The Matilda Effect in Action. How Herta Herzog's contributions were erased from canonical narratives

Herta Herzog – the inventor of the focus group and foundational contributor to audience research and uses and gratifications approach – has been systematically excised from the disciplinary histories of sociology and communication studies. This chapter examines how her intersecting marginalization, as a Jewish-refugee-precarious woman scholar, enabled the appropriation of her work and inventions by male colleagues. Combining archival research with textual ethnography, this paper aims to reconstruct Herzog’s groundbreaking work – from her qualitative audience studies to feminist media analysis – while demonstrating how the Matilda Effect obscured her intellectual legacy. Recovering that legacy requires more than citational redress: it demands a fundamental dismantling of the epistemological hierarchies, that persistently frame women’s intellectual contributions as ancillary to male scholars’ theoretical frameworks, alongside a feminist rewriting of those scholars’ intellectual biographies.