Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC

Description

The 20th century was a time of rapid expansion in media industries, as well as of accelerating demands for equality and recognition for women. While women’s agency has typically been defined through the domestic sphere, the introduction of media into the home destabilised firm boundaries between public and private spheres. Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age demonstrates how women as media producers and audiences in three countries with public service broadcasters (UK, Canada and Australia) have contributed to changes in our understandings of public and private. Justine Lloyd offers a new way of understanding how tremendous changes in social definitions of gender roles played out in media forms worldwide during this period through the notion of ‘intimate geographies’. Women’s participation in media continues to be a key challenge to notions of the public sphere and the book concludes that profound changes initiated in the broadcast era are unfinished in the age of digital media. Lloyd therefore provides rich and valuable evidence of the dynamic relationship between media texts, producers and audiences that is relevant to contemporary debates about a growing gender ‘apartheid’ in a mediated culture. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: New Connections 1 Radio: Public, Private, Intimate Introduction Spatial histories Histories of intimacy Inciting intimate geographies 2 Media’s Domestication as Intimate Geography Introduction: Not a technical article Making time for women Writing radio histories The (gendered) democratization of everyday life Conclusion 3 Anything but the News: Defining Women’s Programming in Australia, 1935–1950s Introduction She will be missed … Woman’s place is in the world The plight of the home Censorship and the women’s cold war Resuming transmission Wishy-washy sessions Conclusion 4 Mental Health on a National Scale: The Women of the CBC, 1940–1953 Introduction Caught in the act: Monica Mugan They Tell Me: Claire Wallace Leftovers and politics: Kate Aitken “Housekeeping Plus”: Mattie Rotenberg Behind the scenes: Elizabeth Long Conclusion 5 Listening to the Listener: Constructing Woman’s Hour at the BBC, 1946–1955 Women’s Hour and after A question of genre Defining Woman’s Hour The middle-class Woman’s Hour? Something about children Making space for listening The limits of listening Conclusion: Gender, time, and labor 6 The Long Legacies of Women’s Programming The cold case of the disappearance of women’s programming Feminists’ Hour or Woman’s Hour Conclusion: Whisky and wives Notes Bibliography Index