Pioneering Activist, Speaker & Writer
This list is by no means comprehensive. Many of the organizations listed have their own resource lists and other materials. I am only listing books that might not be obvious choices and that have been of particular importance to me. It is easy to find books on the various topics below these days and there are too many to include here.
You may reproduce this document freely, without alteration and with full credit to Jean Kilbourne.
Our society is today cultivating single vision, and the desensitization and the dehumanization that we feel all around us is a kind of sleep or death of awareness and conscience. We must revive in people a habit of double vision that can identify myths and values underlying society and can evaluate them from a perspective that transcends the limitations of that society.
The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.
APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls Report, American Psychological Association, 2007.
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
Center on Media and Child Health
Culture Reframed (https://www.culturereframed.org/parents-program-on-porn-hypersexualized-media/)
Fairplay (https://fairplayforkids.org/)
Kids in the House (A website featuring parenting experts, including Jean Kilbourne.)
New Moon Girls: An online community and magazine for girls and their dreams. (For and mostly by girls ages 8 to 12.)
Shaping Youth (Mission is to shift negative influences of pop culture to a healthier world view for kids)
So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. Levin, Diane E. and Kilbourne, Jean. New York: Random House, 2009.
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
Advertising and the End of the World. (A film by Sut Jhally.)
Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Kilbourne, Jean. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Originally published by the FreePress in 1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising.)
Corporate Accountability International. (Protecting people around the world from irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions.)
Deadly Persuasion: The Advertising of Alcohol & Tobacco. (A film based on Jean Kilbourne’s lecture).
Feminist Perspectives on Advertising. Golombisky,Kim, ed. New York: Lexington Books, 2019. Foreword by Jean Kilbourne.
Katie Martell (https://www.katie-martell.com)
The 3% Movement (https://www.3percentmovement.com)
Ways of Seeing. Berger, John. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
Ad Archives
Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
Only when you make things unnatural, do you have any chance of changing or intervening into the social process of advertisements. We must make what is invisible, visible, so we have a choice to make about how we want to participate in the world we inhabit.
AnyBody (Giving women a voice to challenge images of women.)
Beauty Redefined (https://www.morethanabody.org)
Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women (A film based on Jean Kilbourne’s lecture.)
Miss Representation (film)
Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession with Thinness (A film based on Jean Kilbourne’s lecture.)
True Body Project (A journal and film created by teenage girls.)
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
ANAD - National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders
Eating Disorder Referral and Information Center
Eating Disorders Coalition for Research, Policy & Action
National Eating Disorder Information Centre (Canada)
NEDA - National Eating Disorders Association (A comprehensive list of resources is available on the website.)
Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health
The values that have been labeled “feminine” – love, compassion, cooperation, patience – are very badly needed in giving birth to and nurturing a new era of greater peace and justice in human society. It would be unfortunate if they were forsaken by women because they seem dysfunctional to competition in a “masculine” world. Now, more than ever, these are the values that need to be asserted by men and women in creating a new world order.
Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Kilbourne, Jean. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
The Colonizer and the Colonized. Memmi, Albert. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. Douglas, Susan. J. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010.
HeForShe (https://www.heforshe.org/en)
Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women (A film based on Jean Kilbourne’s lecture)
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
National Organization for Men Against Sexism
National Organization for Women
National Sexual Violence Resource Center
National Women’s Hall of Fame (https://www.womenofthehall.org)
National Women’s Health Network
Privilege Through the Looking Glass. Patricia Leavy. Boston: Sense Publishers, 2017. (Includes a chapter by Jean Kilbourne)
Race/Gender/Media: Considering Diversity Across Audiences, Content, and Producers (Fourth Edition). Lind, Rebecca Ann (ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2019. (Includes a chapter by Jean Kilbourne.)
Representation Project (https://therepproject.org)
Tough Guise: Media Images and the Crisis in Masculinity. (A film by Jackson Katz)
Veteran Feminists of America (https://www.veteranfeministsofamerica.org)
WIMN (Women in Media and News). (A media analysis, training and advocacy organization. Offers female sources to reporters, speakers on women in the media, and a listserve on media analysis and reform.)
Women’s Foundation (https://twfhk.org/blog/gender-stereotyping-advertising)
It seems to me that the cultural and economic liberation of women is inseparable from the creation of a society in which all people no longer have their lives stolen from them, and in which the conditions of their production and reproduction will no longer be distorted or held back by the subordination of sex, race, or class.
Send e-mails to the President (comments@whitehouse.gov) and your Congressional representatives (www.senate.gov andwww.house.gov). Get your representatives’ voting records from the Center for National Independence in Politics (www.votesmart.org).
Center for National Independence in Politics
Emily’s List (A political network for electing women.)
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
The enemy of truth is not the lie, but the persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic myth.
ColorLines: Race Culture Action (Magazine on race, culture, and organizing.)
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
Refdesk.com (For facts of all kinds.)
Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures
The most valuable educational experience a woman can have is one which teaches her to identify and analyze – and resist – the conditions in which she lives, the morality she has been taught, the false images of herself received from high art as well as cheap pornography, classic poetry as well as TV commercials.
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture
the f word (Monthly feminist publication from the UK.)
Herizons (Canadian magazine with international and feminist views.)
Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) (An organization for female journalists.)
New Moon Girls: An online community and magazine for girls and their dreams (For and mostly by girls ages 8 to 12.)
SheSource (An online resource of expert women ready to enrich the public debate.)
Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press
The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.
Media Education Foundation ( (Films and videos on the media and social issues)
WINGS (Women’s International News Gathering Service)
In a democratic society we ought to have the widest possible discussion about the hazards that affect people. Advertising is a powerful deterrent to that free and unimpeded discussion.
Center for Media and Democracy
FAAN Mail (Fostering Activism and Alternatives Now)
Fairplay (www.fairplayforkids.org)
Women in Media and News (WIMN)
For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, churches or others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell.
Free Press (Works to involve the public in media policy making and to craft policies for more democratic media.)
Media Owners (Who owns the American media.)
The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Ask the Mediatrician (Dr. Michael Rich, Director of the Center on Media and Child Health.)
Association for Media Literacy, Canada
Center for Media Literacy (Current resources as well as an extensive archive.)
Consortium for Media Literacy (Addresses the role of global media through the advocacy, research and design of media literacy education for youth, educators and parents)
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
Global Action Project: Youth Make Media
Media Girls (https://mediagirls.org)
National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
Project Look Sharp (Provides materials, training and support for teachers and evaluates media literacy programs. Free classroom-ready media literacy curriculum kits for social studies and other subjects.)
The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy. Hobbs, Renee and Mihailidis, Paul, eds. Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.
Welcome2Reality (https://www.welcome2reality.us)
It is not hope that gets people engaged in struggle. It is being engaged in struggle that gives people hope.
Center for Partnership Studies
MADRE (International Women’s Human Rights organization.)
Violence Policy Center (Provides policy analysis on gun violence.)
Women’s Action for New Directions
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Alcohol Justice (“Talk Back” service generates letters to alcohol advertisers.)
Campaign for Justice on Tobacco Fraud (http://www.justiceontobaccofraud.ca)
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
Center on Alcohol Marketing to Youth (CAMY)
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
EducateUS: Siecus in Action (https://educateusaction.org) (A movement to transform U.S. sex education)
International Network of Women Against Tobacco (INWAT)
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)
National Association for Children of Alcoholics
Our Bodies Ourselves Today Your accurate and inclusive guide to health, sexuality, and reproductive justice.
Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) (Original research on public health problems and solutions.)
Prevention Institute (Primary prevention of gender-related violence.)
Prevention Research Institute (Prime for Life, training programs for parents, teachers, addiction professionals, and students.)
Responsible Purchasing Network (Dedicated to improving human health and the environment through best practices, superior products and networking.)
Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies & Alcohol. (A film about drinking on college campuses by Jackson Katz and Jean Kilbourne.)
Trinkets & Trash Services (An archive of tobacco products and tobacco industry marketing materials.)
To end our pervasive obsession with drugs requires nothing less than the transformation of American society. We need to reorient our values and priorities so that we value and invest in our most precious resource: people.
A Woman’s Way Through the 12 Steps Covington, Stephanie. (Book and workbook available along with many other resources.)
Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR)
She’s in Recovery (An online community for women in recovery.)
Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. White, William L. Bloomington, IL: Chestnut Health Systems, 1998.
Overeaters Anymous https://oa.org/
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.