Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Charles Musser; J.D. Connor.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

"You Just Type ": Women Television Writers in 1950s America argues for the pivotal role women writers played in engineering the content, form, and genres of 1950s American television; it also examines how women writers came to television from other industries, including radio, theater, and publishing, to script teleplays that voiced women's frustrations about and insights into romance, family, and married life.

Meanwhile, off-screen, some women writers critiqued conventional gender roles in their work, while others drew on those tropes to assert that the sensitive, family-oriented woman was suited to writing for the intimate, domestic technology of television. The figure of the woman writer in early television is reflected and allegorized by female-authored scripts that express a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Using extensive archival research, close textual analysis, and a feminist orientation within media industry studies, this dissertation establishes a new history of early television that addresses gender politics within the industry and argues that the post-war television program must be read as a product of the tension between mainstream cultural norms, industry gender politics, and the aesthetics of a new commercial medium.

Chapter 1 surveys the struggles and debates that constructed television writing as a gendered occupation and details the range of writing-adjacent jobs, such as story editing and advertising, that were especially open to women professionals breaking into television. Subsequent chapters follow three case studies spanning genre and style. Chapter 2 is about the comedy writer Lucille Kallen, whose collaborations with writer Mel Tolkin and performer Imogene Coca carved out a space for progressive, feminist humor on the comedy-variety program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954) and The Imogene Coca Show (1955-1956). Chapter 3 focuses on Gertrude Berg of The Goldbergs (1949-1957) and Peg Lynch of Ethel & Albert (1953-1956), two women who created and starred in shows in which the homemaker is positioned as the symbolic author of the domestic realm. Chapter 4 centers on women authors of suspense television for such anthology dramas as Climax! (1954-1958) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). Writers and creative producers in this genre, including Joan Harrison, Charlotte Armstrong, and Lucille Fletcher, commented on the domestic ideal through the conventions of suspense and leveraged their own story-telling abilities into positions of institutional power. The question of why women writers' control and autonomy waned in the years following the 1950s is explored in the conclusion, as is the question of how this history bears on contemporary issues of representation and discrimination in the American film and television industries.

United States > Study and teaching.