Radio advertising to women in Twenties America: “A latchkey to every home”

Learning to Listen: Developing the Canadian Radio Audience in the 1930s

“…The divide between active listening that required all one's attention and passive listening, which would involve performing other tasks at the same time tended to divide by technology, gender, and perhaps class. As advertisers suggested, women were most likely to listen to the radio as they worked (MacLennan, 2008;Smulyan, 1993). As previously noted, Elizabeth Bennett, in Montreal, enjoyed the radio all day while she did her housework (personal communication, July 15, 1999).…”

Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age

“…The historical moment when the electronic medium of radio was enfolded into the everyday time and spaces of the modern home tells us a great deal about contemporary mediations of everyday life because radio broadcasts constructed an immediacy and semblance of presence that had never before been experienced in the domestic sphere. Radio's coincidence with maintenance and transgression of social boundaries has long been highlighted by media historians (Hayes 2012;MacLennan 2013;Moores 1988;Razlogova 2003Razlogova , 2006Razlogova , 2011Scales 2010Scales , 2016Smulyan 1993;Valliant 2013). While modern print mass media (books, newspaper, magazines) had already been "at home" for some time, radio's reception has been associated with an "intimization" of public address, as institutions such as national governments (Lacey 1994(Lacey , 1996Nicholas 1996) as well as commercial interests (Johnson 1983;MacLennan 2013) and civic associations (Goodman 2007) sought to access new constituencies in novel ways.…”

“…In the Australian context, Jeannine Baker's recent study (2017) of figures such as Irene Greenwood's work on commercial radio has contributed to this project. Outside the scope of this book, such work in non-European countries has been focused on the United States (Ganzert 2003;Hayes 2012;Smulyan 1993), while other important critical historical work continues to be done in Latin America by Christine Ehrick (2016) in particular. This book comes out of this distributed and ongoing work.…”

“…In 1956, Quigley was promoted out of the Woman's Hour role and gendered programming more broadly to become the BBC's chief assistant of Talks (Sound) ("Janet Quigley [Obituary]" 1987 It is now impossible to make the claim, as Anne Karpf quite accurately did so in 1980, that while "academics and women's groups have been diligently monitoring television, cinema, and the press: decoding signs of sexism, uncovering masculinist ideology, and promoting feminist alternatives … radio, the medium which permeates women's lives more than any other, has been largely ignored" (Karpf 1980: 41). The work of feminist media researchers and historians, including Karpf herself, has overturned this absence (Baker 2017;Carter 2004;Crean 1987;Hilmes 1997Hilmes , 2006Hilmes , 2013Horne 2017;Johnson 1988;Karpf 1980Karpf , 1987Karpf , 1996Karpf , 2014MacLennan 2008;Smulyan 1993;Veerkamp 2014;Wang 2002). This book has sought to contribute to this feminist project of recuperating radio 6…”

“Focus on the Housewife”: the BBC and the Post-war Woman, 1945-1955

“…The relationship between the domestic and radio has also been explored in the American context by Michele Hilmes (1997), who has argued that 'women in fact invented and sustained some of broadcasting's most central innovations and served in key decision-making roles, and furthermore participated in the development of entire genres that spoke to them as a specific group about the interests and concerns of women's lives' (p.132). In common with Susan Smulyan (1993), she emphasises that it was housewives who had the purchasing power, and therefore became one of the most important groups for advertisers to reach. 'By the mid 1930s, serial drama dominated US daytime schedules in particular, with over 45 different 15-minute serials on the air daily [...] across all four networks in 1939, and a few more airing in the early evening' (Hilmes, 2007, p.8).…”