A recent report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported that less than 25 percent of the country’s national print opinion writers are women. Another study by the Columbia Journalism Review reported that byline stories by men outnumber those by women by as much as 13 to one in many national political magazines. At the local level, women comprised 21.3 percent of news directors at U.S. television stations in 2004 (down from 25.2 percent in 2003) and were 14 percent of the guests on the Sunday morning public affairs TV programs from November 2004-July 2005. Women in primetime fared no better; in 2004-2005, females accounted for just 39 percent of all characters (with 77 percent of them being white and 12 percent over 40). (Extra! May/June 2005; Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2005; Media Report To Women, December 2005)

Carilli and Campbell begin their edited volume with the startling comment that "combining the words ‘women’ and ‘media’ is a challenging task because the words are so at odds with one another." After reviewing these national statistics about female participation and representation in media, their point hits home.

Women and the Media: Diverse Perspectives is a collection of 19 essays examining media depictions, stereotypes, and visual imagery of women. The anthology also includes four biographies of female media pioneers. Editors Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, both English professors at Purdue University Calumet, report that they assembled the articles in response to the largely misguided assumption that "we live in a post-feminist era where women have achieved equality." Carilli and Campbell, as well as most of the contributors of this volume, argue instead that women in the 21^st century face a diminished stature in the public sphere, endure "insidious oppression" by popular culture, and suffer from invisibility and marginality in media. Their goal is to critique and illustrate this subjugation and to challenge the patriarchal values of mass media.

In many cases, they are successful. Writing in "The Israeli Womb: Images of Gendered Nationalism in the Israeli Press," Orly Shachar points to ways that Israeli women’s lives have been narrowed by cultural and ideological expectations of motherhood. Suggesting that Jewish women in Israel have been firmly anchored to the private sphere with responsibilities to families and households, Shachar examines ways the Israeli press has positioned women as "national reproducers." Casting Israeli social life within antithetical constructs of war and womb, Shachar argues that the political pressure to increase Israeli population through natality, coupled with the mythology of Jewish motherhood, works to constrain the range of acceptable options for women.

Shinichi Saito and Reiko Ishiyama ("Press Coverage and Awareness of Gender Equity Issues") also examine the role of the press in promulgating policy and social practice. In this article, Saito and Ishiyama delve into the lack of knowledge in Japanese society about "The Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society" and such phrases as "unpaid work," "gender," and "reproductive/health rights." Through a content analysis of news accounts in Japan’s three most influential newspapers, these researchers discovered substantial lack of coverage of gender issues in the targeted years (1995-2000). They conclude that lack of awareness in Japan about gender diversity, as well as social practices defining strict division of labor between men and women, are directly tied to the failure of the mainstream Japanese press to reference key terms and issues related to gender inequality.

Other chapters in the book deal with the portrayals of women in a range of contexts, including post-liberation Chinese posters, political campaigns, advertising in women’s magazines, films produced by and about Italian-American women, and "Hello-Kitty" artifacts. Two chapters deal specifically with the representation of African American women and the ways this representation produces controlling images of sexuality and lifestyle. Michelle Tracy Berger’s essay ("Embodying Deviance, Representing Women and Drugs in the 1990s: Lessons from Losing Isaiah to New Jack City") examines filmic depictions of urban black women and their lives on the street in the nineties. Her investigation centers on a close reading of several contemporary movies that rely on the trope of a sexually deviant, crack using black woman. According to Berger, the repetition of this image in these commercially successful films not only contributes to a climate of hostility toward female drug users, but also reifies negative ideas about "uncontrollable lower-income women, particularly welfare mothers" (pg 94). Gloria Gadsden also addresses ideas of social containment in "Safety and Restriction: The Construction of Black Women’s Sexuality in Essence Magazine." In Gadsden’s analysis, black women are constructed as sexual beings in Essence, which provides readers a safe space for development of sexual empowerment. Although this suggests a change from mainstream media’s depictions of asexual mammy, Gadsden claims the magazine also operates as a sphere of restriction, limiting topics to "safe" issues that steer black women readers away from "sexually loose behavior."

Carilli and Campbell begin this collection with an account of how women reporters in the 1950s and 1960s were relegated to the balcony of the National Press Club during political speeches by national and international figures. This practice not only forced female reporters to stand (without meals) during these luncheon meetings, but also cast them as marginalized spectators, excluded from some of the most important political discourse of the time. The press club balcony symbolized and enabled the gender discrimination of female political writers in the fifties and sixties; it also serves as a metaphor for the central arguments. Divided into four sections ("Commodifying and Exoticizing the Female Body," "Stereotypical Depictions," "Portrayals of Political Activism," "and Media Pioneers"), this anthology produces a largely unified, well-documented claim that women are treated inequitably by media organizations and through media messages. To this end, these essays examine media artifacts from around the world and conclude that media texts typically function negatively in the social construction of women’s lives, privileging expectations of youth, traditional femininity, heterosexuality, and whiteness. The book’s contributors find that stereotypical categories of mother, tramp, mammy, and Jezebel surface repeatedly as media frames; that the male gaze prevails; and that as they age, women on the screen move predictably into age-old roles of sacrifice and nurturing. Although these authors tend to focus on in-depth analyses of individual texts, their results cohere with broad genre and industry studies that offer similar conclusions about the content of contemporary media. As the editors note early on, in media products…."women appear as saviors and sex objects, villains, vixens, and forces to be squelched. Rarely do they have an opportunity to express their unique experiences and strengths" (pg xiii). Although this is not a new argument, it is an important one; and it seems especially useful to reiterate this claim in a contemporary environment increasingly received as post-feminist and gender equal. Carilli, Campbell, and the 21 other media critics represented in this collection are to be lauded for taking on this socially and politically significant task. This is clearly a contribution to the analysis of contemporary media.

At the same time, the book is not without its weaknesses. Just as it offers a wealth of thought provoking and well-documented textual critique, Women and the Media: Diverse Perspectives virtually ignores questions of reception and the production mode. We read convincing arguments about oppressive strategies in texts produced in India, Argentina, Japan, China, Israel, and the United States, but nothing about the individuals who actually receive these messages. We know that readers sometimes respond unusually, unpredictably, and even in resistance. More attention to actual media use would be helpful, particularly in terms of the text’s global perspective. Another important absence involves analysis of the structures, systems, and institutions that develop and distribute media products. For example, although Saito and Ishiyama examine outcomes and policy ramifications of Japanese newspaper coverage, they do not delve into the media regulations, social norms, economic constraints, and historical contexts that coalesce to produce such articles. More attention to workplace norms, funding sources, and executive power could further complicate and expand the scope of many of these essays. Finally, I would have appreciated more application of media theory throughout the book. Although Tom Reichert’s analysis of magazine advertising employs a framework of social learning theory, most contributors do not take advantage of the rich body of theory available for media analysis.

Even with these deficiencies, Women and the Media: Diverse Perspectives is a powerful new book that has much to offer to the study of gender issues. Not only would scholars working in English, women’s studies, global media, and gender roles find the book helpful, but feminist researchers, in particular, could derive useful insights about the ways in which media texts construct social practice and frame the lived experiences of women around the world. Importantly, through a focus on four prominent female media producers, the last four chapters of the book point to the ways women continually challenge the status quo in terms of authorship, media ownership, and representation. These women’s stories are hopeful and inspiring; we need to hear more of them.