Women, Radio Broadcasting and the Depression: a “Captive” Audience from Household Hints to Story Time and Serials
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Women, Radio Broadcasting and the Depression: A “Captive” Audience from Household Hints to Story Time and Serials Anne F. MacLennan York University, Toronto The image of women radio listeners during the Depression is unduly influenced by contemporary ideas about daytime serial dramas. This distortion must be revisited in light of new evidence uncovered through content analysis of the program schedule and interview research. Interviews reveal that the conception of listening both as an active and a passive activity took time to develop. Conceptions of and forms of listening served to influence program scheduling. The program schedules evolved slowly and content analysis reveals that women’s programming did not fall into an established routine until the latter part of the 1930s. During the Depression, once the listening audience expanded to include more than the early adopters of new technology and extended beyond the prime-time evening hours, women listeners became an important part of the radio audience. Various indications of a female daytime listening audience become apparent during the 1930s, including children’s programs patterned after a mother’s day, the shift of serial dramas from the evening to the afternoons and finally reinforcement of early women’s programming centering on the home. This study focuses on the interesting case of Canadian women’s programming since the audience had access to a truly North American mix of local, network, Canadian, and American programs. A content analysis of radio program schedules in three Canadian cities supplemented by oral history interviews to clarify the place and role of women listeners’ and women’s programming in radio during the Depression are the foundation of this work.1 Radio made the transition from an occupation of the hobbyist to a medium for regular entertainment for a variety of listening audiences. In its early years and immediately following the First World War, radio was regarded as primarily the domain of the hobbyist, whose numbers rapidly multiplied thanks to training received in the military. Messy, leaking, homemade contraptions, the radio was usually confined to space in barns, garages, and attics. Although the hobbyists were almost exclusively boys and young men, Michelle Hilmes demonstrates through an extensive list of articles from QST, the journal of the American Radio Relay League and the Radio World column “Radio and Women”, that some women were also active in amateur radio.2 1 This work draws on the earlier sample for Anne Frances MacLennan, “Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Canadian Radio Program Schedule Evolution During the 1930s” diss., Concordia University, 2001. The sample is a strategic random sample of the Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver radio broadcast schedules published in local newspapers, 1930 to 1939. The sample from the decade of the 1930s had a parameter of 515 weeks, including Sunday, December 29, 1929 to Saturday, January 6, 1940. The sample has been extended to include a parallel sample of Winnipeg and Toronto. The content analysis is supplemented by a convenient and snowball sample of oral history interviews of remaining audience members. 2 Although the popular perception is that the hobby was the domain solely of boys and young men, Michele Hilmes uses an extensive list of articles from QST, the journal of the American Radio Relay League, to demonstrate that women were also active in amateur radio for many of the same reasons as their male counterparts, and Hilmes suggests that the “ability to escape the determinations of gender” may have added to radio’s appeal. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 132–136; While the experimenters and hobbyists were among the first radio enthusiasts, radio quickly moved beyond a fad or craze to a permanent part of the domestic sphere. While radio remained almost strictly experimental it was associated with a male audience, but its role changed as the medium grew in popularity. In Great Britain, almost 85 percent of the country was within reception range of the eight stations established by 1923.3 While only 21 percent of households possessed a radio license in 1926 that percent steadily rose to 64.4 percent by 1936.4 With a larger geographical expanse to cover, American radio stations rose from a mere 5 stations in 1921 to 765 in 1940.5 In 1924, 11.1 percent of Canadian households owned radios and 81.1 percent in 1940.6 Canada’s scattered population and large land mass made radio coverage more difficult, starting with 51 stations in 1923 and 0.5 percent of households licensed for radio receivers there were 94 stations and 47 percent of households with licensed radio receivers in 1939.7 Evasion of licensing in Canada due to resentment over having to pay for what was perceived to be free across the border in the United States and since many listeners lived within in reception range of American stations account in part for what might be a less apparent spread of radio in Canada. Beyond the growth of the radio audiences and radio reception, the entertainment value of radio soon became more important. Richard Butsch notes that in “[t]he 1920s [there] was a distinct turning point in gender roles … [that included] assertions of women’s competence with technology.”8 As radio became more of a “domestic furnishing” rather than a hobby, radio was effectively transferred from “the traditional masculine sphere of technology to the feminine domestic sphere.”9 Women listening to daytime radio were a unique element of early radio and a Susan Smulyan, “Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: A Latchkey to Every Home,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 13 (1993) 3 of 18 online. 3 Lyn Gorman and David McLean, Media and Society in the Twentieth Century. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) 53. 4 “Licence figures,” BBC Handbook 1939, 1929 as cited in “Table 1.1” Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 20. 5 Data derived from Broadcasting Yearbook 1977 as cited in Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting. 2nd ed. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1980) 633. 6 Sterling and Kittross, 633; Thomas Eoyang, “An Economic Study of the Radio Industry in the USA” diss., Columbia University 1936, 67 and Christopher Sterling and Timothy Haight, The Mass Media: Aspen Institute Guide to Communication Industry Trends. (New York: Praeger, 1978) 360, 363, 367 as cited in Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 176. 7 “Radio Telephony,” Canada. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. General Statistics Branch, The Canada Year Book 1925 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1925) 660; “Part VII. Radio Communications,” Canada. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Department of Trade and Commerce, Canada, The Canada Year Book 1940 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1940) xx–xxi, 721–722; F. H. Leacy, ed., “A.1 Estimated population of Canada. 1867–1977.” “A248–253 Number of households and average number of persons per household, Canada 1881– 1976.” Historical Statistics of Canada. 31 July 2006 http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/ 11-516-XIE/sectiona/A1.csv, http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/11-516-XIE/sectiona/ A248_253.csv 8 Butsch, 184. 9 Butsch, 185. part of a larger sense of the routinization of audience listening patterns. Lesley Johnson and Simon Frith argue that radio ceased to be an intrusion but part of the escape and common culture of the home.10 In A Social History of British Broadcasting: Serving the Nation, Volume One 1922–1939, Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff explain important transformations in the rise of popular radio in the 1930s that included the routinization of program schedules, the changing style of radio talk and the end of the concept of a unified audience.11 The growth of the audience followed by the development of a pattern of listening was common to the development of Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. The rapid spread of radio in North America led to its commercialization, a feat more easily accomplished in the United States where the audiences were large and densely concentrated. Susan Smulyan argues that the rapid commercialization of radio soon led to the serious consideration of the medium’s daytime audience and the consideration of women as a potential audience for programming and the accompanying advertising.12 Smulyan addresses the changeover of radio from a male-dominated medium that did not include daytime programming at all in 1924 to one that considered the emerging consumer culture based on the home and family.13 American radio stations rapidly became part of the NBC Red, NBC Blue, or CBS network. As radio stations in the United States rapidly commercialized, they expanded their daytime schedules and became increasingly standardized with regard to content and technical standards. By 1933, the independent broadcasters with religious, educational and other motivations had virtually disappeared, largely becoming part of the major networks of NBC Red, NBC Blue, or CBS.14 The networks provided a lot of the major entertainment supplied by the stations, which served to quickly homogenize the type of broadcasting heard across the United States and Canada. Canadian radio remained in its infancy throughout the 1920s, but by the 1930s most Canadian radio stations were attempting to become full-time broadcasters with a daytime and evening schedule. Many Canadian listeners were accustomed to tuning in to American network programming in the evening, when and where reception was possible. However, once the Canadian broadcasters considered the daytime audience, they started to vary programs for their perceived audiences. Women became a new audience to be taken into account by early radio broadcasters, not only for commercial motives as demonstrated by Smulyan in the American case, but simply as an attempt to fill the broadcast day by matching the routine of their perceived listeners.