Girls' Media in the Women's Liberation Era

by Kirsten Pike

Overview

Girls’ Media in the Women’s Liberation Era is a critical analysis and cultural history of popular girls’ media narratives produced in the United States between 1968 and 1980—the era of the second-wave feminist movement—and girls’ responses to those narratives.

Grounded in exhaustive archival research and close analysis of such hits as The Brady Bunch and Family, the book highlights how mainstream media negotiated feminist themes and how liberation-era girls “talked back”—especially through letters, opinion essays, interviews, and diaries—on a range of media narratives and feminist issues, thus demonstrating their crucial involvement in the women’s movement and its wider political struggle.

Girls’ Media in the Women’s Liberation Era is a key text for both students and researchers in women’s and gender studies, media studies, children’s media, American studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032937175
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kirsten Pike is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar.

Table of Contents

Introduction  1. Girls in Revolt! Girls’ Activism and Citizenship in Sitcoms and Seventeen  2. Hear Me Roar! Girl Writing, Girl Talk, and Do-It-Yourself Citizenship  3. After School Lessons in Liberation: From ABC Afterschool Specials to Trina Porte’s Teen Diaries  4. Tomboy Tensions and Family’s Queer Pleasures: The Curious Case of Kristy McNichol  5. Independence, Power, and Sexuality: Managing Female Adolescence in Disney’s Witch Mountain Movies  Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"This major contribution to feminist media studies is a sensitive and sharply observed study of the spaces through which 1970s girls and the media makers addressing them articulated youth social prospects, ambitions, interests and constraints.  Encompassing television, film, magazines and celebrity discourse Kirsten Pike tracks a revealing pattern of a feminism both emancipatory and cautionary." 

- Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin, Ireland

"Through innovative primary sources, trenchant analyses, and rich context, Kirsten Pike invites us into girls’ media worlds of the late 1960s and 1970s. Pike provides an in-depth examination of the magazines, television programs, and celebrities that engaged pre-teen and teen girls in an era of immense change to gender expectations, rights, and roles. Bringing together commercial media products and the everyday experiences of real girls, Pike delivers a wholly engaging and insightful contribution to feminist media history."

- Elana Levine, Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, U.S. and author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

"This book builds a rich history of girls media, illuminating the complexity, pleasures, and contradictions of the late-1960s and 1970s. Pike works deftly at the intersection of multiple aspects of girls media studies, illuminating the popularization of feminism for girls, as well as the ways media commodified feminism and linked it to discourses of beauty and heterosexual romance. Yet, even as Pike addresses media representation, she also explores the many ways girls “talked back” to and within media culture through both widely available print media and private archival material, thereby reinvigorating feminism for themselves, for each other, and now—through Pike’s compelling study—for us."

- Sarah Projansky, Professor of Gender Studies and Film & Media Arts, University of Utah, U.S. and author of Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture

From the Publisher