Session Abstract

This panel will examine the histories of women and the narratives of women's lives that were generated by broadcast media between 1930 and 1960. Since the 1970s, feminist historians based in and outside the academy have looked to the political speeches, writings, and ephemera of past women in an effort to construct narratives of feminist thought and activism. Within the last few decades, scholars working on mass culture have added to these histories by turning to other sources. Focusing on women’s media, including magazines, romance fiction, and soap operas, feminist critics such as Joanne Meyerowitz and Lynn Spigel, have drawn attention to the role that popular culture plays in constituting and modifying dominant constructions of femininity. In subsequent strains of feminist media criticism, feminism itself has become an object of analysis, evidenced by the work of Susan Douglas, Wini Breines, and Bonnie J. Dow on the representations of second wave feminist leaders and the incorporation of liberal feminist rhetoric in popular media.

These forms of feminist media history attest to the credible status that mass culture texts have attained as primary materials for writing women’s history. Yet, too often, this scholarship retraces a neat dividing line between popular media and feminism, charting the effects of one discrete construction on the other. The papers in this panel seek to blur those boundary lines, historicizing mid-century women’s media and its productive connections to women’s activism and feminist discourse. Contesting the familiar construction of media as reactive and conservative, these papers trace the collaborations between commercial sponsors, women’s activists, and government agencies in generating popular media for female audiences. Emily Westkaemper’s paper looks at the historical biographies of women that were broadcast as part of Gallant American Women (1939 – 1940) and other radio programs, exploring the ways that some women and activists used commercial culture to broadcast feminist narratives about women's histories. Similarly, Leigh Goldstein’s paper addresses the biographies of “great American women” that were broadcast as part of the first seasons of the Hallmark Hall of Fame television series (1952 – 1953), comparing the women’s history generated by these programs with the feminist narratives popularized by contemporary women’s activists. Christine Ehrick’s paper will explore the radio advice columns and romance narratives that were broadcast for female audiences in 1940s Argentina, addressing the complex mix of feminist and patriarchal politics that defined this early form of women’s media. Taken together, these papers provide a comparative analysis of women’s media as a form of women’s history. 

Speaking to the theme of “Lives, Places, Stories,” this work analyzes the multiple, intersecting agendas that shaped popular storytelling conventions in early radio and television. Drama stimulated audience identification with the lives of characters, a strategy which served to sell products and to foster patriotism.  Simultaneously, activists deployed biography to increase public recognition of forgotten female figures and dramatized scenes of everyday life to highlight the importance of women’s activities to society as a whole.  This approach thus worked to expand public assumptions of what constitutes “history.”