Considering the slow affirmation of women in the professional world, their breakthrough in media has been remarkable. However, the place that has been attributed to female journalists is, even today, not without problems, especially as cinema and advertising. Each medium has promoted the intrumentalisation of the female body, pushing the female sex into roles from which, ironically, it had sought to escape in what we call, for want of a better term, ‘real life’. Women must, therefore, reflect whether the modernity that was promised to them has not been confiscated, and that too, in the name of an opening up of society to which they were called upon to consent.

In the first stanza of its Women’s Anthem, the French Movement for the Liberation of Women, declares: 

We who are without a past, women
We who have no history
Since the night of time, women
We are the black continent (MLF 1971)

And this text adds :

Enslaved, humiliated, women
Bought, sold, raped
In all houses, women
Out of the world relegated (Ibid.)

Has the absence of a specifically female history deprived women of conceptual tools necessary for them to assert themselves in a professional world that remains dominated by values of the patriarchal system? And would their access to the predominantly male world of politics, especially through journalism, now dominated by the social media, provoke the ire of men unprepared to accept such a visible change in social structure? The access of so many to social media has, it is true, opened an avenue for expression that would have best remained closed off: that of hate speech - of which the female journalists are a frequent target.
 

This study will consider first of all the difficulty, even today, for history to offer space to women. In response, one may promote research that will trace them across the centuries. Secondly, the study will examine the (theoretical) question of the harassment (particularly sexual) that women face in their daily lives. The study will, then, come to what one might term the ‘tip of the iceberg’: attacks on women journalists and their social significance, even as groups of men in various societies employ ‘dark arts’ to push them back ‘where they belong’. Finally, the recommendations will focus on the need to give greater visibility to women in the history that is taught to younger generations of boys and girls. The latter will, thus, be better able to envisage a common vision of the future founded on respect for the other and sheltered from ancestral prejudices.

Reference

Mouvement de liberation des femmes-MLF (Movement for the Liberation of Women) 1971, ‘Hymne des femmes’ (Women’s Anthem), Mouvement de Libération des femmes, [Accessed 30 October 2019].