The Women Who Proposed Two-Step Flow: A Gendered Revisit to the Intellectual History of a Mass Communication Theory

Abstract

Women were a key component of the research teams that worked on the first proposal of the two-step flow theory in the Bureau of Applied Social Research (Columbia University) in the 1940s and 1950s. However, in a perfect stance of historiographical epistemic injustice, they disappeared from the history of the field. Through archival analysis and critical-hermeneutic approaches, we recover the contributions of female researchers to the Erie County and Decatur projects, published as The People’s Choice and Personal Influence, respectively. These are the 2 projects that first proposed the two-step flow theory. In particular, we recover female contributions to both the fieldwork and theoretical debates. Ultimately, we analyze their work from a gender-informed perspective. To conclude, we argue that reinscribing women into the foundational narratives of communication research is a step toward a fairer, more pluralistic, and less individualistic comprehension of the historiography of the field.