C A T H E R I N E M A R T I N
Radio
KEYWORDS comedy, gender, race, radio, sexuality
Radio studies is an inherently feminist endeavor. Radio was long considered too commercial, too personal, too crowded with pop music, too frivolous, too . . . feminineto be taken very seriously either in academia or in the culture at large. My own introductions to radio studies and feminist radio studies were one and the same. Even before returning to graduate school, I happened upon Michele Hilmes’s landmark study Radio Voices through the serendipity of an Amazon search. As others have noted before me, Hilmes masterfully mixes in-dustrial and cultural history, with a heavy emphasis on gender. In her fifth chap-ter,“The Disembodied Woman,”she argues that gender is a“central conflict”
and formative influence in the evolution of American radio.1 Feminist radio scholars are still answering her call to tease out the complex relationships be-tween the women who have historically composed the majority of radio’s listen-ers and the medium’s broadcasters—a historically (but not exclusively) masculine group of producers, writers, advertisers, and radio station owners.
Radio studies incorporates cultural studies, gender studies, and the aesthetic tool kit it shares with film and literary studies. Indeed, feminists’emphasis on the importance of female-centric popular media helped make broadcasting an acceptable academic focus.2An intrinsically intertextual approach for an inter-textual medium, scholarship on radio overlaps many other branches of media inquiry, especially television. However, it is important to understand radio as its own medium. Radio preceded television by some three decades, and many of its industrial and aesthetic characteristics shaped its younger broadcast sibling’s development. Radio continued to exist beyond its so-called Golden Age (gener-ally agreed to span from thes to the earlys), when the last American network radio dramas made the leap to television in the early s. Radio remains a vibrant, international site of public debate, cultural exchange, and
communication. Thus, scholars must continually reconsider what it means to discuss radio’s audience and its temporality. As the definition of radio expands to include satellite and web-based broadcasts, as well as podcasting, gendered program boundaries blur and a wider range of feminist and queer representa-tions find far-flung audiences.3
Early broadcasters courted prestige by distancing themselves from their sup-posedly lower-class“mass”female audiences—theoretically securely contained in the daytime hours—and emphasizing their prestigious, masculine-identified prime-time programming. This attitude dominated early radio histories focusing on the industry’s development and well-known radio auteurs like Norman Corwin or Orson Welles.4Early feminist histories of American radio focused, naturally enough, on its evolution as a commercial medium. Susan Smulyan’s Selling Radio() traces broadcasters’efforts to construct and sell advertisers a coherent female audience of daytime listeners.5The study of female-oriented radio genres began with that most reviled of institutions, the soap opera. Muriel G. Cantor and Suzanne Pingree inand Robert C. Allen in were the first to seriously investigate radio soap opera production and poetics.6 Ellen Seiter, Jennifer Hyland Wang, Sarah Murray, and others have continued this work, highlighting women’s creative roles, American broadcasters’contentious relationships with female listeners, efforts to confine women’s programming to daytime hours, and ways soap operas shaped and challenged conventional gender norms.7British scholars like Lyn Thomas continue this analysis into the present with their work on long-running BBC soaps likeThe Archers(–present).8
Expanding beyond the stereotypically feminine preserve of daytime, research-ers have analyzed the transgressive potential of prime-time female comediennes like Gracie Allen.9Allison McCracken, Jennifer Fleeger, and Matthew Murray explore the ways radio questioned, destabilized, and/or reasserted both female and male gender and sexual identities ins ands comedy and suspense pro-gramming.10Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
’s recent history of Jack Benny’s popular com-edy series (–) resurrects the memory of Mary Livingstone, Benny’s chief stooge, and highlights the moments of sympathy between Mary, Rochester (Benny’s African American butler), and female listeners.11My own work focuses on representations of working women in post–World War II crime and adven-ture series.12Eleanor Patterson highlights gender
’s continuing salience in collec-tors’circulation of residual radio texts.13Jason Loviglio notes the importance of female announcers’voices to NPR’s cultural work.14
Latina/o Media() collects numerous perspectives on gendered representa-tions and Latina audiences on modern-day US Spanish-language radio.15 In Broadcasting Freedom () Barbara Savage emphasizes African American women’s role in World War II–era efforts to improve racial representation.16 Kathy M. Newman highlights advertisers’ halfhearted outreach to African American audiences as white listeners decamped to television in thes, not-ing that many commercials were designed to reach affluent white housewives possibly listening along with their Black domestics.17
As a domestic appliance, radio was a fundamentally feminine medium, but women are often missing from archival records. Feminist radio studies seeks to recover the lost stories of women working behind the scenes. In Susan Douglas’sInventing American Broadcasting,–began the difficult task of writing women back into American radio history, noting women like Nora Stanton Blatch, who helped her husband, Lee de Forest, develop and pro-mote early radio technology.18Donna Halper’sInvisible Stars () reviews the broad range of women whose stories have been obscured in broadcast history.19Cynthia Meyers
’s work on radio advertising foregrounds the roles of women like Anne Hummert in the advertising industry, especially soap opera production, beginning in the s and continuing to television.20 Amanda Keeler recently examined Judith Waller’ss work on NBC’s educational and public service offerings.21
While American broadcast media tend to take center stage, radio is an inter-national medium. Kate Lacey’sFeminine Frequencies() analyzes how wom-en’s radio programming in Weimar and Nazi Germany promoted feminine domesticity, foregrounding early female broadcasters like Carola Hersel.22 Christine Ehrick shows how gendered soundscapes interacted with s to s women’s rights movements in Argentina and Uruguay.23Other recent international scholarship scrutinizes female pirate radio operators in Ireland, representations of lesbian culture and feminist radio collectives on British radio, feminist radio production in Turkey, and representations of Muslim women on Australia’s national broadcaster.24
another important meeting place for US-based radio academics, and groups like the UK-based Radio Studies Network hold annual conferences. Feminist radio work appears consistently in journals like theHistorical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, theJournal of Radio and Audio Media, and the internationally focusedRadio Journal, though it is not their central focus.
Despite these advances, feminist radio studies still has a niche status in American universities. Radio researchers are distributed throughout media and cultural studies disciplines, and radio is too often regarded as an afterthought in historical and media scholarship, rather than an integral part of the industrial and ideological media ecosystem.25Interesting interventions might include anal-yses of the way radio adaptations and promotions domesticated and feminized masculine-coded high-culture texts. Scholars focusing on prime-time radio gen-res and aesthetics still fall into the same gendered taste hierarchies as early broadcasters and media studies scholarship, prioritizing male auteurs and ca-nonical texts like Welles’sWar of the Worlds() over more popular, mass-audience texts. This focus ignores gender’s central role in shaping such hierar-chies, which are being replicated on new formats like podcasting.26It further misses valuable opportunities to analyze the ways women and men might have interacted with the range of radio messages and ignores the larger feminized domestic environment in which listeners encountered such programs.
CATHERINEMARTI Nis a PhD candidate in Boston University’s American and New England Studies
Program. Her dissertation,“You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime: Representations of Women in American Radio and Television Crime Programming, 1945–1978,”analyzes representa-tions of women in radio and television crime programs, with an emphasis on cultural depicrepresenta-tions of women’s labor between World War II and the emergence of second wave feminism. She currently serves as graduate representative for the Radio Preservation Task Force, and her work has appeared in theVelvet Light Trap.
N O T E S
. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, – (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,),.
. Michele Hilmes,“The Bad Object: Television in the American Academy,”Cinema Journal, no.():–.
. See Mél Hogan,“Dykes on Mykes: Podcasting and the Activist Archive,”TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (): –; Ragan Fox, “Sober Drag Queens, Digital Forests, and Bloated ‘Lesbians’: Performing Gay Identities Online,”
Qualitative Inquiry, no.():–.
andThe Image Empire, vol., coveringto(New York: Oxford University Press,
,,).
. Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting,
–(Washington, DC: Smithsonian,).
. Muriel G. Cantor and Suzanne Pingree,The Soap Opera(Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,
); Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,).
. Ellen Seiter,“‘To Teach and To Sell’: Irna Phillips and Her Sponsors,–,”
Journal of Film and Video, no.():–; Jennifer Hyland Wang,“‘The Case of the Radio-Active Housewife’: Relocating Radio in the Age of Television,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, ),–; Sarah Murray, “The Radio Made Betty: Live Trademarks, Disembodiment, and the Real,”Feminist Media Histories, no. ():
–; Jennifer Hyland Wang, “Producing a Radio Housewife: Clara, Lu ‘n’ Em, Gendered Labor, and the Early Days of Radio,” Feminist Media Histories , no.
():–; Jason Loviglio,Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting And Mass-Mediated Democracy(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,).
. Lyn Thomas,“The Archers: An Everyday Story of Old and New Media,”Radio Journal, no.():–.
. Susan J. Douglas,Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,).
. Allison McCracken,“Scary Women and Scarred Men: Suspense, Gender Trouble, and Postwar Change,–,”inRadio Reader,–; Allison McCracken,Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
); Jennifer Fleeger, Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song through the Machine
(New York: Oxford University Press, ); Matthew Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals’: Regulation and Irregular Sexuality in Golden Age Radio Comedy,”inRadio Reader,–.
. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy(Oakland: University of California Press,),.
. Catherine Martin,“Adventure’s Fun, but Wouldn’t You Rather Get Married?: Gender Roles and the Office Wife in Radio Detective Dramas,”Velvet Light Trap, no.():–.
. Eleanor Patterson, “Radio Redux: The Persistence of Soundwork in the Post-Network Era”(PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison,).
. Jason Loviglio,“Sound Effects: Gender, Voice and the Cultural Work of NPR,”
Radio Journal, nos./():–.
. María Elena Cepeda and Dolores Inés Casillas, The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media(New York: Routledge,). See also Dolores Inés Casillas,Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy(New York: New York University Press,).
. Barbara Dianne Savage,Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race,
. Kathy M. Newman, “The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, the‘Negro Market’and the Civil Rights Movement,”Radical History Review():–.
. Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting,–(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,),.
. Donna L. Halper, Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,).
. Cynthia B. Meyers,A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio(New York: Fordham University Press,).
. Amanda Keeler, “‘A Certain Stigma’ of Educational Radio: Judith Waller and ‘Public Service’ Broadcasting,” Critical Studies in Media Communication , no.
():–.
. Kate Lacey,Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere
–(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,).
. Christine Ehrick,Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay,–(New York: Cambridge University Press,). See also Christine Ehrick,“Nené Cascallar’s Thirsty Heart: Gender, Voice, and Desire in a
s Argentine Radio Serial,”Feminist Media Histories, no.():–.
. Caroline Mitchell, ed., Women and Radio: Airing Differences (New York: Routledge,); Caroline Mitchell,“Re-Sounding Feminist Radio: A Journey through Women’s Community Radio Archives,”Feminist Media Histories , no.(October,
): –; Nazan Haydari, “Sabun Köpüğü: Popular Culture, the Everyday, and Representation of Feminist Politics through Radio in Turkey,”Feminist Media Histories , no.():–; Julie Posetti,“Unveiling Radio Coverage of Muslim Women,”
Radio Journal, no.().
. Michele Hilmes,Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,).
