‘The Second Wave' Made a Big Splash: 1970s Feminism and the Australian Press.

Sandra Lilburn, Women's Studies Department, Flinders University of South Australia

sandra.lilburn@flinders.edu.au

In the early 1970s, the Australian press reported, celebritised, ridiculed and scandalised individuals and events associated with the Women's Liberation Movement. But many within the Movement recognised the power of the press to publicise political causes and they were active in cultivating press attention. Germaine Greer was always prepared to link personal fame with the political cause. The Women's Electoral Lobby saw press publicity as the best way to advance women's interests in the political debate. Even the first ‘femocrat', Elizabeth Reid believed that it was the press that has jeopardised women's issues on the Labor government's reform agenda.

This paper examines the strategies used by feminists in their engagements with the Australian press during the 1970s and the controversies about media representations of the feminist cause that followed. Rather than confirm the polarity of the debate - feminism versus the media - it advances a contextual reading of mediated publicness. It argues that the publicity outcomes in this context were unpredictable but they helped fuel disagreements about representative feminism and the possibility of an authentic public voice.