ABSTRACT
For more than 50 years, news accounts about the movement of mothers into and out of the U.S. workforce have generally relied on similar explanatory themes: motherhood as a natural, primary identity for women, and the departure of women from the workforce as an answer to an internal, biological call toward full-time childrearing (Williams, Manvell, & Bornstein, 2006). In a 2007 Columbia Journalism Review essay, E. J. Graff (2007) discussed how these underlying assumptions infl uence the way facts are interpreted and presented by reporters and, consequently, how the workplace, motherhood, and working women are likely to be understood by readers. In particular, Graff outlined the results of an exhaustive content analysis of a quarter century of newspaper stories conducted by Williams and colleagues (2006). Those stories, Williams et al. found, tended to depict mothers as “opting out” of employment in order to pursue the joys of childrearing. Other equally viable reasons for leaving the workplace, such as frustration with workplace demands or discrimination, tended to be excluded from news stories. After summarizing these fi ndings, Graff described why the results of such research should concern U.S. workers:
The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upperechelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences…. If journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. (p. 54)
Journalists’ use of frames that reinforce gender-related myths in their reporting of events and issues greatly concern feminist media researchers, who argue that such frames impact social policy decisions and reinforce commonsense assumptions that privilege men in the social hierarchy (Barnett, 2005; Hardin, Simpson, Whiteside, & Garris, 2007; Vavrus, 2007; Williams et al., 2006). Framing, understood as the use of an organizing
schema to construct social reality, has guided the media research of feminists since the publication three decades ago of Tuchman’s (1978a, 1978b) seminal work on depictions of women. Tuchman’s work remains central to meeting feminist goals for social justice in news coverage, as illustrated in recent studies (cf. Akhavan-Majid & Ramaprasad, 1998; Byerly, 1999; Lemish, 2000; McGregor, 2000). In this chapter we explicate the role of framing in the pursuit of feminist ideals, discuss its use within the feminist research tradition, and propose ways for its continued integration in feminist research. In doing so, we discuss the values and concepts we have integrated into our own research agenda from the wide expanse of framing literature. We also argue that a constructionist paradigm for framing research, which allows us to consider issues of power and ideology but also feminism as a social movement with strategic opportunities, might be the most fruitful direction for feminist research.
