Women and Radio

Airing Differences

Caroline Mitchell, Caroline Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136354809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Radio

Combining classic work on radio with innovative research, journalism and biography, Women and Radio offers a variety of approaches to understanding the position of women as producers, presenters and consumers as well as offering guidelines, advice and helpful information for women wanting to work in radio.
Women and Radio examines the relationship between radio audiences, technologies and programming and reveals and explains the inequalities experienced by women working in the industry.

Part 1
Gendered radio – hidden histories and the development of programming by and for women

It is history writing that has consigned women to the sidelines, not historical events themselves.

(Hilmes 1997: 132)

Media narratives, structures, and audiences are produced in, and themselves help to produce, the same crucible of negotiations of social power that shapes the histories through which we later understand them.

(Hilmes 1997: 289)

Invisible women

There are several weighty and respected ‘official histories’ of British broadcasting including Asa Brigg’s epic chronicles (1961-1995), Scannell and Cardiff’s social histories (1991) and Crisell’s useful overview (1997). Lewis and Booth’s history of public, commercial and community radio (1989) pays the most attention to women’s radio. However official histories tend to be ‘un-gendered’. Women are rendered invisible through omission, or because their work is hidden, considered inferior or in the background. Occasionally we get a glimpse of women’s broadcasting work: a name here, a footnote there. Tim Crook (1998) reveals how Elizabeth Welch may have been Britain’s first black woman broadcaster, presenting her own show, Soft Lights and Sweet Music, on BBC radio in 1934. However in Briggs (1961) she is only a name on a list, with no mention of her colour. Crook (2000) quotes Susan Okokon who suggests that women such as Welch are ‘victims of a kind of cultural amnesia’ (Okokon 1998: 11).

This part of the book attempts to represent the ‘other’ history, missed out in the brief footnotes and fleeting glimpses. It brings together the marginalised histories of radio women – individually and collectively – from BBC, commercial and community broadcasting.

Early voices

When ordinary women spoke formally in public in the 1830s (espousing the causes of the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women) they were vilified for moving out of their ‘natural’ feminine, domestic sphere of the home, onto public platforms formerly occupied exclusively by male public speakers. Early female public speakers refuted the idea that women’s voices were naturally unsuitable for public speaking; they felt that it was the preparation, clarity and confident delivery of the presentation that was important (Lerner 1971). Attitudes associated with the premise that women’s voices are not suitable for radio broadcasting, or should be limited to particular areas, are still ingrained in the ideology of the commercial radio industry. In Chapter 1 Ann McKay charts the history of the way that the female voice has been rejected and accepted since women first spoke in public. Her research starts to explain the origins of negative attitudes towards women who present on the radio and she explores the premises on which women’s exclusion from radio was founded.

Women shaping the BBC

Of course there were some women working behind the scenes, shaping the early BBC in production and management. Chapters 2 and 3 celebrate the careers of two female producers: Olive Shapley (1910-1999) and Hilda Matheson (1888-1940). Both women were innovators, developing radio techniques that practitioners now take for granted. In Chapter 2 there are three extracts from Olive Shapley’s autobiography, documenting her early days at the BBC, her work in the northern region making documentaries about working-class culture (developing new recording and interviewing techniques outside the studio), and her time presenting Woman’s Hour.

In Chapter 3, Fred Hunter documents how Hilda Matheson, known to Lord Reith as ‘The Red Woman’, was instrumental in establishing the BBC’s News Section in the 1920s and developing the concept of the ‘scripted talk’.

Radio for women

In the first two years of the BBC women were encouraged to listen during Women’s Hour where subject choice was suggested by a Women’s Advisory Committee. Minutes of their meetings report that they suggested subjects like “‘Women in Public Life”, “Openings for Girls with a University Education” (and) “Women in Other Lands’” (Briggs 1961: 245). This title was abandoned in September 1925 and the idea of a separate programme strand for women did not reappear until Woman’s Hour started in 1946. This does not however mean that women were treated equally. Susan Briggs notes: ‘From the start, men patronised women listeners. “It is the little things that so often influence the mind of a woman,” wrote Sinclair Russell in 1922’ (Briggs 1981: 61).

The origins of female gendered radio are explored by Kate Lacey in Chapter 4 – a fascinating study of the way that Frauenfunk (women’s radio) developed in Germany between 1924 and 1935 which provides fuel for the anti-essentialist arguments of some women and men against separate programmes for women. Scannell for instance defines women’s radio as

a distinctive sector of the audience with particular interests and needs for whom a particular style of address and communicative format were needed to produce a feminized discourse by women for women.

(Scannell 1994: 548)

Lacey charts how the private female discourse of Plauderei (Chitchat) became public through radio and how the early concept of daytime scheduling functioned to fit in with the supposed domestic structure of a woman’s day. She discusses how women’s programming was used by the German authorities as a propaganda tool, reinforcing a reactionary and fascist ideological agenda.

In typical BBC fashion Woman’s Hour was initially presented by a man. The programme has consistently covered issues of interest to women and subjects from a woman’s perspective; during its fifty-year history it has attracted both applause and criticism from all sectors of the audience: feminists, ‘housewives’ and men (the latter group making up at least thirty per cent of its audience). Sally Feldman was editor of the programme from 1991 to 1997 and in Chapter 5 she combines an historical perspective of Woman’s Hour with a unique insider insight into a key moment in the programme’s history – when the programme’s name and timeslot were under threat of change.

Restored histories

Woman’s Hour is cited by Chapter 6’s authors Sheridan Nye, Nicola Godwin and Belinda Hollows as the earliest programme to refer to lesbianism and the only programme to address lesbian representation head-on by appointing a producer for lesbian issues. ‘Twisting the Dials: Lesbians on British Radio’ restores a major chunk of British broadcasting history to its rightful place. It covers a wide span of lesbian radio including occasional appearances of lesbians in BBC drama and soap opera, the rise of lesbian and gay programming on BBC Radio Five to recent initiatives from independent production companies and community stations. It should be noted that since ‘Twisting the Dials’ was published there have been several new programmes, particularly on BBC channels, made by and for lesbian and gay audiences. These include Greater Manchester Radio’s ‘Gaytalk’ and the award winning ‘Out this Week’ (produced by an independent production company) which ran on BBC Radio Five Live for five years until March 1999, attracting 30-40 thousand listeners a week.

The traditional history of radio includes the rise of local BBC and commercial radio stations in the seventies and eighties. Chapter 7, ‘Women’s Voices’, is a snapshot of the sexism of the output of London’s local radio in 1981. It was carried out as part of a non-academic but systematic survey of a week of broadcast output of Capital Radio, London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and BBC Radio London. Women’s Airwaves who collectively produced the report were scathing in their polemic about the lack of women reporters and presenters, the sexism of many male DJs and the consistent under representation of women’s and feminist perspectives on London’s Airwaves.

Another previously unwritten history is included in Chapter 8. This charts the development of women’s radio stations in the UK, starting with feminist radio activity first promoted by groups like Women’s Airwaves. Compared to the expansive Women’s magazine industry it does seem extraordinary that the first time women set up their own station in Britain was almost a century after the invention of radio. This chapter documents the activities of a unique decade of broadcasting when six short-term women’s community radio stations broadcast in the UK and the first commercial women’s station lasted barely a year. It looks forward to the future of feminist radio in community, pirate and Internet radio stations but is pessimistic about the ability for mainstream stations to cater for the mutiplicity of women’s interests and survive commercially.

References

Briggs, A. (1961, 1965, 1970, 1979, 1995) The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vols 1-5, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Briggs, S. (1981) Those Radio Times, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Crisell, A. (1997) An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, London: Roudedge.

Crook, T. (1998) ‘Was she Britains first female black broadcaster?’ Radio Studies List Online posting. Available email [email protected] 23/12/1998.

Hilmes, M. (1997) Radio Voices. American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lerner, G. (1971) The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina, Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition, New York: Schocken Books.

Lewis, P. and Booth, J. (1989) The Invisible Medium, Public, Commercial and Community Radio, London: Macmillan.

Lewis, P. and Pearlman, C. (1986) Media and Power, from Marconi to Murdoch, London: Camden Press.

Okokon, S. (1998) Black Londoners 1880-1990, London: Sutton Publishing Limited.

Scannell, P. (1994) ‘Editorial’, Media, Culture and Society, 16: 547-50.

Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1, Oxford: Blackwell.

Further reading

Baehr, H. and Ryan, M. (1984) Shut up and Listen: a view from the inside, London: Comedia. (An insight into commercial local radio in the early eighties and recommendations for change.)

Johnson, L. (1988) The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio, London: Roudedge.

Karpf, A. ‘Women and Radio’, Women’s Studies International Quarterly, vol. 3 no. 1,1980, reprinted in H. Baehr (ed.) Women and Media, London: Pergamon Press, 1980. (A picture of British radio and women’s employment in the industry in the late nineteen seventies. It contains interviews with senior industry figures revealing attitudes towards female employment as DJs. It offers models of radical women’s radio from outside Britain.)

Matheson, H. (1933) Broadcasting, Thornton Butterworth.

Murray, J. (1996) The Woman’s Hour, London: BBC Books. (A history of women over the 60 years that Woman’s Hour has been on the air. Not a history of Woman’s Hour as such although it contains interviews with women about how they related to and used the programme.)

Chapter 1
Speaking up: Voice Amplification and Women’s Struggle for Public Expression

Anne McKay

From: Kramarae, C. (1988) Technology and Woman’s Voices, London: Routledge, pp. 187-206

If a woman knows her business when she tries to speak before the microphone she can create a most favorable impression.

(Jennie Irene Mix 1924)

Devices for artificial voice amplification were developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They were brought into practical application during World War I, and began to be used for public address and for radio during the 1920s. These devices – the microphone, amplifier and speaker – accomplished for the ear what the microscope and telescope did for the eye. Sounds fainter than the footstep of a fly or the voice of a woman could now be amplified and distributed to unlimited numbers of listeners.

Walter Ong (1967; 1974) has suggested that the technology of voice amplification is significant for women’s advancement because it helped to open the world of public participation previously closed to them by natural vocal deficiency and reinforced by custom and lack of training. I have tested Ong’s assumption by examining evidence surrounding some related questions.

• (1) Are women’s voices in fact less powerful than men’s? What is the cultural and sociobiological evidence? What is the evidence left by observers of women’s public speaking in the era before artificial amplification?
• (2) How did women make use of amplification devices when they first appeared, and what was the response to them?

My findings, drawn largely from reports and commentary in newspapers and popular journals, suggest a familiar thesis – that when women used the new technology in support of the goals and activities of established institutions, they were applauded at best or ignored at worst. When they attempted to use it in ways that would lead to change in the traditional order and in women’s customary roles, their right to use it at all was challenged.

Are women’s voices naturally less powerful than men’s?

It has long been assumed that most wo...