"Her Say" in the Media Mainstream: A Cultural Feminist Manifesto

Abstract The "Her Say" column of the "Womanews" section in the Chicago Tribune functioned as an editorial to position the new women's section and provide women-centered perspectives on issues. Written by women from outside the Tribune staff during its 1991 launch, "Her Say" spoke in voices drawn from the larger women's community, often barkening back to earlier notions of gender to bring forward concepts and rework them to fit American women in the 1990s. Using sex difference and privileging sisterhood, "Her Say" articulated the terms of a separate women's culture, the bounds of which continued to be defined by newspapers across the nation as they introduced their own women's sections. Through "Her Say" this section signaled a shift in the media paradigm from liberal feminism to a cultural feminist approach, which called for a reconnection among women through women's media in the media mainstream. The myth for the 1990s that emerged from "Her Say" was that of a world-weary prodigal daughter returning to the hearth. As the mouthpiece for the "Womanews" section, "Her Say" heralded a revaluing of "woman," and challenged the industry to hasten its redefinition of "news" for 21st -century relevancy. The 1991 debut of the "Womanews" section in the Chicago Tribune sparked a nationwide reintroduction of women's pages that caught on as rapidly as the move to kill them had 2 decades earlier. If not as long-lived as the earlier opposing movement, this move proved at least as controversial. Through textual analysis of the section's editorial voice, this research attempts to determine how "Womanews" positioned itself for such immediate popularity and potential for success. This study listens to "Her Say," the editorial voice of "Womanews," during the section's launch to determine how its call promoted a women's culture and what it promised for readers as well as industry. In determining the significance of this call, this study employs a cultural feminist theoretical perspective, one that has not often been used in media studies. From this perspective, this research seeks to define examples of cultural feminist practice. The method has been to define key issues in the editorials and from them to determine themes and the metathematic considerations that structure the discourse as cultural feminist as well as tie it to the conventions of the news industry. With these issues, themes, and metathemes not expected to be mutually exclusive but interwoven, this qualitative study attempts to analyze the call that launched this section without losing the richness of its discourse. "Womanews" premiered on Sunday, April 28, 1991, in the Chicago Tribune. Providing a space for women, the section profiled women, highlighted women's accomplishments, and examined family and societal relationships. With women writing most of its articles, the section incorporated columnists from around the nation as well as writers from other media in addition to Tribune staffers. Each week, the section ran articles on pages designated by topic. The "News & Opinion" page ran what can be viewed as the section's editorial, "Her Say." "Womanews" was a newspaper within the newspaper. The section front had the look and feel of a newspaper front, complete with sky boxes. Averaging 14 pages from the start, the section was thick with its news/ advertising mix, each week running regular pages including "Family Matters," "Helping Hands," and "Health & Well Being." The completeness of the presentation of this section signaled by its newspaper-within-a-newspaper structure offered women what appeared to be a fully formed culture of their own, a women's culture within the male-defined mainstream. This structuring differentiated the section from the complementary nature of women's pages as they had appeared in newspapers until the 1970s, and in so doing it offered advertisers the prepackaged women's audience that they had been missing for the intervening decades. …