Feminist Media is an Endangered Species. Can the Movement it Created Survive Without it?

In November 2023, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller announced that he had made the “very, very difficult decision to suspend publication of Jezebel,” a feminist magazine highly influential in the #MeToo movement, as “the parent company’s business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.’” With the snap of a powerful man’s finger, dozens of women journalists were laid off and their voices silenced, along with a storied fixture of feminist media—a tragedy that would become a trend as Bitch Magazine and The Lily also folded with Jezebel in the same period of three years. 

In the wake of these mass closures of feminist media outlets, the future of the larger women’s movement—which has sustained its influence on their distribution of ideas since its inception—hangs in the balance. 

From the very beginning of the First Wave women’s movement—inspired by the revolutionary ideas of Margret Fuller, a trailblazing journalist commonly credited with being the first woman to be employed at a major newspaper and serve as a war correspondent in the United States—female journalism and the women’s press have served as an integral keystone of feminist organizing power from the 1800s to the present day. Groundbreaking female journalists have fought to deconstruct patriarchal barriers around the newsroom not only to succeed in the industry but to wrest back control over the male-dominated mainstream narrative, asserting that women have the right, intellect, and duty to weigh in on matters of collective importance just as much as men do.

In Fuller’s contemporary, journalism was a particularly masculine profession in a time when most if not all jobs were held by men and intellect itself was considered an inherently masculine quality. Indeed, the popular reaction to Fuller’s unprecedented success as a female book critic almost universally denied the possibility of her femininity coexisting with the confidence, ambition, and frank outspokenness commonly associated with men.

Most notably, esteemed writer Ralph Waldo Emerson—a fellow transcendentalist and friend of Fuller’s—said that Fuller’s “burly masculine existence” was intimidating in a woman. In an elaborated comment included in Fuller’s posthumous biography, he said that “she ought to have been a man” and that in her bravado she “lived at a rate so much faster than [Emerson’s], and which was violent compared with [his].” During her life and well after her death, Fuller was persistently masculinized by her male peers for the “violent” crime of speaking her mind.

In response to the insecure disdain of their male peers, female writers began to establish their own creative spaces and publications without men. Inspired by Fuller’s uncompromising attitude and her deeply-held conviction that women belonged in the workplace, Amelia Bloomer collaborated with feminist Elizabeth Stady Canton to publish The Lily in 1849—the first newspaper published and contributed to entirely by women. The newly invented women’s magazine would become a critical mouthpiece for the nascent feminist movement. In 1869, Stanton and fellow activist Susan B. Anthony released the first publication of The Revolution, a daring feminist newspaper that brought the Woman's Suffrage Association of America into being. Through the newly conceived women’s media, women were finally able to share ideas that were important to them on a large scale, inspiring newfound female solidarity in the face of patriarchal oppression and allowing the suffrage, equal pay, and reproductive rights movements to attain mainstream recognition among both women and men. 

While immense progress has been made after more than fifty years of women’s activism, the Women’s Media Center (WMC) found that today women comprise only 35 percent of the reporters and correspondents on the network evening news. Just 37 percent of the bylines at the nation's ten most widely circulated newspapers were women, and men were quoted as sources three times more often than women on the front page of the New York Times. The same masculinizing stereotypes around successful, outspoken, and ambitious women prevalent during Fuller’s time still grips the present in the form of the misogynistic “boss bitch” trope.

Because the mainstream media still has a significant influence on what voters learn about politicians and issues, persisting gender inequality in the media suggests that women will continue to have fewer opportunities to impact the nation’s political agenda and may be at a disadvantage relative to their male counterparts when it comes to voter registration and support. 

In a 2015 study conducted by Gail Baitinger, Adjunct Professor at the American University Department of Government, found that throughout a three-year period, 1,007 different individuals participated in Sunday morning political discussions, but only 228—or approximately 23 percent—were women. On these programs, male members of Congress greatly outnumber female members of Congress invited to participate, meaning that the average viewer of these programs consumes significantly more content centering on male politicians and perspectives than female ones.

While the state of women in journalism in the 2020s has made strides from the 2015 levels of workplace inequality, the WMC’s 2021 report revealed that the percentage of female reporters in the newsroom is on a downward trend; women made up 44.7% of the news workforce in 2024, fractionally down from the previous year’s record high of 44.9%. A year later, the Independent reported on a study conducted by researchers at the Swedish University of Gothenburg— drawing from data polled from 32,000 across 27 countries—noted a rise in “modern sexism” which is “working against women’s rights”.

Six decades after the publication of The Revolution, the future of the feminist movement may still be determined by the media it has fought so hard to make its own, and according to Ms. Magazine, women’s media is “more essential than ever in our current moment of abortion bans and anti-feminist backlash.”