FEMINISTS IN THE WASTELAND The National Organization for Women and television reform

This article investigates the television reform activism of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the early 1970s in the United States. In particular, it focuses on NOW's petitions-to-deny license renewal of television stations. Like other social justice groups of the period, NOW drew on a recent court case, Office of Communication of United Church of Christ v. Federal Communications Commission (1966), which enabled the broadcasting public to participate in the license renewal process. NOW used its petitions to pressure broadcasters to improve representations of women, to hire more women, and to recognize women as part of the broadcasting public. For NOW, the symbolic and material spheres were deeply intertwined, and television in particular played a crucial role in perpetuating the very problems that the organization sought to solve. In this vein, NOW was in line with other activist groups that believed that to realize social change in a mass-mediated world required a focus on media reform. In addition, this article argues that NOW's purpose was not only to reform the practices and programming of television stations, but also to claim women's membership in the civic body, here predicated on their position as members of the broadcasting public.