Jean Kilbourne | |
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| Born | (1943-01-04)January 4, 1943 (age 82)[1] |
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| Occupation | Media educator |
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| Children | 1 |
| Website | JeanKilbourne.com |
Jean Kilbourne (born January 4, 1943) is an Americaneducator, formermodel,filmmaker,author andactivist, who is known as a pioneer of feministadvertising criticism and advocacy ofmedia literacy. In the 1970s she was one of the top three requested speakers at college campuses inNorthern America.
Her 1979 documentary,Killing Us Softly, has been used in several fields of academy ranging frompsychology tocommunications for several decades. In 2019, Jennifer Pozner said her points were more compelling than ever.
Kilbourne was born inJunction City, Kansas.[1] Her mother died when she was 9.[2] She grew up inHingham, Massachusetts.[3][1] She started smoking when she was 13. She toldDeseret News that quitting was the hardest thing she'd ever done.[2] She graduated fromHingham High School in 1960.[4]
Kilbourne has aBachelor of Arts inEnglish fromWellesley College and holds aMaster of Arts andDoctorate in Education fromBoston University.[5][3][1]
At the time of her graduation from Wellesley, it wasdifficult for women to find jobs. Kilbourne had to work as a waitress and as a model while she attendedsecretarial school to find work in her field. She described her work as a model "soul-destroying," describing a culture ofsexual harassment.[6][7][8] She then obtained a job at theBBC working as asecretary.[3] In 1969, she started teaching atNorwell High School. Upon obtaining her MA, she taught atEmerson College until 1975.[1][3]
In 1968, Kilbourne saw an ad forOvulen 21, a birth control pill, which said it worked "the way a woman thinks—by weekdays" instead of by theirmenstrual cycles with pictures of variousstereotypical tasks for ahousewife. She said the ad changed her life. She began to watch for patterns in advertisements she saw and clipped them to put on her refrigerator at home. She said she noticed a trend of advertisements demeaning to women and some were "shockingly violent." She then shifted her career from teaching to academia and educating the public about how the media shapes society.[9]
Early in her scholarly career, Kilbourne explored the connection between advertising and severalpublic health issues, includingviolence against women,eating disorders, andaddiction, and launched a movement to promotemedia literacy as a way to prevent these problems. An idea that diverged significantly from the mainstream at the time, this approach has since become mainstream and an integral part of most prevention programs.[10][11] She testified twice before theUnited States Congress and advised twoSurgeons General of the United States on the impact ofJoe Camel, a cartoon mascot forCamel brand cigarettes, on children, and other advertising around alcohol and the portrayal of women. Kilbourne said that the advertising perpetuates unrealistic, unobtainable ideals and creates a culture of violence toward women in which they are objectified and dehumanized. Kilbourne believes that addictions are a political tool.[8]
Kilbourne was in the 2011 documentaryMiss Representation.[12]
In the 1970s, Kilbourne's work pioneered the criticism of a growing trend among advertisers to objectify women, now a robust field within feminist criticism of the media. According toThe New York Times Magazine andThe Boston Globe, she was among the top three most popular guest lecturers on college campuses, speaking at more than half of all universities and colleges inNorthern America.[7] Her 2000 book,Can’t Buy My Love, was recognized with a Distinguished Publication Award from theAssociation for Women in Psychology.[13]
In 2015, she was inducted into theNational Women's Hall of Fame.[14]
In 2019, 40 years after the release of her documentaryKilling Us Softly, Jennifer Pozner, the director of the organization Women in Media & News, said, "Kilbourne’s main point—that advertising creates a toxic cultural environment in which sexual objectification, physical subjugation and intellectual trivialization of women has deep psychological and political resonance—is more compelling than ever."[7] The series has been widely used in the fields ofsocial psychology,gender studies, andcommunication studies since the 1980s.[15]
In the 2006 article "Market Feminism: The Case for a Paradigm Shift" byLinda M. Scott,Still Killing Us Softly from 1987 was criticized as being a near duplicate film from the 1979 original.[16]
A 2012 paper calling for change in teaching materials withinWomen's Studies to includeandrogynous body types andtransgender women criticized Kilbourne's work stating "by neglecting to acknowledge or critique dominant couplings of bodies and genders, Kilbourne is able to neatly flip the terms of the binary she sets up," and that "the absence of this critique is connected to her failure to interrogate the ways in which the category of women is constructed in conjunction with a host of other identity categories" such as race.[17]
Kilbourne datedRingo Starr in the 1960s while she was living inLondon.[3] She was in a relationship with writerJerzy Kosiński while in graduate school, which she described as "the most important of her life."[9][19] She later met poetThomas Lux while working at Emerson. They married and they had one child before divorcing. Lux died in 2017.[20]
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