»Tais-toi et sois belle!« 20 Jahre Geschlechterinszenierung in fünf westdeutschen Printmedien

A longitudinal content analysis of five West German print media from 1976 to 1996 investigates the two strategies of presenting women often found in electronic mass media: annihilation and trivialization. Working with over 20 categories, the stories of two news magazines (〉Stern〈, 〉Spiegel〈) and three daily newspapers (〉Frankfurter Rundschau〈, 〉Welt〈, 〉Neue Westfälische〈) were analysed for the years 1976, 1983, 1986, 1993, 1996, using parallel examinations of articles about women and about men. While the latter outnumber the former by 2:1 to 6:1, the stories about women thematically appear to belong to the popular and entertaining sectors. The two common strategies — underrepresentation and trivialization of women — do not change much over the time investigated — despite the rapid development of a women’s movement and a profound emancipation of gender relations in the western world in this period. Nonetheless the two strategies are accentuated by the five papers’ quantitative and qualitative differences in handling them.