Television for Women

New Directions

Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, Helen Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138914292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317428473
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of 'television for women'. In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender still matter?

The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also historical span. Additionally, whilst the influential methodological formation of production, text and audience is still visible here, the new research in Television for Women frequently reconfigures that relationship.

The topics included here are far-reaching; from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women's roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under.

This book presents ground-breaking research on historical and contemporary relationships between women and television around the world and is an ideal resource for students of television, media and gender studies.

Part I
Women and work

1
Women’s History, Women’s Work

Popular television as feminine historiography

Moya Luckett

Over the past few years, several widely discussed British and American period television dramas have testified to public fascination with the history of working women. These series respond to the ways in which work increasingly dominates women’s lives, exploring how paid employment might have shaped femininity in the past and, by extension, the present. In exploring work’s impact on feminine identities, shows like Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012–), The Bletchley Circle (ITV, 2012–14), Mr Selfridge (ITV, 2013–), The Paradise (BBC1, 2012–13), The Hour (BBC2, 2011–12) and Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15) directly address concerns held by women audiences. Seen collectively, these programmes articulate postfeminism’s emphasis on achieved gender equality even as they use the recent past to uncover more complex and potentially progressive histories that variously ground, rationalise, inspire and justify contemporary women’s professional lives. Going beyond simple narratives of female progress, these texts seek to puncture widespread illusions about the limited nature of female participation in the pre-1970s Anglo-American workplace. Rather than presenting their characters as surprising pioneers, they demonstrate working women’s relative ubiquity, encouraging viewers to revise their understandings of feminine labour. Bridging past and present, they link work to female emancipation, agency, self-fulfilment and even glamour, all characteristics that conventionally attract women audiences. Avowedly feminine skills are shown as central for even the most markedly patriarchal and traditional workplaces, with these programmes consistently presenting women as the more visually literate sex and thus more perceptive to the visual cues key to a variety of tasks, including solving crimes, assessing medical emergencies and running successful modern businesses. Female audiences are consequently invited to see their spectatorship in similar terms as these programmes encourage identification with their protagonists’ visual labour, something mirrored in the very act of viewing. The discourse on women’s work mounted in these series reflects upon and extends to the labour performed by their female spectators.

Showcasing a variety of working women – retired 1940s code-breakers, 1950s midwives and TV executives, 1960s advertising professionals as well as domestic servants, shopgirls, nurses and elite professionals from the 1910s–20s – these dramas depict histories marked by varying degrees of female professionalisation, drudgery, emancipation and struggle. In focusing on non-iconic periods for female liberation – the 1910s, 1950s and early 1960s, years often associated with more ‘traditional’ domestic gender archetypes – these programmes effect more serious archeological investigations into women’s working lives, ones consistently framed in terms of revelation. Throughout, femininity is presented as particularly suited to modern working life, with female characters often displaying greater, if at times unrecognised, mastery of their professions as well as the ambition necessary to succeed. Female audiences are courted through representations that ally work to feminine expertise, going beyond the more traditional private, domestic skills associated with nurturing and homemaking (Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife) to the more public domain of representation (advertising – Mad Men, television – The Hour, even the code-breaking/detective work of The Bletchley Circle’s women).

Although typically associated with liveness and ‘presence’, television’s status as potential chronicle and archive – as well as its neo-Victorian postwar cultural roots and affiliations with domesticity and women’s leisure – make it a particularly compelling, if fanciful, site for popular feminine histories/historiography. Besides offering a wide range of histories of women’s work, these programmes employ varied modes of address. Downton Abbey, The Paradise and Mr Selfridge extend the romantic conventions associated with costume drama to the workplace and history itself. Call the Midwife, The Hour and Mad Men employ accurate mise-en-scène to develop a self-conscious historicity that stimulates audiences to reflect more critically on the past and practices of historical representation, particularly in terms of the ways these define femininity and frame women’s lives. The Bletchley Circle’s address is in some ways the most interesting, inviting female audiences to share its leads’ conventionally feminine visual literacy while signifying how, in this particular context, these skills cannot emancipate these women nor change the broader social climate. Taken together, these series all hail female audiences with their recognition of the contradictory pleasures and pressures of female labour, its potential for pleasure and its sense of suffocating entrapment, its links to identity and self-actualisation as well as its capacity to contain and limit self-expression.

Despite sometimes dubious claims to history, these programmes (and their surrounding discourses) perform a series of important historiographic functions. Besides contributing to a public history of women’s work, they employ a series of rhetorical strategies, most notably presenting their working women as a revelation, unveiling a secret or hidden past. Here, these shows try to ally themselves with ‘reputable’ histories like BBC2’s Shopgirls: The True Life of Girls Behind the Counter (2014) that bridge popular and ‘academic’ fascination with the ‘unknown’ history of working women, whether those deemed exceptional (like Bletchley’s codebreakers) or more mundane (shopworkers, nurses and secretaries).¹ Marketing and promotions employ similar tactics: America’s PBS website features an interview with a history professor at George Mason University who testifies to Call the Midwife’s accuracy (‘Real Life History of Call the Midwife’, n.d.), while Bletchley Park’s website featured images from The Bletchley Circle. Self-consciously positioning themselves against prevalent conceptions of the past that typically occlude female participation in the workplace prior to (at least) the 1960s, the popular period dramas I discuss here position their interventions as significant even as they hone an ultimately well-established path of rediscovering (working) women’s past. Real historical events (like the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the Suez crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King) and these series’ own much-touted visual authenticity, their attention to details of clothing, sets, design, etiquette and each period’s signature representational practices, further validate these representations of working women, embedding them in the popular historical record.

In the process, these shows position femininity as particularly dependent on history and time, helping account for its myriad variations. Unlike masculinity, which is conventionally seen in terms of an illusory (and false) stability, the feminine is upheld as historically variable and contingent, making period drama a rich site for exploring popular understandings of womanhood while effectively parsing its relationship to the present. Similar ideas saturate much feminine popular culture, including magazines, popular fiction and fashion, inviting women audiences to reflect on their position as profoundly historical subjects, even if this historicity depends more on variations in work experience and appearance. Lynn Spigel’s discussion of Mad Men and other related programmes such as Pan Am (ABC, 2011–12) and The Playboy Club (NBC, 2011) highlights this particular contemporary feminine sensibility, one that is forward-looking but dependent on history. These series imagine ‘a future where feminism never happened, but where somehow miraculously, without political struggle, everyone gets a great job, great clothes and great mixed drinks’ (Spigel, 2013: 275). In recognising contemporary women’s desire for a past that ‘validates the present by giving postfeminism a heritage’, she speaks to femininity’s peculiar need for history, here its desire to revise the past to license both the present and hopes for the future (ibid.: 273). While presenting historical women who already aspired ‘to be postfeminists, independent, career-focused, yet hyperbolically “feminine” in their embrace of fashion, shopping and dating’, Mad Men’s otherwise meticulously reconstructed past erases feminism, omitting a history that facilitated the professional lives of both its characters and the female audience (ibid.: 272–3). Arguably the British shows discussed below are more cognisant of feminism, possibly because they are more willing to deal with issues of struggle rather than utopian possibility. Still, they often gesture to feminism with a revelatory flourish, suggesting its history – like that of working women themselves – is less well known. Downton’s Sybil and Edith both engage with first-wave feminism, educating audiences about its goals, while The Bletchley Circle shows how the absence of a postwar feminism, even one that is largely compatible with femininity, silences these women and removes them from the workplace and from history itself.

As such, amnesia pervades popular histories of working women, whose pre-1970s forebears are typically presented as unusual pioneers or novelties. Although the working woman is widely seen as a recent phenomenon, making her an avatar of modernity, women have always worked, even during periods of backlash like the Depression, the late 1940s and the 1950s. The removal of women from the workplace in the immediate postwar years has denaturalised working women, recasting them as inherently political – an often inaccurate generalisation. Correspondingly, popular histories largely position the workplace as entirely male until the 1960s, 1970s or even 1980s, despite the reinvention of the secretary as a preeminently female job during the late nineteenth century.² Lost, then, is the nineteenth-century legacy of female professionalism, administrative, factory and retail work, the increased female college enrolments of the 1910s and 1920s and working-class and single women’s unbroken history of labour. From the late nineteenth century, urbanisation, consumerism and industrialisation opened up a range of occupations for women. New careers as shop assistants, typists, secretaries, factory workers, telegraph and telephone operators complemented established positions in service, childcare, nursing and education. High-profile female professionals like the young American lawyer Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886–1916); the first British female MP to take her seat, American Lady Nancy Astor (1919); and screen, stage and print celebrities captured the public imagination during the 1910s, glamorising work and linking it to greater self-actualisation. A better understanding of this history might help us disarticulate and complicate the relationships between feminism and working women. Work may have helped open up the public sphere, but it was often not on feminine terms – plenty of women were aware of distinctions between necessary drudgery and self-fulfilment. More varied representations of work would perhaps resonate with contemporary female audiences for whom work is a necessity, not a choice, and thus not a political act (Moseley and Read, 2002: 247).

Based on Jennifer Worth’s bestselling memoirs – books heralded for their authenticity, realism and historical accuracy – Call the Midwife’s style and address exemplify a feminine historiography centred on revelation and recurrent amnesia. Particularly conscious of its historical narration, Call the Midwife alternately presents a sometimes dreamlike, lost past and uses its more authentic details to assert its distance from the present. While the show’s opening credits vary, they typically feature black-and-white images of handwriting, signifying its written origins and relationship to a lost past. Several episodes, including the pilot, use black-and-white photos to establish a historical gap that is compounded by the clearly reconstructed Poplar streets and docks, which are sometimes shrouded in a dreamlike mist. Here the past is alternately presented in terms of nostalgia and stylisation, suggesting that the show performs history rather than reconstructing it. Vanessa Redgrave’s voice-over as the older Jenny Lee compounds this sense as it echoes her work in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007), another text that self-consciously deals with history, memory and women’s work. Call the Midwife’s forgotten world becomes animated via recollections, recasting difference along axes of class, work/motherhood, paid and unpaid labour. The series’ first words – from the older Jenny Lee – highlight the importance of women’s work, ambitions and professional choices in this unlikely time and setting. She recalls: ‘I could have been an air hostess, a model, concert pianist, seen the world, followed my heart’, establishing this young, attractive, upper middle-class woman’s privilege via her investment in work. While her words link other occupations to glamour and mobility, her profession takes her to an unfamiliar but hardly alluring locale. The topic of working women in this historical period is ultimately introduced as both central and as something of a revelation – we do not expect work to define such a woman nor to find her in this place or time, nor are we aware of the skills and knowledge her work demands.

Amnesia and revelation: television and the history of working women

Despite lacking historical rigour, popular beliefs about women’s entry into and acceptance in the workforce have social and cultural effects, shaping public understanding of work’s value and perceptions about female autonomy. Notably self-conscious about their historical interventions, these contemporary television dramas point to continuities across change, asserting visions of capable, progressive femininity, even though these may be more ambivalent than they first appear. Highlighting the forgotten, the unpredictable and the unexpected – particularly in terms of women’s lives – they gesture to limitations in contemporary understandings of the past.

Historical TV dramas typically have a greater impact on public understandings of the past than books, costume movies and non-fictional television because they are more widely seen, often more emotionally engaging and accessible and of longer duration, prolonging public interest and debate (Landsberg, 2015: 61–110). Their structurally complex but easily understood multi-perspectival realist and verisimilar narratives foster identification, helping bridge past and present, while their visual details both foreground historical gaps and attract female viewers by evoking their presumed competence in emotion, understanding of fashion and overall visual literacy. This strategy has migrated to daytime, with dramas like Land Girls (BBC1, 2009–11) focusing on a group of women in the Women’s Land Army during World War II. The first period drama on BBC daytime television, Land Girls testifies to broadcasters’ shifting conceptions of their female audience, even in time slots catering to traditional homemakers. This commission recognised women’s interest in work, history, the politics of race and class – even as they were domesticated within costume drama’s more conventional investments in romance, family, friends and interactions with the aristocracy. Part of the public commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the start of the war, Land Girls present...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Television for women – what new directions?
• PART I Women and work
• PART II Women and identity
• PART III Formations of women’s television
• PART IV Women and the home
• Index