‘Women and Media’: Too Little Power

The subject at the opening session of a conference on “Women, Men and Media” was the “breakthroughs and backlash” women have experienced in the 25 years since Betty Friedan’s landmark book, “The Feminine Mystique,” helped launch the women’s movement.

But the bottom line was power.

As television producer Esther Shapiro, co-creator of “Dynasty,” defined it, power means not only taking control of one’s own life, but owning other things as well. At that point, late Sunday afternoon, Shapiro turned a rather staid conference chaired by Friedan at USC into what sounded like a political rally.

“I’d like to own a network,” Shapiro said matter-of-factly to hoots, hollers and applause, “and hire Barbara Corday and a few others. . . . We simply have to do it ourselves.”

A Blurred Picture

Fellow panelist Corday, co-creator of “Cagney & Lacey” who in October resigned as president of Columbia/Embassy Television, painted a rather blurred picture of the position of women in and on TV. She spoke of “backsliding” rather than “backlash.”

While noting that there are no women at the top deciding what the nation watches, Corday added that a truer measure of power might lie with women like herself who “speak to America with the shows they create, write and produce . . . which do make a difference.”

The three-day conference, which ends tonight, is examining the role of the media as reflector and creator of American society; asking what difference the presence of women in the media has already made, and what more needs to be accomplished.

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who is also the Globe’s associate editor, said there are “few women editors (in top newspaper management) anywhere; the number of women on the masthead has peaked at about one.” The Pulitzer-winning columnist quipped that five years ago there were more women in the Reagan Cabinet than on the board of the American Newspaper Publishers Assn.

Other panelists were public television anchor Marlene Sanders, who had been the first woman vice president in a network’s news division (vice president for documentaries at ABC in 1976), and Times television critic Howard Rosenberg.

Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women and now a visiting professor at USC’s School of Journalism and the Institute for the Study of Women and Men, set the tone Sunday by asking: “Is there a new ‘feminine mystique’ on the horizon? Is there an attempt to close the doors to women?”

Monday, the conference took up the question of a “glass ceiling,” the seemingly invisible barrier women in media encounter as they attempt to reach the top.

The Unattainable Top

As Kathy Bonk, who headed the Women’s Media Project of NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund for nearly a decade, defined glass ceiling: “It’s seeing the top and not being able to get there.”

Along with other conference participants, Bonk also said that the position of women has declined due to the “hostile” attitude toward women on the part of the Reagan administration. She contrasted that with the “aggressive enforcement” of women’s rights laws and regulations during the Carter years when the message was “that Washington cares.”

Shapiro, who a decade ago was vice president in charge of miniseries for ABC, didn’t use the term glass ceiling Sunday. But that’s apparently what she was talking about when she noted that after such successes as “Friendly Fire,” “Roots: The Next Generation” and “The Women’s Room,” she “fantasized” about running a Fortune 500 company--or the network itself. “But nobody asked me to be president.”

Living Out the Fantasy

So, with her husband Richard, she formed her own production company and created the series about the oil-rich Carringtons and their glamorous older women. “I wanted to live out the fantasy, I was part of that show, I began to get a taste of that power,” she said.

Shapiro indicated she also made a lot of money from “Dynasty”--”I own part of that show”--and now she wants something more.

“The time is coming when women, the few of us who have a certain amount of financial clout,” must take the next step, she said. Besides herself, Shapiro mentioned women such as Marcy Carsey, co-producer of “The Cosby Show,” and independent movie producer Sherry Lansing, who “I’m sure made a bundle on ‘Fatal Attraction.’

“The next step for us is for women to do networking, where women can be in support of each other, and setting up businesses. Men don’t have all that money.”

However, Shapiro, who pointed out that she has four brothers and a husband of 27 years, as well as two daughters, hardly means to exclude men. “I like to hire women who like to work with men and men who like to work with women. That’s what the late ‘80s are about.”