Benefitting from Small and Mass Media: The Local New Women’s Movement Enters the Public Sphere in 1975

This chapter will focus on the dynamic between the local new women’s movement and the print media by focusing on the media strategies that Finnish activists chose when they entered the public sphere. I will argue that their more strategic use of both small media and mass media in 1975 increased the overall print media visibility of the new feminist groups, that is, Marxist Feminists (Marxist-Feministerna), Red Hags (Rödkäringarna) and the Finnish Women’s Association Unioni (Naisasialiitto Unioni) working groups. Because the new women’s movement gained a distinctive public presence in 1975, the chapter concludes with a discussion of media coverage of the International Women’s Year (IWY). I will argue that the IWY was used as an entry point to negotiate the proper ways of conducting feminism at a critical time when new feminist organising was at last fully awakening in Finland.