By Laura Cummings
Journalism and the media are everywhere – lighting up our televisions, splashed across our computer screens and arriving on our doorsteps each morning. With such a major daily impact, it’s no wonder many would choose to study the media’s various facets, and Barbara M. Freeman is one of them.
She is an adjunct research professor of journalism at Carleton University, with key research areas in communications history, and gender and diversity issues in the media. She is currently working on a history of women in Canadian journalism, 1945-2000.
Her most recent book is a collection of her own essays under the title, Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2011), which she researched and wrote with the help of a three-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
In these essays, she examines historical cases of women who worked in print and broadcast media and were committed activists as well. Her case studies illustrate how the language and foci of women’s rights have changed from the late 19th century until the year 2000 as her subjects sought equality in education, suffrage, fair employment practices, reproductive and sexual freedom, and the rights of indigenous women.
“I wanted to see how they used their positions to forward their causes, how they succeeded, and why they failed when they did,” Freeman said. “After all, the women of Canada often learned about their rights from the women journalists of their time.”
There is a lack of historical context for national studies on media and gender issues, she said. Her research contributes more of that background and adds to our knowledge of the conditions that women working in both mainstream and alternative media have faced.
Aside from Beyond Bylines, Freeman has authored two other book-length studies — The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women’s Issues in English Canada, 1966 – 71 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001) and Kit’s Kingdom: The Journalism of Kathleen Blake Coleman, a renowned Canadian newspaper pioneer (Carleton University Press, 1989).
She has also published articles in several anthologies and journals, most recently in K. Kozolanka et al., Alternative Media in Canada (UBC Press, 2012) and in Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (December 2012).