Stirred, Not Yet Shaken: Integrating Women's History into Media History

Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age

“…While feminist programming itself has been dropped from many broadcasters in ongoing pushes toward "mainstreaming, " the new range of voices and issues canvassed by these post-1960s programs challenged the politics of separate spheres at the same time that they emerged from it. While the story of The Coming Out Show and other similar feminist broadcasting projects are worthy of a study in themselves, and some of this work is already being done (Carter 1996(Carter , 2004Friedman et al 2009;Henderson 2006;Hilmes 2013;Veerkamp 2014), in order to understand any continuities between pre-and post-secondwave women's programming, I suggest that we have to understand on their own terms what the original programs were trying to do and what successes and failures they had in organizing listeners around the time and space of gendered radio. This aspect of media history has often been underestimated in contemporary debates about the reemergence of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.…”