"This Week on the Hallmark Hall of Fame...": The Episodic Drama of Feminine Discontent in 1950s American Television

This presentation will discuss programs from the first seasons of the Hallmark Hall of Fame television series. To this day an ongoing feature of network broadcast, the Hallmark series began on NBC in 1951. The format of the series was revamped several times during the 1950s, but in its first two seasons the show was a weekly broadcast composed of 30-minute dramatic narratives that paid tribute to "great" women and men in American history. Each week on Sunday afternoon, the show’s host, Sarah Churchill, would begin by “nominating” a historical figure to Hallmark’s Hall of Fame. The rest of the program would be devoted to a narrative presentation of an incident from that person’s life. Florence Nightengale, Anna Ella Carroll, and Harriet Quimby are among the women Hallmark chose to profile and showcase as representatives of female achievement. For the most part, the life stories of these diverse women are made to conform to the same model. Presented as being both gifted and exceptional, the female protagonists of these programs express frustration with domestic duties and often choose a life of self-sacrifice and independence over marriage and children.

These weekly presentations of defiant femininities stand in stark contrast to the sitcom housewife heroine that is often treated as shorthand for femininity on television during the postwar period. One of the goals of this paper is to draw attention to these alternative versions of femininity that were in circulation via television during the postwar years. By pointing to the commonalities between the women’s narratives presented on Hallmark and the narratives of women’s lives offered a few years later in the writings of women’s activists like Betty Friedan, Eve Merriam and Mirra Komarovsky, I hope to further dismantle the binary of mass culture/feminism that scholars of women’s culture have begun to critique.