September | 2014 | Women's Radio in Europe Network (WREN)

WREN Anya Luscombe has just published an article based on a paper presented on a WREN panel last year.

‘Eleanor Roosevelt as “Ordinary” Citizen and “Expert” on Radio in the Early 1950s’

Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady of the United States, used radio to communicate on a wide variety of issues that she felt the American public, and women in particular, should know or think about. She had been a radio pioneer, broadcasting from the 1920s onward and starting with her own radio show in 1932. By the 1950s, radio as a technology began facing increasing competition from television. Yet, as a medium to reach mass audiences and women in particular, radio continued to play a vital role. From October 1950 until August 1951, Eleanor Roosevelt together with her son Elliott hosted a daily show on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) called The Eleanor Roosevelt Program. Focusing on this 1950-1951 program, this article seeks to examine the way in which Mrs. Roosevelt communicated with her listeners and successfully blended that which at first sight might seem opposites: the domestic with the global, the informal mode of address with the serious topics, the public with the private, and the ordinary woman’s view with that of the expert international stateswoman.

The article is available online at SAGE OPEN (for free)

In May, I had the privilege of attending a workshop on women in ICT at my former workplace, the Institut des Sciences de la Communication (ISCC). This was organized between two research strands at the LabEx EHNE, my former colleagues at the Strand 1: Europe as a product of material civilisation and strand 6, devoted to writing a gendered history of Europe The workshop took a long-term perspective, exploring women’s roles in a number of communication technologies, from telegraphy, discussed by the brilliant Simone Müller-Pohl, to the roles of women in computing – back when ‘computer’ meant a person – usually an underpaid woman, who was performing the massive series of calculations needed to conduct science the the mid-20th century.

As part of this effort, a number of people were interviewed, including me, on my research on women and radio. Of course WREN was a big part of this…

You can see it online at LabEx strand 6, or below: