Neither worker nor housewife but citizen: BBC’s Woman’s Hour 1946–1955

This article investigates BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour in the post-war period. It explores Woman’s Hour’s focus and insistence on educating women listeners about their role as citizens, and the tensions this caused particularly between broadcasters and different groups of women. The article documents the programme’s development of public and outward looking items, such as the reporting and covering of current affairs, public debates and national politics, women’s party political conferences, and further introducing women MP’s to the microphone. This gave the programme a public and arguably political dimension. The article thus places Woman’s Hour within the broader historiography of the women’s movement in this period, and illuminates the changing role and expectation of women, particularly the middle-class housewife

Lessons from Lilian Is Transnational (Media) History a Gendered Issue?

Scholarship has long demonstrated how a focus on women’s roles can reveal vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory, and participatory media narratives. This article asks: What happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as “media history”? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? The work derives from research on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) as read from the correspondence of founder Wilhelmina (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), and builds on IAWRT’s example to develop methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, absorbing insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age. KEYWORDS entanglement, International Association of Women in Radio and Television, international organizations, media history, transnational histor

Women and radio: sounding out new paths in women's history

Since its early introduction in the domestic sphere in the 1920s, radio has been used as a medium for the expression of women's voices, needs and concerns. In this introduction we would like to mobilise an understanding of radio as a vital source for doing women's history. Women's radio programming, women broadcasters, and women listeners provide a lens through which a number of histories can be analysed. This introduction provides an overview of the historical relationship between women and radio. It is further dedicated to research that explores the overlapping spaces of radio and women's history, and in particular, points to how radio-related source material can provide new points of departure for women's history

Your woman friend in the West: women broadcasters and the Cold War

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Radio played a paradoxical role in the Cold War, embraced both as a key tool for propaganda warfare as well as for promoting peace and understanding. Women, too, played paradoxical roles both in radio and on the world stage. In this paper we will attempt to explore these intersecting paradoxes in a transnational perspective by focusing on The International Association of Women in Radio and Television, founded in 1951. This international network of women provides insights into how women broadcasters viewed radio and themselves in the global ideological struggles of the Cold War. Exploring the organization's international networking practices, its positioning within international women's movements, as well as their conceptions of the relationship between women and radio, we show how in each of these arenas, despite a belief in a universal womanhood and striving for a global organization, the organization can be seen falling into the emerging Western camp of the Cold War