Lloyd, Justine. "Anything but the News: Defining Women’s Programming in Australia, 1935– 1950s." Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC. New York,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 45–76. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501318801.ch-004>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 13:42 UTC. Copyright © Justine Lloyd 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Anything but the News: Defining Women’s Programming in Australia, 1935–1950s When you switch on your radio set, the valves slowly warm up and the full flow of power sweeps in to give you the programme you want—so the power of the mind flows in to help us in our tasks, responding to the thoughts we hold. But it is our job to turn on the switch. “Beauty in Life,” talk by Mary Grant Bruce on September 20, 1940, 3LO Melbourne, quoted on the “Women’s Page” of the ABC Weekly (Bruce 1940) Introduction As argued in the last chapter, the arrival of radio as a technology and cultural form heralded a new, potentially democratic configuration of the home and the institutions of modern public life. During the 1920s live music, news, parliamentary broadcasts, child and adult education, political talks, and celebrity culture all became accessible in the home, if that home could afford a radio set. Women’s programming on radio was a troubling innovation, however, from the perspective of cultural authorities such as politicians, educators, and newly minted radio critics. What kind of relationship should women at home have to these newly accessible public worlds? Should radio programming for women simply support existing assumptions of women as responsible for domestic labor or could it be taken up to modernize these ideas? And if women’s domestic role was to continue, could radio be used to instruct women in the most efficient and up-to-date ways to run their homes? Or rather, should radio open up women’s worlds and speak to their curiosity about and involvement in 46 Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age the public sphere on a national, and even world-wide, scale? As foreshadowed in the last chapter, these were the questions that created constant struggle within the public service broadcasters canvassed here, which, like the societies that gave rise to them, encompassed all of these different and conflicting ideas of women’s futures. These debates waxed and waned at the Australian government-funded broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), for the entire four decades of its Women’s Sessions. In this book, to provide important context on the individual careers of women broadcasters, I survey internal attitudes toward women’s programming on three public broadcasters in Australia, Canada, and the UK. The case of the ABC Women’s Sessions and their troublesome history demonstrate that women’s programming raised issues of gender and genre within broadcast media that were hotly debated from the early 1930s onwards. As the evidence discussed here shows, this contestation did not stop in the 1950s, despite its received understanding as a highly apolitical period. This chapter first looks in detail at the brief career of feminist activist Irene Greenwood within ABC Perth’s Women’s Sessions. This chapter focuses on how she crafted a globally intimate voice within women’s programming, as well as how she came up against limits on discussions of international politics on the public broadcaster as a result. Then I outline some of the contemporary commentary from both within the ABC and without surrounding the its persistence with women’s programming well into the 1950s. Sources such as national and local newspaper coverage of radio listings, as well as internal documents and correspondence, are used to map the trajectory of the sessions, which placed the ABC out of kilter with the wider Australian radio industry in the postwar period, when such programming declined. These materials are used to tease out the radically different understandings of gender, home, and world that emerged in discussions between the women who worked on the programs and the ABC’s management. The programs’ implicit assumptions that daytime radio programming should be used to encourage women at home, suitably assisted by experts, to learn more about domestic science and family psychology were contested by many of the women that worked on the programs and thereby picked up on debates prevalent in the wider public sphere at the time. This chapter therefore explores issues at play for this study as a whole: What was at stake for women within mid-twentieth- century media in transgressing gendered divisions between public and private spheres? Defining Women’s Programming in Australia 47 She will be missed … Pasted inside a scrapbook covered in blue and green floral-patterned paper, in an archive in a University Library in Perth, Western Australia, is a cutting from the West Australian newspaper published on October 2, 1940 (Halsted 1940). Headlined “Well-known broadcaster,”—with a phrase from the article “She will be missed … ” repeated in handwritten pencil below—the cutting appears in a scrapbook documenting the radio career of Irene Greenwood, nee Driver, who appeared on Australian radio for more than twenty years as a presenter from the early 1930s to the 1950s. In her radio broadcasts on both public and commercial radio, Greenwood, who later described herself as a “second-generation feminist” (Greenwood 1976), drew on her involvement with a range of women’s peace and Indigenous rights organizations, including the post-suffrage Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Australian Federation of Women Voters (Baker 2017; Fisher 2017). During her 60s and 70s, she was involved with establishing what would become the Family Planning Association in Western Australia, as well as the Abortion Law Repeal Association, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, and the United Nations Association (Baldock 1993). During the late 1980s, Greenwood donated this scrapbook to the Murdoch University Library as a record of her work in broadcasting and involvement in the Australian women’s and peace movements from the 1930s (Greenwood “Women in the International News”). Until they were abruptly discontinued in late 1940, Irene Greenwood’s talks from 1936 to 1940—“every Friday at 11 am” (Greenwood 1976)—within 6WF Perth’s Women’s Session stand out against the backdrop of women’s programming on this and other ABC local stations. In contrast to the programming that was “geared towards the domestic and supportive role of women with an emphasis on home hints, child care, and self-improvement of a superficial kind” (Lewis 1979: 29), Greenwood regularly emphasized women’s role in international politics and the possibilities of broadcasting to explore questions of social justice and promote world peace. Greenwood’s talks started in July 1936 after she had approached ABC Perth’s station manager Conrad Charlton, when Greenwood’s husband’s mining speculation was at its least lucrative in the height of the Depression and she needed to supplement the family’s income (Greenwood 1976; Murray 2005). While the details of talks recorded before mid-1937 are not documented in her archives, Greenwood promoted the possibilities of radio to organize women internationally throughout her career with the ABC’s Perth station. 48 Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age Participating in a broadcast to celebrate “International Women’s Night” in 1937 hosted by the Federation of Business and Professional Women, she reported that her commentary had been broadcast throughout the United States “in nation-wide hookups that reached England and France” (Murray 2002: 147). She told her listeners on her local program that “on this evening women threw a girdle of thought around the world; they linked themselves together in a chain of friendship and cooperation. The theme for the celebration was this year ‘Women in Governments the world around’” (Greenwood 03/05 1937, quoted in Murray 2005: 75). She highlighted the potential of radio to develop solidarities between women and to coordinate feminist activity across national boundaries: Even although these national and international link-ups in broadcasting are becoming quite frequent, they can never lose the romance—with the sense of distance overcome, the belief in difference is over-ruled by a realization of fundamental likeness which is stronger than superficially different characteristics. (Greenwood 03/05 1937, quoted in Murray 2005: 76) The subjects of Greenwood’s talks throughout the late 1930s focused on inspirational and path-breaking women in the news, for example “China-Mme Sun-Yat-Sen, Mme Chiang-Kai-Shek” on August 27, 1937. In late 1937, her talks focused on notable international women such as Belgian feminist Baronne Marthe Boël, “new President of the [International] Council of Women” (September 24), Natalie Kalmus, American color film pioneer, Rosita Forbes, English explorer and travel writer (both October 1), and the “New York World’s Fair and Monica Walsh (Director, Women’s Participation)” (October 15). In 1938, Greenwood profiled British Labour figure and Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb (March 18), followed by Czech feminist Františka Plamínková in a talk on “The Czech Women: Their Country, Their Customs and Their Outstanding Woman-Senator Plaminkova” (May 27). Other progressive women activists and politicians appeared in a talk entitled “Dr Edith Summerskill, Mrs Elsie Parker, Miss Caroline Woodruff and Mrs Stein” (June 10). Summerskill was a British Labour politician; Parker was Secretary of the New York branch of the National Municipal League, an urban reform organization that later became the National Civic League; and Woodruff was a Vermont-based public educator and campaigner for pensions for teachers in female-dominated profession.