TV For Women Who Think: Female Intellectualism and Network Television in Mid-Century America

Goldstein, Leigh Mathia

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jrvb-tg10

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TV For Women Who Think: Female Intellectualism and Network Television in Mid-Century America

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This dissertation argues that network television was a vehicle for the promotion and enactment of female intellectualism in the US during the period directly following World War II. Beginning in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, network television included among its offerings programs that were designed to appeal to women it designated as “educated.” Eclectic in terms of format, the programs belonging to this category of television included women’s service shows, public affairs documentaries, adaptations of classics and more recent Broadway hits, and plays written expressly for television broadcast. I analyze these formats, treating select programs and individual broadcasts as exemplary. My readings are also informed by industry press discourse and archival documents. Through a discussion of these sources I shed light on how the figure of the intellectual woman was imagined in the early postwar US and what the broadcasting industry hoped to accomplish by speaking to her. The history I trace also denaturalizes familiar concepts like “the intellectual” and “intellectualism,” attending to other ways they have been thought and to the racial, class, gender and religious politics that continue to inform their elaboration. My first chapter examines the efforts of network television producers, particularly those at NBC, to develop a television program that resembled the women’s service magazine, thereby attracting that medium’s “class” consumers and, it was hoped, transforming other women into something that more closely approximated them. My second chapter looks at the original television plays overseen by Fred Coe, particularly those written by Horton Foote, Paddy Chayefsky and other playwrights known to be specialists of “microscopic theatre.” By reading select broadcasts in relation to the local color stories that were a familiar feature of women’s service magazines and related popular media, I interrogate the gendering of scale in 1950s television and efforts to “open up” both women’s media and the small screen. My third chapter analyzes public affairs programs developed in the very early 1960s for educated homemakers. I treat the series Purex Specials for Women as exemplary of the artistic documentary, a new kind of public affairs program, and I explore the cultural anxieties that informed this innovation. My fourth chapter explores the religious inflections of television’s intellectualist address to women, focusing in particular on the color television dramatic specials broadcast as part of The Hallmark Hall of Fame.

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