Media bias challenges coverage of Boomer women

Newswise — Media portrayal of baby boomer women has shifted and changed even as society has changed. Maryland Journalism Professor Maurine Beasley says in the 1940s, the "Doris Day ideal of a sweet, wholesome young woman permeated the media." For most women of that period, family came first.

But the daughters of those women were portrayed much differently. The Women's Liberation movement and Vietnam War protests helped push the media to a portrayal of women that not only included shifting views on explicit language, but it was also "much more oriented to sex in both broadcasting and print," says Beasley.

Civil Rights legislation continued the push, as women were given more opportunities to attend graduate school and take on well-paid careers. But despite that, the Maryland Journalism professor says "the traditional ideas of women as family caretakers by no means went away."

Today, Professor Beasley says women "face a bewildering array of social, economic and political choices, while lower-class women face a burdensome economic struggle that middle-class feminism has not really addressed. All this plays out to some degree in the mass media, but the emphasis is on selling women products to enhance their sexual appeal, which is basically a very traditional approach to keeping many women subordinated to a male-dominated structure."