Their Own Best Creations

Women Writers in Postwar Television

Annie Berke (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

302 Seiten

2022
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-30079-8 (ISBN)

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A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.

Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Craftsmen and Work Wives
The Gendering of Television Writing

2. “A Sea of Male Interests”
Your Show of Shows and the Comedy of Female Mischief

3. Gertrude Berg, Peg Lynch, and the “Small Situation”
of the Stay-at-Home Showrunner

4. “What Girl Shouldn’t?”
The Many Children of Irna Phillips

5. “Knowing All the Plots”
Presenting the Woman Story Editor

6. “A Girl’s Gotta Live”
The Literate Heroines of the Suspense Anthology Drama

Conclusion
Better Than It Never Was

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	08.03.2022
Reihe/Serie	Feminist Media Histories ; 1
Zusatzinfo	30 b-w illustrations
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	408 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	0-520-30079-3 / 0520300793
ISBN-13	978-0-520-30079-8 / 9780520300798
Zustand	Neuware