Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age ii Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC Justine Lloyd BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Justine Lloyd, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Kreisler radio display, 1938, at Mick Simmons Ltd, Haymarket store / State Library, New South Wales, Australia. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Introduction: New Connections 1 1 Radio: Public, Private, Intimate 9 Introduction 9 Spatial histories 12 Histories of intimacy 19 Inciting intimate geographies 25 2 Media’s Domestication as Intimate Geography 31 Introduction: Not a technical article 31 Making time for women 34 Writing radio histories 38 The (gendered) democratization of everyday life 39 Conclusion 43 3 Anything but the News: Defining Women’s Programming in Australia, 1935–1950s 45 Introduction 45 She will be missed … 47 Woman’s place is in the world 51 The plight of the home 53 Censorship and the women’s cold war 56 Resuming transmission 62 Wishy-washy sessions 66 Conclusion 74 4 Mental Health on a National Scale: The Women of the CBC, 1940–1953 77 Introduction 77 Caught in the act: Monica Mugan 80 They Tell Me: Claire Wallace 81 vi Contents Leftovers and politics: Kate Aitken 85 “Housekeeping Plus”: Mattie Rotenberg 89 Behind the scenes: Elizabeth Long 92 Conclusion 94 5 Listening to the Listener: Constructing Woman’s Hour at the BBC, 1946–1955 97 Women’s Hour and after 101 A question of genre 104 Defining Woman’s Hour 109 The middle-class Woman’s Hour? 117 Something about children 120 Making space for listening 125 The limits of listening 131 Conclusion: Gender, time, and labor 133 6 The Long Legacies of Women’s Programming 137 The cold case of the disappearance of women’s programming 139 Feminists’ Hour or Woman’s Hour 145 Conclusion: Whisky and wives 150 Notes 153 Bibliography 158 Index 184 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for their practical support and encouragement during the writing of this book: ●● Colleagues in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, especially Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, Gabrielle Meagher, and Alison Leitch. ●● Other members of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University, especially Bridget Griffen-Foley, Jeannine Baker, and Virginia Madsen. ●● Researchers at the Centre for Transforming Cultures at the University of Technology Sydney, especially Devleena Ghosh and Katrina Schlunke, as well as Jan Idle, Jemima Mowbray, and Ilaria Vanni. ●● Multifarious collaborators on “The Listening Project,” especially Tanja Dreher, Cate Thill, and Nicole Matthews. I would also like to thank: ●● Lesley Johnson for her work that sparked this idea, as well as Helen Macallan for inspiring teaching and discussions over many years. ●● Liz Jacka, Paul Ashton, and Paula Hamilton for their feedback on the project in its early stages. ●● Katie Gallof, Susan Krogulski, and Erin Duffy at Bloomsbury for their professionalism and patience, and Shanmathi Priya at Integra for overseeing production. ●● Barbara Szubinska, editor of Storytelling: A Critical Journal of Popular Narrative, for permission to reproduce sections of my article “Intimate Empire: Radio Programming for Women in Postwar Australia and Canada” from their Winter 2007 issue. ●● The staff of the CBC Radio Archives; the University of Waterloo Archives; the BBC Written Archives Centre; the British Library; the National Archives of Australia, especially Edmund Rutledge and Craig Venson; the ABC Archives, Sydney, especially Sal Russo and Sabrina Lipovic; and library staff viii Acknowledgments of UTS, Macquarie and Murdoch universities, as well as the State Library of NSW, for assistance in tracking down materials. ●● The staff of the Faculty Research Offices at UTS and Macquarie universities, especially Helen Thomson, Jaine Stockler, Gill Ellis, Christine Boman, and Glenda Hewett. ●● My coeditors of Space & Culture: The International Journal of Social Spaces, especially Rob Shields for long-distance intellectual inspiration. I would also like to acknowledge the Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, for hosting me during a crucial moment of editing. ●● Anonymous peer reviewers for this manuscript and also Feminist Media Histories journal. The initial research for this book was supported by an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, “The ABC Women’s Session, 1935–1973” (DP0450349) 2004–2007, as well as the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UTS. Research and writing time were also supported by a Faculty of Arts Mid-Career Fellowship from Macquarie University and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Museum of Applied Arts and Science (MAAS/Powerhouse), Sydney, in 2016. I particularly wish to thank Kylie Budge, formerly of MAAS, for her kind support during a very enjoyable visit, as well as the staff of the museum, including Paul Wilson, Campbell Bickerstaff, Karen Biddle, and Matthew Connell for research help and chats. Finally, but also beginningly, my family: my parents, Peter and Libby Lloyd, my brothers and sisters-in-law, Jamie Lloyd and Aoise Stratford, Daniel Lloyd and Katrina Retallick, and my nieces and nephews, Sam, Rowena, Maya, Gwen, Reuben, Hugo, and Miller for their encouragement and delightful company. And thank you to my partner, Juke Wyat, for both being there and never asking when the book would be finished. Abbreviations ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission (Company 1929–1932, Corporation from 1983) BBC British Broadcasting Corporation (Company 1922–1927) CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (from 1936) CRBC Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation (1932–1936) x Introduction: New Connections The research for this book started by tracing the rise and fall of a set of programs aimed specifically at women audiences in the early years of public service broadcasting in Australia, Canada, and the UK. In doing so, I uncovered compelling narratives of working lives of the women who produced and spoke on the programs. The individual personalities and collective imagination of these women emerged in the details of their daily interactions with radio as well as their negotiations with management—the latter a force sometimes sympathetic, sometimes hostile to their ideas and innovations. While I acknowledge and draw on the recent “biographical” turn in media history (Hendy 2012; Murphy 2016), this work investigates broadcasting history from the perspective of a “cultural circuit” that goes beyond individual life stories to look for connections between media production, consumption, distribution, circulation, and identification (Johnson 1986: 47). Going beyond a traditional audience or policy analysis, I place the individual career trajectories of these women within a different, more complex, story: how these programs, for both the audience and those who spoke on them, provided the ground for the emergence of a cultural form unique to a particular stage in the constitution of a middle-class female subject. This book asks the question of how this new subject position for women was constructed in the challenge that public service radio broadcasting made to divisions between public and private spheres: a new form of agency that was ultimately transformative of the opposition between these spheres. While this new agency began in personal experience and domestic space, it was not limited to there. The trajectories of individual programs and media workers reveal that each broadcaster had very different attitudes to the content, format, and presentation of radio programming for women. Sharp contrasts emerge between each broadcaster’s approach to women’s programming. Each public service broadcast institution had very different interactions with civil society organizations and 2 Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age economic actors, which in turn also shaped the agenda of individual programs and therefore understandings of radio’s transformative potential of the public sphere. While many of the women working in the programs forged their own paths and therefore shaped new forms of agency through their own individual efforts, the possibility of questioning the separation