Media Studies

Hard-boiled detectives’ secretaries provided an important domesticating influence in post–World War II radio dramas, helping to downplay the hard-boiled detective’s transgressively violent, working-class origins and frame him as a universal father figure for everyday citizens. More importantly, they presented listeners with a model of femininity that allowed young women to seek exciting—but temporary—employment outside the home. This article examines how this ideal of femininity and temporary professionalism is modeled by two postwar radio office wives: Effie Perine of The Adventures of Sam Spade (1946–51) and Claire Brooks (Brooksie) of Let George Do It (1946–54). Both women are competent and valuable assistants, but their labors are regularly dismissed and devalued as feminine and therefore effortless. Effie and Brooksie may test established gender roles by engaging in a dangerous business that brings them into contact with criminals and femmes fatales, but at the end of the day, they really want to be wives and mothers, adding to a long history of popular representations of female labor as inherently domestic.

The character of the hardboiled detective seems a strange programming choice for early American radio networks.  Despite his considerable popularity in print and film in the 1930s and 1940s, the hardboiled detective’s violence and cynicism about American social and economic structures directly countered the enthusiastic capitalism and  consumerism promoted by the manufacturing corporations that sponsored most programming on the three major radio networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC.  However, by the post-World War II period, all three networks prominently featured series starring characters adapted from the work of popular hardboiled detective writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  This thesis examines The Adventures of Sam Spade (1946-1951) as an adaptation of Hammett’s most famous detective.  I argue that crime series adapted from popular mystery novels, like Sam Spade, were shaped by a number of factors, including the source material, the industry production codes meant to maintain decency over the air, the individual producers and writers responsible for each series, the networks airing the series, the selling needs of program sponsors, and input from listeners.  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, these pressures helped to reshape an ideologically varied body of mystery novels into a relatively consistent collection of radio programs that participated in and augmented the mainstream battles against crime and juvenile delinquency.  As large portions of the American middle class moved to homogenous and preplanned suburban communities, radio series like The Adventures of Sam Spade helped to redefine urban spaces and social order.  These series supported a view of the world in which crime did not pay and suburban the American middle classes – and their possessions – were safely protected by vigilant law enforcement bodies.
Chapter One explores the literature on detective fiction, adaptation, and radio’s role in transmitting cultural values.  I rely particularly on Linda Hutcheon’s (2006) theory of adaptation as a continuous process with a product that is particular to its own industrial and cultural context.  Chapters Two and Three examine archival scripts from Sam Spade’s five-year run.  Chapter Two compares the characterization of Sam and the police, citizens, and criminals he interacts with on the radio to Hammett’s original descriptions.  I support my argument that the series’ producers and sponsors sought to soften the detective’s personality by referring to frequent censorship edits visible in the scripts.  I also discuss external influences on Sam’s character, particularly the dominating figure of Humphrey Bogart.  Chapter Three explores the image of post-war society presented by The Adventures of Sam Spade by comparing three early episodes with the Hammett short stories from which they were adapted.  I argue that the series’ producers appropriated certain elements of Hammett’s work to increase their program’s credibility and stature as quality entertainment while altering others to create a coherent and conservative world where law and order reign supreme.  The radio episodes revise Hammett’s exploration of the country’s checkered past and attempt to present the modern city as potentially dangerous but ultimately controllable.

Radio studies is an inherently feminist endeavor. Radio was long considered too commercial, too personal, too crowded with pop music, too frivolous, too. .. feminine to be taken very seriously either in academia or in the culture at large. My own introductions to radio studies and feminist radio studies were one and the same. Even before returning to graduate school, I happened upon Michele Hilmes's landmark  study Radio Voices through the serendipity of an Amazon search. As others have noted before me, Hilmes masterfully mixes industrial and cultural history, with a heavy emphasis on gender. In her fifth chapter , " The Disembodied Woman, " she argues that gender is a " central conflict " and formative influence in the evolution of American radio. 1 Feminist radio scholars are still answering her call to tease out the complex relationships between the women who have historically composed the majority of radio's listeners and the medium's broadcasters—a historically (but not exclusively) masculine group of producers, writers, advertisers, and radio station owners. Radio studies incorporates cultural studies, gender studies, and the aesthetic tool kit it shares with film and literary studies. Indeed, feminists' emphasis on the importance of female-centric popular media helped make broadcasting an acceptable academic focus. 2 An intrinsically intertextual approach for an inter-textual medium, scholarship on radio overlaps many other branches of media inquiry, especially television. However, it is important to understand radio as its own medium. Radio preceded television by some three decades, and many of its industrial and aesthetic characteristics shaped its younger broadcast sibling's development. Radio continued to exist beyond its so-called Golden Age (generally agreed to span from the s to the early s), when the last American network radio dramas made the leap to television in the early s. Radio remains a vibrant, international site of public debate, cultural exchange, and

'i've got my eyes open and i can't be crooked': race, female virtue and national identity in Terry and the Pirates abstraCt The Second World War-era US network radio programmes augmented nationalist propaganda by connecting American national identity to white patriarchal gender norms. Juvenile adventure radio serials like Terry and the Pirates (TATP) joined this effort and countered criticism of their negative influence on children by promoting their ability to teach young audiences socially sanctioned values like respect for established authority and cultural norms. Within this cultural and industrial context, characters like April Kane became 'discursive " relay station[s] " ' through which wartime debates over women's changing cultural and economic status were circulated, contested and produced. TATP tested April's dedication to an idealized American way of life by pairing and contrasting her with queered and exoticized racial others, including sexually deviant female criminals and subservient foreign men. April passed this inquisition by identifying with Burma, the series' other white heroine, and adhering to traditional feminine values like honesty, passivity and deference to white patriarchal authority. These comparisons reaffirmed a gendered

Despite their low pay and clerical status, the women who staffed the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) Information Department played an integral role in shaping the national network's program and public relations policies. As the network's first line of contact with its audience, Information Department workers influenced public opinion by shaping the networks' responses to individual audience members' written complaints. They also processed and molded the information NBC executives used to sell programming to advertisers. Still, as women, they were routinely devalued and their labor dismissed as simultaneously rote, irrelevant, and hyperemotional. This paper brings together internal documents from across NBC's corporate structure to recover the careers of Anita Barnard and Kathryn Cole, two women who managed the Information Department through the 1940s and 1950s. During this period, the network underwent enormous transitions, including the shift from radio to television and renewed threats of federal regulation. The Information Department's status waxed and waned along with NBC's need to appease its audience and recruit and retain sponsors. Barnard and Cole's status rose when audience information was at a premium, but it fell as soon as network dominance over television was established and financial returns assured.

You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime uses archival research, textual analysis, and industrial and cultural studies frameworks to re-evaluate women’s representation in post-World War II American radio and television crime dramas.  It complicates popular and scholarly understandings that postwar broadcasters simply responded to audience desires by marginalizing women across their schedules and removing recurring female characters from crime dramas altogether.  Rather, the three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that dominated the broadcast industry’s transition from radio to television joined conservative religious and anti-communist groups to silence public debate over women’s roles.  While late-1940s network radio programming incorporated varied opinions about postwar women’s desire and potential to expand their influence in the workplace and politics, postwar television naturalized a vision of passive housewives embracing husbands’ patriarchal authority.  Women who chose to fight crime challenged this authority by claiming the right to enforce the law and judge their fellow citizens. 

This dissertation is organized into two parts: The first explores the industrial and cultural discourses that set the stage for postwar restrictions on women in crime.  Network executives and anti-communist conservatives did not see each other as natural allies, but they mobilized complementary gender discourses emphasizing women as passive consumers rather than public actors.  Archival industry research shows network executives ignored evidence female audiences liked crime programming, especially series featuring active, sympathetic women.  Instead, executives and vocal conservatives framed such women as a sexualized threat to men, children, and themselves.  Networks tolerated crime-curious women on radio and early television, when they struggled to retain and build a female audience.  However, by the mid-1950s, executives feared such women would undermine their commercial emphasis on domestic consumption and attract regulation or censorship.  Part two explores three major types of crime-curious women who appeared on postwar radio and television programming.  Investigative wives and detectives’ secretaries investigated crimes with male husbands or employers.  Female detectives, however, directly challenged men’s control over criminal justice, the most overt sign of patriarchal social power.  All three types gave female audiences a powerful model of feminine agency within patriarchal society.  They also established representational norms that endure in modern crime dramas.