Kantrowitz Supports Feminism

I chose to examine Barbara Kantrowitz’s article, “Its Ms. America to You” using a contextual analysis, and came to the conclusion that the piece is epideictic and in support of commonly accepted standards of gender equality. Kantrowitz recounts a demonstration at the 1968 Miss America pageant kick-started the women’s liberation movement. Through her account of the story Kantrowitz seems to justify the protests.
Kantrowitz uses ethos in the first paragraph by dispelling the commonly held notion that the women protesting the pageant in 1968 burned bras. She also revisits this claim in at the end of the second paragraph when she asks and receives confirmation from one of the former protesters, Robin Morgan, that no bras were burned. By “mythbusting” this bra burning story, Kantrowitz does two things; she shows the audience how reliable and good she is at fact finding (ethos), and she shows that she has some sort of interest in showing that these protesters were not violent, and might even be “elegant.” In order to convince the audience that the women were not in the wrong, she has to make sure they are not thought of unfavorably. The dispositio of the ethos also seems calculated because by placing it at the front of the piece, she gains the audience’s trust before she lays out her main argument.
Kantrowitz then uses pathos at the end of paragraph 4 to justify the actions of the New York Radical women by crediting them with blowing the doors off the “bastions of male power” forcing medical, law, and Ivy league schools to admit women into their ranks. I believe this is pathos because most Americans today; male and female, consider gender equality a deeply held value.
In paragraph five, Kantrowitz’s true colors come out. She is clearly in favor of women’s rights judging by the connotations of some of the adjectives she uses. She says some issues are still “disturbingly” contentious. She would not consider opposition to roe vs. wade disturbing unless she strongly favored the current law. She also describes calls anti-abortion activists’ actions as “ferocious” rather than a less loaded word like persistent or aggressive. Her description of Botox as “poison” clearly shows that she doesn’t approve of the “rigid beauty standards” that were the target of the New York Radical Women.
Although this article could have been analyzed contextually I believe a textual analysis was more effective because Kantrowitz doesn’t really insert herself personally into the piece. She doesn’t outrightly state her positions biases or use pronouns like I or me like E.B. White did. For this reason I thought the best way to unshed her true feelings would be to look deeper at the text itself rather than Kantrowitz herself.