ABSTRACT
Around the time that Betty Friedan, the author of the groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique, criticized American society for preventing women from developing their full potential and confining them to the role of housewife, journalism scholars were asking questions about the presence of nonreaders in the news media landscape. In the first published study that focused exclusively on daily newspaper nonreaders, Westley & Severin (1964) identified numerous variables that distinguished nonreaders from readers, but sex was not one of them. The results of that 1964 state-wide study of nonreaders revealed that 13.3 percent of women and 13.9 percent of men could be classified as nonreaders of newspapers (ibid., p. 45). With 86 percent of the survey respondents reading newspapers every day, 37 percent reading more than one newspaper, and 8 percent reading three or more newspapers, the authors called reading the daily newspaper “one of the most thoroughly institutionalized behaviors of Americans” (ibid., p. 45).
