ABSTRACT
Publicity and privacy in the context of gender policy ‘Making the Private Public’ – none of the political mottos of the women’s movement has gained as much notoriety. The women’s movement brought to the light of day the homely secrecies of private life, so as to make visible the general in the particular and thus to make possible solidarity among women, to politicize and hence make subject to change women’s lives that traditionally had been conceived of as private – as for instance in the case of domestic violence. No doubt this constituted a noticeable disruption of the Fordist world of the Western democracies of the 1970s. One of the results of this strategy of publicity was that it alerted the public to matters of gender discrimination and the establishment of women’s policy as a legitimate policy field, including the crafting of genderrelated institutions like women’s ministries and anti-discrimination officers; legal changes regarding, for instance, abortion rights, domestic violence, and affirmative action; and the invention of new policy concepts like gender mainstreaming. The media have played an important part in the origin and spread of the second women’s movement in West Germany in the early 1970s. It was, for instance, a media campaign – the magazine Stern presented, under the headline ‘I have had an Abortion,’ testimony from 374 famous women who had broken the law by aborting pregnancy – that initiated not only publication and scandalization of a misogynous and socially unjust penal practice, but also a public policy debate that eventually led to the reform of the anti-abortion paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code. Beyond its immediate target, this campaign was the symbolic point of origin for the struggle against women’s discrimination and hence an important milestone for the mobilization of the second women’s movement. It has been nearly 40 years since, and the media system has changed in these years just as fundamentally as the women’s movement. While the communication triangle citizens-public policy-media has gained much in complexity the media’s interest in women’s issues and gender equality policies is rather low. That until today, for example, almost nobody outside the circle of activists and professional politicians is familiar with concepts like gender mainstreaming, anti-discrimination or diversity politics is to no small degree owed to the lackadaisical attitude of the media towards these issues.
