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Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 630-632



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Book Review

Invisible Stars:
A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting


Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. By Donna L. Halper. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. Pp. viii+331. $39.95.

In Invisible Stars, Donna Halper attempts to right a historical wrong: the marginalization of women in broadcasting histories. Academics have long lavished attention on the "great men" of early radio and television. Broadcasting textbooks have focused on the inventions, industries, and prime-time programming developed by these men to the exclusion of female media pioneers, the daytime programming they sometimes produced, and the female audiences that consumed these shows.

Although there have been a few attempts to recover the suppressed history of women in broadcasting in the areas of journalism and mass communications, cultural historians have devoted much effort in recent years to reassessing women's role in the development of U.S. broadcasting. Scholars such as Lynn Spigel, Michele Hilmes, and Susan Douglas have [End Page 630] grappled with the contributions of women as producers and consumers of broadcasting. By combining social and industrial history, Halper reminds readers of the forgotten women of early broadcasting and how their opportunities in the radio and television industries were often limited.

When one considers the marked absence of women in many popular histories and standard textbooks, even after the work of the aforementioned historians, Halper's goal to "write the women of broadcasting back into history" (p. 9) is not just laudable, but necessary. Her clear and often conversational writing style makes Invisible Stars a readable overview of women's contributions to American broadcasting. Useful to undergraduates or readers new to the field, this book surveys industrial events that have influenced the fate of women in the industry, social trends, the experiences of working women in broadcasting, the representations of women in radio and television programming, and the social impact of these representations from the 1920s to the present.

Halper's main argument is that women's opportunities on the air have been shaped by various social trends and industrial circumstances over the last eight decades, such as the rise of the "new woman" of the 1920s, the national needs of World War II, or the rise of FM rock stations in the 1960s. In the course of pursuing this argument, she makes some important contributions to the history of early radio. Her brief discussion of women's programs and hosts, the debates about female voices on radio, the dismissal of women announcers, the lives of early radio pioneers and local personalities, and the opportunities for female employment in this young industry are topics that have rarely been addressed in broadcast histories. Her review of trade journals like Broadcasting and her discussion of their tendency to overlook the contributions of women in broadcasting reminds cultural historians of the silences in these sources upon which we base so much of our work.

Readers should be aware that this book's strength is in its breadth rather than its depth. As defined by this text, the topic of "women on the air" includes accounts of female announcers, women covering sports and news, women in local and network entertainment, women's programs, female fans, debates about women's presence on the air, female industry executives, and women who appeared in the news. Halper's attempts to trace these various subjects throughout two media—radio and television—over the last eighty years allow for only a cursory examination of many important topics. There is little in the way of sophisticated analysis of the complex relationship among social trends, industrial events, broadcast employees, representations, and audiences.

In her chapter on the 1930s, for example, Halper misses the opportunity to expand upon recent scholarship on the dynamics among women in the industry, programming, and audiences, providing little information on how daytime offered opportunities for women behind the scenes and how serial programs allowed women to address female audiences in new ways. [End Page 631] What also remains unexplored is...

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