Anna Ford, ‘Women in Media’ and celebrity/feminism in UK second wave feminism

Hamad, Hannah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8949-7206 2026. Anna Ford, ‘Women in Media’ and celebrity/feminism in UK second wave feminism. McIntyre, Joanna and Taylor, Anthea, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Celebrity, Routledge, pp. 475-487. (10.4324/9781003290582-41)

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Abstract

Employing the findings of archive research into the ‘Records of Women in Media’ collection at the London School of Economics (LSE) Women’s Library, this chapter interrogates a key moment in UK second-wave feminist history as it intersects with celebrity and the media when a flashpoint occurred around British newsreader Anna Ford’s excoriation of the UK media as ‘body fascist’. Already a key figure in UK feminist television history by virtue of having become the first woman to read the news on independent television, Ford effectively became a celebrity spokesperson for UK feminism through her affiliation with the pressure group ‘Women in Media’, at whose conference she made her inflammatorily newsworthy remarks in July 1980. The celebrity status that Ford brought to her membership of this group attracted a heretofore unseen level of publicity and national mainstream media coverage for what had, by then, been a ten-year long feminist campaign by the group to intervene in sexist media myths perpetuated in the depiction of women, in unequal working practices and discrimination against women in the UK media industries, and to lobby for change on both fronts.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032269313
Related URLs:	https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit...
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 November 2025
Last Modified:	11 Aug 2026 14:52
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182052

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