
tions of newspapers concerns people in power, and newspapers justify this
emphasis by stressing that such people work in or head societal institutions that
regulate social intercourse. But communications researchers view the matter
somewhat differendy. They argue that newspapers exercise social control: By
telling stories about such people, newspapers lend status to approved institutions
and chastise lawbreakers. Historically, those few women mentioned in the gen-
eral news pages belonged to the powerful groups in society. Gladys Engel Lang
suggests "the most admired woman" list probably reflects the publicity given to
specific women. They are mainly wives of the powerful, celebrities and stars,
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MAss MEDIA 167

and the few women who are heads of state. But women are mainly seen as the
consorts of famous men, not as subjects of political and social concern in their
own right.
This situation appears to be changing. Once ignored or ridiculed (Morris
1974), the women's movement has received increasing coverage as it has passed
through the stages characteristic of any social movement. As the women's move-
ment became sufficiently routinized to open offices with normal business hours,
some newspapers established a "women's movement beat" that required a
reporter to provide at least periodic coverage of new developments. When
increased legitimation brought more volunteers and more funds to wage suc-
cessfullaw suits against major corporations and to lobby for the introduction of
new laws, newspapers concerned with m ajor institutions were forced to cover
those topics . In turn, these successes increased the movement's legitimation.
Legitimation also brought support of sympathizers within other organizations
who were not movement members (Carden 1973). Reporters having those other
organizations as their beats are being forced to write about the ideas of the
women's movement and women's changing status. For instance, the position of
women and minorities in the labor force is becoming a required topic for labor
reporters and those who write about changing personnel in the corporate world.
On the whole, though, despite coverage of women forcibly induced by the
legitimation of the women's movement, newspapers continue to view women
in the news as occasional oddities that must be tolerated. Attention to women
is segregated and found on the women's page. As a recent survey of women's
pages demonstrates (Guenin 1975), most women's pages continue to cater to a
traditional view of women's interests. They emphasize home and family, only
occasionally introducing items about women at work. And those items are more
likely to concern methods of coping with home and office tasks than they are
with highlighting problems of sex discrimination and what the modern
women's movement has done in combatting it. Like the television industry,
appealing to a common denominator encourages newspapers to engage in the
symbolic annihilation of women by ignoring women at work and trivializing
women through banishment to hearth and home.

The Impact of the Media

As of this writing, women continue to enter the labor force at a faster rate than
in the past-a rate that has far exceeded the predictions of demographers and
specialists on the labor force. What are we to make of this discrepancy between
the sex-role stereotypes reflected in the media and the employment pattern of
women? Does the discrepancy mean that because of culture lag, the mass media
reflect attitudes discarded by the population and that the mass media have no
effect on the behavior of women? That conclusion seems quite seductive, given
the patterns we have described. By entering the labor force at increasing rates ,
women seem to be ignoring the media's message. But that conclusion flies in
the face of every existing theory about the mass media. Communications theo-
rists agree that the mass media are the cement of American social life. They are
168 Caye Tuchman

a source of common interest and of conversation. Children and adults may

schedule their activities around favorite television programs. And the mass media
serve to coordinate the activities of diverse societal institutions. To paraphrase
Gerbner and Gross (1976), the mass media in general and television in particu-
lar have replaced religion as a source of social control in American life. Like the
medieval church that broadcast one message to all social classes, all the mass
media disseminate the same theme about women to all social classes: They
announce their symbolic annihilation and trivialization.
Equally important, all available evidence about the impact of the media upon
sex-role stereotyping indicates that the media encourage their audiences to
engage in such stereotyping. They lead girls, in particular, to believe that their
social horizons and alternatives are more limited than is actually the case. The
evidence about the impact of television is particularly compelling.
Aimee Dorr Leifer (1975) points out that television provides many of the
same socialization processes as the family. Like the family, television provides
examples of good and bad behavior. The family socializes children through the
patterning and power of those examples, and television programming also pro-
vides variation in the frequency, consistency, and power of examples. Leifer notes
some indications that variations in these factors may have an impact on the child
viewer (5). Finally, like the family, television can provide reinforcers (rewards and
punishments) for behaviors. However, although the family can tailor reinforcers
to the individual child, television cannot.
Most of the documentation regarding the impact of television upon children
considers the effect of televised violence, primarily because of the national push
for such research after the political assassinations and riots of the 1960s. That
research is particularly interesting, for our purposes, because of the unanimity of
the findings and because of the diverse methods used to analyze the topic.
Social science researchers frequently squabble about which methods of
research are appropriate to explore a problem. All seem ready to admit that the
ideal way to explore television's impact would be to perform a controlled exper-
iment in a natural setting. Ideally, one would isolate a group that did not watch
television, matching characteristics of individuals in that group with the charac-
teristics of others whose viewing was designed by the researchers. The groups
would be studied over a period of some years to see whether the effects of tel-
evision are cumulative. Unfortunately, such a research design is impossible. Vir-
tually all American homes have at least one television set; and so, one cannot
locate children for the "control group"-those not exposed to television. To get
around this problem, the violence researchers used both laboratory and field
experiments. In the former, children were exposed to carefully selected (and
sometimes specially prepared) videotapes, lasting anywhere from ten minutes to
an hour. Behavior was analyzed before viewing the tape, while viewing it, and
after viewing it. By carefully controlling which children would see what tape
(designing "control groups"), the experimenters could comment upon the effect
of televised violence on the children. Unfortunately, laboratory studies are arti-
ficial. For one thing, both sets of children are already dosed with violence in
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 169

normal viewing, and both watch television under conditions different from their
homes or classrooms. Thus, researchers cannot state in any definitive way how
the research findings are related to activities in the real world.
The second approach, field experiments, also has difficulties. Such studies are
invariably "correlational." The studies demonstrate that two kinds of behavior
are found together, but cannot state whether one behavior causes the other or
whether both are caused by a third characteristic of the children studied. For
instance, in the violence studies, teams of researchers asked youths and children
about their viewing habits (and in one case tried to control those habits) and also
measured (in a variety of ways) their antisocial behavior. Although viewing
aggression and antisocial behavior were invariably found together, it remains
possible that some third factor accounts for the variation.
The fact that different research teams interviewed children of different sexes,
ages, social classes, and races from different parts of the country makes it fairly
certain that a third factor was not responsible for the association of television
viewing and antisocial behavior. And this conclusion is strengthened by the evi-
dence provided by the laboratory studies. Furthermore, since the Surgeon Gen-
eral issued his report in 1973, additional field studies have found "that viewing
televised or filmed violence in naturalistic settings increases the incidence of nat-
urally-occurring aggression, that long-term exposure to television may increase
one's aggressiveness, and that exposure to televised violence may increase one's
tolerance for everyday aggression" (Leifer 1975) .
Although there are not as many studies, researchers have also established that
television programming influences racial attitudes. Again, both laboratory and
field studies were used. They demonstrate that white children may take their
image of blacks from television (Greenberg 1972), that the longer a white child
watches "Sesame Street," the less likely that child will have negative attitudes
toward blacks, and that positive portrayals of blacks produce more positive atti-
tudes toward blacks, with negative portrayals producing little attitude changes
(Graves 1975) . Aimee Leifer (1975) writes of these findings: "Apparently black
children increase their [positive] image of their own group by seeing them por-
trayed on television, while white children are influenced by the portrayal, espe-
cially when it is uncomplementary to blacks" (26). The evidence on the impact
of the depiction of race is important in assessing television's impact on sex roles
because content analyses provide strong documentation that television treats
blacks and whites differently. For instance, Schuetz and Sprafkin's analysis of
children's commercials and Lemon's analysis of patterns of domination docu-
ment differential treatment by race as well as by sex.
Since the documentation on violence is extensive and the documentation on
race is strong, it seems more than reasonable to expect that the content of tele-
vision programs leads children to hold stereotyped images of sex roles. The
power of the evidence on race and violence is important, because researchers
have just started to ask about the impact of television on societal sex roles. What,
then, do we know now?
Suppose, we asked earlier, that television primarily presents adult women
170 Caye Tuchman

as housewives. Also suppose that girls in the television audience "model"

their behavior and expectations on that of television women. Such a suppo-
sition is quite plausible for psychologists note that "opportunities for model-
ing have been vastly increased by television" (Lesser, quoted in Cantor 1975,
5). It is then equally plausible that girls exposed to television women may
hope to be homemakers when they are adults, but not workers outside the
home.
Do girls actually model their attitudes and behavior on the symbolically anni-
hilated and dominated television woman?
This general question may be broken down into several component ques-
tions:

1. Do girls pay closer attention to female television characters than to male

characters?
2. Do girls value the attributes of female characters or those of male charac-
ters?
3. Does television viewing have an impact on the attitudes of young children
toward sex roles?
4. Do these attitudes continue as children mature?

As in the studies on violence and race, the available evidence includes labo-
ratory and field studies.

1. Do girls pay closer attention to female characters than to male characters?

Joyce Sprafkin and Robert Liebert report the results of three laboratory
experiments designed to see whether (a) boys and girls each prefer television
programs featuring actors of their own sex; (b) whether the children pay closer
attention when someone of the same sex is on the television screen; and (c)
whether the children prefer to watch members of their own sex engaging in
sex-typed (playing with a doll or a football) or nonsex-typed (as in reading
with one's parents) behavior. To gather information, they enabled the tested
children to switch a dial, choosing between an episode of "Nanny and the
Professor" and one of the "Brady Bunch." (Children like to watch situation
comedies [Lyle and Hoffman 1972].) For each program, episodes featuring
male or female characters were selected with different episodes showing a boy
or a girl engaging in sex-typed or nonsex-typed behavior. The findings are
clear: In their viewing habits, children prefer sex-typing. They prefer programs
featuring actors of their own sex; they watch members of their own sex more
closely; and they also pay more attention when a member of their own sex
engages in sex-typed behavior. According to Sprafkin and Liebert (1976), such
behavior probably involves learning, for according to psychological theories
children prefer to expose themselves to same-sex models as an information-
seeking strategy; children are presumed to attend to same-sex peers because
they already know that much social reinforcement is sex-typed and must dis-
cover the contingencies that apply to their own gender (see also Grusec and
Brinker 1972).
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 171

2. Do girls value the attributes ojfemale characters or oj male characters?

The evidence on evaluation is not as clear. A variety of communications
researchers, particularly a group working at Michigan State University, have per-
formed a series of laboratory experiments to determine which specific charac-
ters boys and girls prefer, and why they do so. They found that invariably boys
identify with male characters. Sometimes though (about thirty percent of the
time) girls also identify with or prefer male characters (Miller and Reeves 1976).
When girls choose a television character as a model, they are guided by the char-
acter's physical attractiveness; boys are guided by strength (Greenberg, Held,
Wakshlag, and Reeves 1976; Miller and Reeves 1976). Indeed, even when girls
select a male character they appear to be guided by his physical attractiveness
(Greenberg et al. 1976). Girls who select male characters do not state they are
basing their choices on the wider opportunities and fun available to men,
although the girls who select female characters state that the characters do the
same kind of things as they themselves do (Reeves 1976).

3. Does television viewing have an impact on the attitudes oj young children toward sex roles?
Here the evidence is clearer. Frueh and McGhee (1975) interviewed children in
kindergarten through sixth grade, asking them about the amount of time they
spent watching television and testing the extent and direction of their sex-typ-
ing. The children who viewed the most television (twenty-five hours per week)
were significantly more traditional in their sex-typing than those who viewed
the least (ten hours or less per week). Because this study is correlational, one
cannot know whether viewing determines sex-typing or vice versa . But televi-
sion does seem to be the culprit, according to laboratory studies on television
viewing and occupational preferences.

Miller and Reeves (1976; see also Pingree 1976) asked children to watch tel-
evision characters in nontraditional roles and then asked them what kinds ofjobs
boys and girls could do when they grew up. Children exposed to programs
about female police officers, for instance, were significantly more likely to state
that a woman could be a police officer than were children who watched more
traditional fare.
Beuf (1974) reports similar results from sixty-three interviews with boys and
girls between the ages of three and six. Some girls had even abandoned their
ambitions:

One of the most interesting aspects of the children's responses lay in the
reaction to the question: "What would you want to be when you grew up,
if you were a girl (boy?)" Several girls mentioned that this other-sex ambi-
tion was their true ambition, but one that could not be realized because of
their sex. Doctor and milkman were both cited in this regard .... One
blond moppet confided that what she really wanted to do when she grew
up was fly like a bird. "But, I'll never do it," she sighed, "Because I'm not
a boy." Further questioning revealed that a TV cartoon character was the
cause of this misconception. (143)
172 Caye Tuchman

A boy said, "Oh, ifI were a girl, I'd have to grow up and be nothing." Beuf
reports, "Children who were moderate viewers appeared to exert a wider range
of choice in career selection than heavy viewers. Seventy-six percent of heavy
viewers (compared with fifty percent of the moderate viewers) selected stereo-
typed careers for themselves" (147).

4. Do these attitudes continue as children mature?

It is known that sex-typing increases as children mature. Second graders are
more insistent in their sex-typing than first graders are. Adolescent boys and girls
insist upon discriminating between behavior by sex. But little is known about
the impact of television on this process. A longitudinal study presently under-
way at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication
is the first attempt to answer this question systematically. Chapter 14,* which
contains a summary of that research, indicates that definitive answers are not yet
available. However, analyses based on data from the second year of the study do
tentatively indicate an association between television viewing and sexist atti-
tudes. The association is weak, but it does suggest that the more a youngster
watches television, the more likely the child will be to hold sexist attitudes.
What can we make of all this? The answer is: The mass media perform two
tasks at once. First, with some culture lag, they reflect dominant values and atti-
tudes in the society. Second, they act as agents of socialization, teaching young-
sters in particular how to behave. Watching lots of television leads children and
adolescents to believe in traditional sex roles: Boys should work; girls should not.
The same sex-role stereotypes are found in the media designed especially for
women. They teach that women should direct their hearts toward hearth and
home.
At a time when over forty percent of the American labor force is female and
when women with preschool children are entering the labor force in increasing
numbers, the mass media's message has severe national consequences. As demog-
raphers (for example, Oppenheimer 1970) and economists (for example, Bowen
and Finegan 1969) have shown, the maintenance and expansion of the Ameri-
can economy depends upon increasing the rate of female employment. Dis-
couraging women from working presents a national dilemma. Furthermore, it is
quite probable that the media's message discourages women from working up
to their full capacity in the labor force. And by limiting the kinds of jobs held by
fictional women, it may encourage the underemployment of women, a severe
problem for those working-class families who can barely scrape by with two
incomes (Rubin 1976). And rigid sex-role stereotypes make the burden heavier
for all working women who must still shoulder the responsibilities of home and
family with limited support from their husbands. This problem is particularly
acute in blue-collar families (Rubin 1976). For the nation and for individuals,
the message "women belong in the home" is an anachronism we can ill afford.

* Of original publication.
 THE SYMBOLIC ANNIHILATION OF WOMEN BY THE MASS MEDIA 173

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Bernard,]. 1973. My four revolutions: An autobiographical history of the ASA. American Journal <if Soci-
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