Using Digital Media to Analyze the Evolution of Feminist Discourse

1960-1979

Through 1960 to 1979, many of the terms commonly related to women and girls in the New York Times articles of the previous decades were still present. However, terms such as male, female, and sex began to appear, presenting a lexicon related to issues surrounding gender and sexuality. By clicking the “Terms” tab at the top-left of the Voyant graphic found below, we are able to see the exact number of times terms have been found in the full text in descending order. We also have the ability to search for specific words in the corpus. This provides possibilities of interesting interpretations of term frequency in the corpus upon which we can make further inferences.

For example, a search for terms beginning with orgasm (orgasm*) tells us it appears 34 times, standing two points ahead of terms beginning with mother  (mother*) which appears 32 times. Could this perhaps demonstrate an increasing interest in women’s bodies as sexual subjects capable of pleasure, rather than egg incubators and baby-makers? Another example of possible inferrences is the use of the term abortion which also appears a number of times (13). Searching this term in the section labeled Contexts, we can see language relating to legal matters and teenage-pregnancy surrounding the use of the word abortion, providing insite into the cutural concerns regarding this issue at the time. Beyond term frequency, the graph shown under the Trends tab provides information about how consistantly a word is being used throughout the corpus.  Searching the term feminist, for example, yields a total of only eight instances in the entire corpus, yet it is found more consistently throughout the articles than terms relating to orgasm. Perhaps we can assume that the language of feminism had become more common-place when discussing women in the media.

Analysis of articles from 1960-1979 in Voyant

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