radio | Women's Radio in Europe Network (WREN)

Very excited by this new exhibition set up by Jeannine Baker as part of the Connected Histories of the BBC project at Sussex University, and related to her own project at McQuarie University Working for Auntie Beeb: Australian women and gendered career pathways at the BBC

As part of the AHRC-Connected Histories of the BBC, Saturday 1^st December 2018 saw the launch of the fifth in the series of BBC websites, 100 Voices that Made the BBC.

Pioneering Women is published to coincide with the centenary of women’s suffrage in the UK, and explores the contribution that women have made to shaping close to 100 years of British broadcasting.

The website includes a large number of clips from programmes which have not been seen or heard since they were first broadcast several decades ago. There are also numerous extracts from interviews, as well as photographs and written documents that are being made publicly available for the very first time.

Source: 100 Voices that Made the BBC: Pioneering Women – Connected Histories of the BBC

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)