Kate Murphy

‘Women Who Oil the Wheels’: Waged Women at the BBC

Waged women were essential to the smooth running of the BBC, without them reports would not be typed, scripts duplicated, post sorted, phone calls answered or salaries paid. This chapter explores the daily working lives of the BBC’s weekly paid female secretarial and clerical staff as well as their recruitment, pay, promotional opportunities and mobility. It exposes the highly segregated nature of much of the work, encapsulated in the pivotal role of the Women’s Staff Administrator. The secretarial hierarchy, from copy-typist to personal secretary, is also revealed as is the possibility of rising through the ranks to a salaried position. In addition, House Staff are considered; the charwomen, kitchen workers and waitresses who provided vital services such as preparing and serving meals and keeping buildings clean.

‘New and Important Careers’: Salaried Women at the BBC

This chapter turns to the BBC’s salaried women, predominantly middle class, highly educated and career-motivated. These were women who worked alongside their male colleagues as ‘equals’ in jobs as diverse as adult education officer, Empire Talks organiser, night hostess, BBC cashier and Radio Times assistant. Many held significant posts and the chapter focuses on a number of influential women such as the BBC Librarian, Florence Milnes; the drama producer Mary Hope Allen; the Assistant Editor of The Listener Janet Adam Smith, and the social documentary maker, Olive Shapley. Although salaried women were ostensibly employed on equal terms with men, hidden sexual discrimination was commonplace and many were recruited to lower starting positions, earned less pay and were offered fewer promotional opportunities.

‘You Feel Their Personal Touch’: Women Broadcasters

The final chapter turns the spotlight onto women who broadcast on the BBC during the interwar years, addressing the key issues of appropriateness and authority. From the late 1920s, a handful of grandees such as Beatrice Webb spoke in the prestigious evening slots however the majority of talks by women were restricted to daytimes, when the female audience was at its height. Alongside Webb, three other women have been picked out for closer scrutiny: the garden expert Marion Cran, the feminist writer Ray Strachey and the housewife Mrs Edna Thorpe. As well as a discussion on the programme Men Talking, the problematic experiment of the short-lived female announcer Sheila Borrett is contrasted with the popularity of Olga Collett, the BBC’s first woman outside broadcaster.

‘When They Have Their Cup of Tea’: Making Programmes for Women

The BBC was aware of its potentially large female daytime listenership and from almost the start produced programmes aimed at this captive audience, beginning with Women’s Hour in 1923. This chapter considers the nature of this output, which ranged from crafts to careers, citizenship to cookery and the key role of the four Talks Assistants who had responsibility for it: Ella Fitzgerald, Elise Sprott, Margery Wace and Janet Quigley. The importance of Hilda Matheson, during her tenure as Talks Director, in elevating and extending the talks aimed at women is also probed. Issues such as audience, timing, portrayal and listener reaction are addressed as well as how women’s programming was perceived within the BBC.

‘Women Who Rule at the BBC’: Four Elite Women

Several women reached positions of considerable authority in the BBC and this chapter takes as its focus the Corporation’s four highest earning female employees of the interwar years. Three women attained Director-level positions: Hilda Matheson, Director of Talks (1927–1932); Mary Somerville, Director of School Broadcasting (1931–1937) and Isa Benzie, Foreign Director (1933–1938). A fourth woman, Mary Adams, became the first female television producer in 1937. Operating within the Corporation’s male hierarchy, the chapter assesses their impact, the way they negotiated their roles and the discrimination, if any, they faced. It also places their success in the context of other high-flying career women of the period. The chapter also considers the impact of the professionalisation of broadcasting on BBC women’s careers.

‘Only an Exceptional Woman’: Married Women at the BBC

Married women’s work was highly contentious in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when marriage bars proliferated and the cult of domesticity placed married women firmly in the home. For the first ten years, the BBC openly employed married women; in 1932 it introduced a bar. This chapter examines why the bar was instituted; how the Corporation negotiated the retention of women deemed ‘exceptional’ and in what ways the Marriage Tribunal, which operated from 1934 to 1937, reflected interwar ideology about married women’s work. The move to end the bar is also explored. The BBC’s ‘Married Women’s Policy’ reveals the notion of ‘two classes’ of married women, those dedicated to a long-term career and those ‘whose heart is in the home’.

‘Growing Like a Young Giant’: The BBC as a Place to Work

Here the working environment of the BBC is established, outlining its development from the amateur enthusiasm of Savoy Hill to the sober professionalism of Broadcasting House. The BBC’s unusual position as both a creative industry and a bureaucratic monolith is explored as is the significant role of John Reith, assessing in particular his relationship with women and with the all-male managerial hierarchy he imposed. The sharp division between waged and salaried staff is introduced; their differing pay scales, promotional opportunities and conditions of service as well as their motivation for joining the BBC. The BBC’s commitment to welfare is also analysed in terms of staff loyalty and cohesion. The chapter compares the BBC with other large interwar organisations and concludes that it was a dynamic place to work.

‘New and important careers’: how women excelled at the BBC, 1923–1939

From its beginnings in 1923, the BBC employed a sizeable female workforce. The majority were in support roles as typists, secretaries and clerks but, during the 1920s and 1930s, a significant number held important posts. As a modern industry, the BBC took a largely progressive approach towards the ‘career women’ on its staff, many of whom were in jobs that were developed specifically for the new medium of broadcasting. Women worked as drama producers, advertising representatives and Children’s Hour Organisers. They were talent spotters, press officers and documentary makers. Three women attained Director status while others held significant administrative positions. This article considers in what ways it was the modernity and novelty of broadcasting, combined with changing employment possibilities and attitudes towards women evident after the First World War, that combined to create the conditions in which they could excel.

Historical Dictionary of British Radio, Second Edition

women. In analyzing both local and foreign TV dramas, Wen gives a comprehensive picture of existing perspectives on gender roles in Chinese society in the 1980s. This book explores not only the representations of TV in periodicals, but also how TV programs projected the ideas of gender, modernization, and globalization, and the relationships between TV and the other media. Throughout most chapters, Wen cautiously confines the usefulness of ads and TV programs to reflecting only the producers or intellectuals’ views on issues such as gender, rather than mirroring the reality of society. However, Wen’s overall thesis attempts to go one step further, by arguing that ‘Chinese TV acted as nothing more than a “tongue” of the government when it aired domestically produced programs’ (18–19). Additionally, in the final chapter Wen asserts that TV reflected ‘the complex struggles faced by Chinese people in the 1980s’ as it was ‘a communicator of the nation’s dominant ideology’ (101). Yet these arguments seem at odds with her general approach of using media sources only to gauge the specific views of particular groups. Furthermore, throughout the book, no equally strong and substantiated analysis is given in support of these claims. It is therefore unclear how and why TV played such strong a political role in speaking for the government and promoting a ‘dominant ideology.’ More discussion on government control and censorship of TV programs and related magazines is needed, before one can fully make sense of the alleged political use of these media as tools to propagate ideologies. Television and the Modernization Ideal in 1980s China contains a rich and carefully selected set of periodicals, numerous intriguing comparisons of TV set ads in America and China, as well as a plethora of deep and compelling analyses of TV program content. Despite some flaws, this book does help us understand TV program content and the representations of TV in post-Mao Zedong China, and how they relate to the topics of modernization, gender, and globalization.

Woman's hour at the women's library

Abstract This article, written by a BBC Producer, describes a Womans Hour Radio Four programme that was broadcast from the new Womens Library, London Guildhall University, on Thursday 31 January 2002 to celebrate the Librarys opening.