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What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series, 10) - Hardcover
In this pathfinding book, based on original archival research, Marsha F. Cassidy offers the first thorough analysis of daytime television's earliest and most significant women's genres, appraising from a feminist perspective what women watched before soap opera rose to prominence.
After providing a comprehensive history of the early days of women's programming across the nation, Cassidy offers a critical discussion of the formats, programs, and celebrities that launched daytime TV in America—Kate Smith's variety show and the famed singer's unsuccessful transition from patriotic radio star to 1950s TV idol; the "charm boys" Garry Moore, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Linkletter, whose programs honored women's participation but in the process established the dominance of male hosts on TV; and the "misery shows" Strike It Rich and Glamour Girl and the controversy, both critical and legal, they stirred up.
Cassidy then turns to NBC's Home show, starring the urbane Arlene Francis, who infused the homemaking format with Manhattan sophistication, and the ambitious daily anthology drama Matinee Theater, which strove to differentiate itself from soap opera and become a national theater of the air. She concludes with an analysis of four popular audience participation shows of the era—the runaway hit Queen for a Day; Ralph Edwards's daytime show of surprises, It Could Be You; Who Do You Trust?, starring a youthful Johnny Carson; and The Big Payoff, featuring Bess Myerson, the country's first Jewish Miss America. Cassidy's close feminist reading of these shows clearly demonstrates how daytime TV mirrored the cultural pressures, inconsistencies, and ambiguities of the postwar era.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
MARSHA F. CASSIDY teaches popular culture and media studies in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
From Publishers Weekly:
"Who is this new woman, and what is her place in postwar America?" asks Cassidy as she delves into the subject of the social and feminist consequences of television programming during the 1950s. The University of Illinois–Chicago professor has created a readable treatise on the evolution of daytime TV in an era when most women were expected to be in the home as their husbands continued their lives in the public sphere. Alone during the days, with TV as their connection to the outside world, women were targeted as burgeoning consumers and told what to clean with, what to feed their families and "to leave wartime plainness behind and to embrace glamour." Encouraged by various "charm boys" (game show hosts) to tune in, women looked on as their peers became Queen for a Day or hit the big time on Strike It Rich. Cassidy moves smoothly between portraits of hosts, game shows, other programs and their effects on women's personal and public personas. While her writing is fairly academic, she makes a strong case that daytime television was more than a cultural phenomenon and should be respected as an important part of women's history. Illus. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUniversity of Texas Press
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 029270626X
- ISBN 13 9780292706262
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages276
- Rating
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