Maggie Andrews - Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity

IIllustrations

Acknowledgements

This book carries a special thank you to the very helpful staff at the BBC Written Archives, the British Film Institute and Mass Observation Archives, their assistance to researchers is invaluable. Domesticating the Airwaves has been a long while in the researching and writing and thanks are also therefore due to many friends, students and colleagues who have exchanged and shared ideas with me along the way. Special thanks also go to Lynda Jerrom for proofreading, to Andy Medhurst and Fan Carter for many conversations and much encouragement over the years.

Without the unerring practical and emotional support of my husband Neil this book would not have been written and no words can thank him enough. Finally this book is dedicated to the next generation Lucia, Edu, Erin-Marie and Florence whose consumption, pleasure and interest in broadcast medias association with domesticity is already being established by Big Cook, Little Cook (2003) on CBeebies.

Introduction

Television is a domestic medium, not only consumed in the home but, along with other media, central to the home; as Silverstone has pointed out, television is part of home part of its idealisation, part of its reality (1994, p. 28). Furthermore a brief look at contemporary television programme schedules, or an intense day of channel hopping, provides plenty of evidence that television is preoccupied with domesticity. Drama, soaps and sit-coms are predominantly set in domestic spaces, interviews carried out on sofas in pseudo-domestic settings and a significant part of many schedules is given over to programmes about purchasing and improving homes or domestic skills such as cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, shopping and gardening. This book argues that an understanding of this phenomenon requires an historical analysis; for the roots of broadcastings preoccupation with domesticity, lifestyle celebrities and domestic skills was firmly established with the introduction of radio into the 1920s and 1930s home, which was identified as a feminine sphere.

In the inter-war era, the perceived female listener and her concerns influenced the nature of broadcasting, dictating the tone and linguistic framework of inter-war broadcasters domesticating the airwaves and contributing to the low status of broadcast media in the ensuing years. The inter-relationship between the domestic setting of radio and the cultural associations of home and femininity have been explored in the influential work of Lacey on German Radio (1996) and Hilmes on USA radio (2006), and their work has framed the approach taken in this book in trying to analyse gender, broadcasting and domesticity in an integrated fashion and with detailed attention as to how this inter-relationship is played out in particular texts.

This book draws upon the historiographical approaches of social, womens and gender history (Roberts, 1984; Tebbutt, 1994; Summerfield, 1996; Abbott, 2003) which have explored womens domestic experience and the construction of separate spheres (Vickery, 1993) and Feminist Cultural History which has in recent years displayed a growing fascination with domesticity, in the work of Giles (2004), for example. Although Beethams (1996) and Winships (1987) texts have pointed to the role of womens magazines in the construction of femininity and domesticity there has in historical work been a tendency to downplay the contribution of broadcasting to these areas. This book suggests that although cultural analysis of contemporary culture, such as Hollows (2008) have integrated an analysis of broadcasting with that of domesticity, historians have been slower to explore these areas and therefore attempts to encourage a wider engagement with broadcasting: a hitherto neglected area of feminist cultural history.

Traditional histories of broadcasting have tended to focus on broadcasting institutions and particularly the BBC and key figures such as Reith (Briggs, 1995. Crissell, 2002). Problematically, however, as Street (1996, p. 9) has pointed out, there is a tendency for the history of broadcasting to become the history of the BBC, while oral histories, newspapers and magazines suggest that in the past, as now, people listened to the radio, watched the TV, channel hopping as the mood took them. Other historical approaches have charted the development of radio and latter television genres (Kilborn, 2000; Wagg, 1998) or interrogated the role that broadcasting played in the development of citizenship and politics (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991). It will be suggested that a historical approach, which focuses upon the relationship between broadcasting and domesticity, will offer an alternative cultural history of the mediums. The work of Moores (2000) on radio and new media technologies, Spigel (1997) on television in the USA), and Silverstone (1994) and Morley (1986, 2000) on television in Britain do indeed explore the integration of broadcasting media into the domestic space, how it became integrated into tensions and power battles of that domestic space and comes to define domestic space. Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley argue that the media pose a range of problems for the regulation of the porous boundaries of domestic spaces, which are expressed generally in the regular cycle of moral panics around new media or media content, but on an everyday level, in individual households they are expressed through decisions to include and exclude media content and to regulate within the household (1992, p. 20). As ground-breaking and influential as Silverstone, Hirsch and Morleys research is, it works within a paradigm that problematically lays emphasis on the significance of medias effects on the home, with less attention given to how the domestic space in which broadcasting was consumed shaped the nature of broadcasting itself. Alternatively, Douglas work on radio in the USA challenged scholars to understand not merely how radio influenced the everyday lives of ordinary people, producing a new soundscape, but to see broadcasting not as a one-way medium but as structured and moulded by the imaginary listener with whom the broadcaster is always in dialogue (2004, p. 18). To understand how the feminine domestic sphere of the home literally domesticated the airwaves , it is necessary to look closely at the actual broadcast media texts which were produced, the linguistic tone and visual style, the narrative focus or the preoccupations of these texts which points to a more complex cultural history.