Book Review: Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television

The books under review here chronicle the professional experiences and achievements of a selection of highly talented, innovative, notably single-minded women, and the significance and value of their contributions to the creation and development of US and Australian postwar radio and television. Both offer extensively researched and richly detailed feminist narrative histories of neglected, overlooked and largely uncelebrated female endeavour and of creativity and success achieved in the face of institutional pressures and prejudices. These personal narratives are interwoven with broader critical and institutional histories which interrogate and highlight the complexity of the challenges which faced women attempting to build meaningful and fulfilling careers within male-dominated broadcasting ecosystems. Considering these histories together focuses attention on the consistent occurrence of comparable obstacles that women encountered when working within national broadcasting organisations. Such challenges range from management insistence that women were by nature simply unsuited to intellectually demanding organisational roles, to the unspoken requirement for women to conceive and realise performances of palatable workplace ‘femininity’, to the fact that sometimes simply having one’s voice heard over male co-workers was a job in itself. Women were fighting, whether consciously or not, the incipient and/or insurgent battles of second wave feminism in a period when any formalised legal procedures to tackle gender discrimination and injustice, or mutually understood language in which to discuss it, were either non-existent or extremely limited. It must be noted here that the majority of women who feature in Andrews, and Berke’s findings were well educated, well connected and white and thus still in markedly privileged positions in comparison to absent and unrepresented working-class women or women of colour.

Berke’s Their Own Best Creations offers a fascinating insight into the professional careers of a number of successful and innovative women television writers who played memorable roles in the creation of popular postwar US television genres. Central to the workplace experience of Lucille Kallen as a comedy writer in the early 1950s was the ongoing struggle to make a space for herself as a woman, and to bring a female voice and perspective to the rumbunctious and extremely competitive “boys’ club” of the writers’ room on the comedy variety show Your Show of Shows (1950-1954). A more positive narrative delves into the success of two pioneering female showrunners, writers and performers, Gertrude Berg and Peg Lynch. In The Goldbergs (1949-1956), Berg played Molly Goldberg, an archetypal Jewish matriarch living with her family in the tenement blocks of New York’s Bronx, while Ethel and Albert (1953-1956) starred Lynch as Ethel Arbuckle, one half of a Midwestern suburban couple. Berg and Lynch drew explicitly for subject matter upon their own much-vaunted practical conversancy with the ‘feminine’ craft of household management, making light of the substantial professional expertise that enabled them to write, perform and in Berg’s case also produce a weekly television show. Berke writes succinctly of ‘artlessness as a profession of craft’ (p. 110), that is, the exercise of a type of entrepreneurial femininity which disavows the sustained intellectual labour and acute business acumen which underpinned Berg and Lynch’s professional successes. So too in the story of Irna Phillips, soap opera pioneer and champion, whose strength as a female writer and showrunner ‘lay in how she devised worlds of women relatable to her female fans, those of mothers and daughters, neighbours, friends and rivals’ (p. 116). Publicly Phillips made the strategic choice to downplay her own individual vision and creativity, and to profess herself as a collaborator supported and guided by generous male colleagues, with little personal appetite or aptitude for the business side of entertainment.

Writing of the television industry’s expansion across the US east and west coasts, Berke’s chapter on the role of the woman story editors reveals an all-too-common managerial predisposition to minimise or ignore the extent of women’s editorial labours and creative responsibilities. Women who fulfilled demanding authorial roles, maintaining the overall continuity of series or working cooperatively with screenwriters on developing the quality of their scripts, might be acknowledged only as undertaking administrative tasks, or, often in reality, expected to work uncredited. The final chapter in Berke’s book offers an engrossing account of the creation of the suspense anthology drama, a genre centred around and authored by women and one from which the compelling ‘femme noir’ heroine emerged. Here, Berke shines the spotlight on the career of ‘femme noir’ producer Joan Harrison and on the vital Hitchcockian sensibility Harrison brought to the making of the very popular suspense anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65).

Their Own Best Creations focuses on women working in fiction and entertainment. By contrast, the women whose stories are told by Kylie Andrews were engaged primarily in what they understood as public service through the production of non-fiction and factual broadcasting in the service of Australian nationhood and citizenship. These women provided education and information, nurturing public understanding and intellectual curiosity, while affording access to new cultural experiences. Andrews’ scholarship, like Berke’s, revolves around the depiction of the careers of individual women, in this case four of the most senior female producers of radio and television at the ABC. This structuring device serves to situate its subjects and their ongoing workplace experiences amidst the polarising and divisive gendered discourses circulating around the professional working woman in a frequently misogynist postwar Australia society. Andrews’ protagonists furnish contrasting examples of how women managed to attain powerful and influential positions in the customarily male domain of politics and public affairs; Andrews comments that ‘They did not identify as feminist. For them citizenship was the ideology through which they expressed their social service agendas. It warranted their presence in the public sphere and justified their status as professionals’ (p. 75).

Education was one of the limited number of fields in which traditionally women were allowed to have any influence. This and their own desire to educate others and serve their society was, to varying degrees, the key to the careers these women eventually achieved. Kay Kinane, for example, was a trained teacher and she built an extensive and impressive body of achievement within educational broadcasting. She was central to the ABC’s development of a national policy on educational broadcasting and eventually represented the ABC internationally as a broadcasting advisor and ambassador, offering her expertise to organisations such as UNESCO and the European Broadcasting Union. She was also very much involved in the support and encouragement of women broadcasters and filmmakers from developing nations. Catherine King, who had also been a teacher, was best known as the producer of the radio series Women’s Session. She was a passionate advocate for the provision of programmes for women that did not ‘consign women’s content to superficialities’ (p. 12), instead designing and presenting intelligent programmes that made “high culture” accessible to its listeners. Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage took a more confrontational, disruptive and politically motivated approach to educating Australians about their own society, shining light on aspects of national life that challenged comfortable postwar complacency. Denny who made the ambitious decision in her mid-twenties to seek work in London at the BBC leveraged credentials earned there when seeking work back at the ABC. She became a noted director of engaged documentary films which explored the treatment of Indigenous Australians, framed from the community’s own point of view. Finally, there was Joyce Belfrage originally from England, a highly intelligent Cambridge graduate and a political activist with an enduring interest in socialism. Belfrage came to the ABC with a great deal of international broadcasting experience. Like Denny, she became a specialist in television documentary, creating programming such as the Inquiry Into strand, thirty-minute documentaries which considered topics like alcoholism, youth rebellion and migration. Andrews notes that, ‘Joyce thrilled in their rebellious agenda and wanted to see more similarly challenging programmes being made at the ABC’ (p. 19).

Berke and Andrews have written lively, inquiring, highly informative and readable feminist media histories. Both books abound with valuable new archival scholarship; the compelling stories of the working lives of remarkable individual women are set within a wider nexus of themes pertinent to the historical experiences of women working in the media in the postwar era. The authors break substantial new ground in championing previously untold women’s stories and reconciling these with incomplete extant media histories, while at the same time mobilising much stimulating theoretical debate around women and professional occupations in the postwar period. The concentration of such a substantial quantity of diverse and original subject matter can sometimes be a challenge for the non-specialist reader. In particular, the ordering of Andrews’ narrative can, on occasion, be somewhat confusing with the key protagonists’ career trajectories lacking a clear logical order in their distribution throughout the broader arguments developed in the wider text. That said, the field of feminist media history is one in which often researchers are the first to document previously unexplored territories so Andrews and Berke’s urge to communicate and disseminate, in all its complexity, the wealth and range of new material they have unearthed, and the subsequent scholarship generated is very understandable.

The specialist contribution made by these books to an understanding of the lives of women working in radio and TV in this early postwar period in the particular contexts of the United States and Australia is of significant value for scholars of feminist media history. For readers from elsewhere in the world there is much to be learned about the micro-politics of different national broadcasting systems, and what this meant for women working within them. Andrews’ and Berke’s monographs provide stimulating and rewarding introductions to women’s creative achievements in the post war media landscape. Their case studies raise questions which remain unnervingly relevant in the early 21^st century. In reading their work concurrently, critical commonalities in women’s experiences across such international broadcasting cultures emerge clearly, illustrating the value of such national studies in contributing to a wider international perspective in the construction of robust and inclusive media histories. Their critical work as feminist media historians also demonstrates very clearly that media histories, and histories more generally, which omit women are incomplete, inaccurate and do not tell the full story.