Girlhoods in the Golden Age of U.S. Radio: Music, Shared Popular Culture, and Memory Sharon R. Mazzarella, Rebecca C. Hains, and Shayla Thiel-Stern Memory and storytelling can provide valuable tools for media scholars aiming to better understand popular media audiences from a historical perspective. Girls’ stories are particularly important because they have been absent from most official recorded history and archived documents. In this study, we interview 30 U.S. women born 1918–1948 in order to uncover their girlhood experiences with mid-20th Century media. Their narratives reveal 1) a shared experience of radio listening; 2) an emphasis on the ‘‘experience’’ of using media artifacts rather than on the content; and 3) the appeal of music and dance as a girlhood pastimes. Memory and storytelling can provide valuable tools for feminist media scholars aiming to better understand girls’ interactions with popular media from a historical perspective. Memory provides a powerful and sometimes mysterious means of binding oneself to a sense of time, place, purpose, and community, and when shared, it can explain lived experiences in a way that studying official documents cannot. Girls’ stories are particularly important because they have been absent from most official recorded history and archived documents, and until recently, from much scholarship (Gilligan, 1982; McRobbie, 1991). This absence presents a challenge to scholars who seek to understand girlhoods and girls’ lives in the past. As such, this Sharon R. Mazzarella (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993) is Professor and Director of the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University. Her research focuses on youth culture and mass media, specifically in the field of girls’ studies. Rebecca C. Hains (Ph.D., Temple University, 2007) is an associate professor of communications at Salem State University. The author of Growing Up With Girl Power (2012), her research focuses on girls’ media culture. Shayla Thiel-Stern (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2004) is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Her interests include adolescent girls, digital media, and identity. We would like to thank the thirty women who so graciously and candidly shared their stories with us. © 2013 Broadcast Education Association DOI: 10.1080/19376529.2013.777731 Journal of Radio & Audio Media 20(1), 2013, pp. 117–133 ISSN: 1937-6529 print/1937-6537 online 117 118 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 article presents women’s memories of their girlhoods as a means of counteracting ‘‘official’’ history, in particular at a time when youth culture was first becoming established in the United States. We intentionally use the plural, ‘‘girlhoods,’’ in acknowledgement that there is no single, uniform ‘‘girlhood.’’ Rather, there are ‘‘girlhoods’’—cultural constructs that vary by race, ethnicity, class, nationality, generation, regionality, sexual identity, and so on. Our research seeks to give voice to women whose experiences represent some, but not all, girlhoods. Although the rapidly growing international, interdisciplinary field of Girls’ Studies in recent years has filled a gap in the academic literature on youth, Mary Celeste Kearney (2008) asserts the research often too narrowly focuses on present-day girl culture while ignoring girlhoods in a historical context. Kearney writes: ‘‘Although it may sound somewhat paradoxical, if not nonsensical, the primary direction I’d like to see future girl-centered media research take is backward’’ (p. 82). In calling for Girls’ Studies scholars to look ‘‘backward,’’ Kearney notes that the growing academic discourse on girls and girl culture frequently lacks a historical perspective, specifically an examination of ‘‘the historical development of girls’ media culture’’ (Kearney, 2008, p. 82). However, a growing body of scholars (Hatch, 2011; Kearney, 2004, 2005; Nash, 2006; Scheiner, 2000; Schrum, 2004) has examined mediated artifacts targeted to girls—motion pictures, magazines, television programs, radio, novels—as they existed across the 20th Century’s early and middle decades. In addition to answering Kearney’s call for Girls’ Studies scholars to look ‘‘backward,’’ we also answer Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora’s (2007) call to move away from the study of girls’ popular communication artifacts and toward the study of girls themselves. We hope to accomplish this by listening to women’s voices as they recall their girlhood experiences with media and popular culture artifacts, notably radio and popular music, in early 20th Century U.S. history. Review of the Literature Cultural Constructions of Youth Cultural constructions of childhood and adolescence in the U.S. have evolved significantly over the past century and a half. Before the turn of the twentieth century, children were considered and treated as miniature adults who, in all but upperclass families, attended school for but a handful of years (Aries, 1962). They did not experience what we today in the U.S. consider to be ‘‘childhood’’: a carefree time of learning and little responsibility. In the early years of urbanization and industrialization, for example, many city children labored long hours in factories, often fending for themselves in ‘‘the urban stews’’ (Savage, 2007, p. 36). This changed in the early decades of the twentieth century, a time of institutionalization of public education, the beginnings of child/adolescent study/psychology, the institution of child protective legislation, the designation of parents (particularly Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 119 mothers) as responsible for molding innocent youth, and a growing youth-oriented commercial leisure culture (Wartella & Mazzarella, 1990). It was in the years/ decades following this shift in the cultural construction of youth that our informants were born. While some scholars contend that the 1950s post-war period was the historical moment when the U.S. teenager and teen culture were essentially ‘‘born’’ (Doherty, 1988, p. 35), other scholarship has shown that characteristics defining the teenager in Western cultures pre-date the 1950s (Savage, 2007; Schrum, 2004) primarily due to the dramatic increase in high school attendance at mid-century spurred in part by returning World War II veterans displacing young people from the workforce and pushing them back into schools (Kearney, 2004; Schrum, 2004). Schrum (2004) also identifies the increased production and variety of consumer goods marketed to teens as well as increased emphasis on advertising as a means to reach the newly prized demographic. Kearney (2004) says these factors paralleled the perception of early teenagers as ‘‘one of the most lucrative and influential consumer markets’’ (p. 269). By 1944, ‘‘teenager’’ became ‘‘the accepted way to describe this new definition of youth as a discrete, mass market’’ (Savage, 2007, p. 453). Teenage girls, in particular, became a sought-after market in this time period, and they have been positioned and located as consumers ever since. Constructing the Teenage Girl as a Distinct Social Category Historians and Girls’ Studies scholars including Schrum (2004), Kearney (2004), Ilana Nash (2006) and Georganne Scheiner (2000) have documented the teenage girl’s distinct historical evolution in the United States—a history they argue predates the 1950s by 20 or 30 years. Moreover, they document this as it relates to marketing and popular culture targeted specifically to girls. Marketers began targeting high school-aged girls in the 1920s, increasing the practice in the 1930s and 1940s (Schrum, 2004). For example, Seventeen magazine, founded in 1944, sold out its first issue of 400,000 within 6 days (Schrum, 2004). Its print run increased to 530,000 within 6 months (Savage, 2007); its circulation exceeded 1 million by early 1947 and 2.5 million by mid-1949 (Schrum, 2004). From the early 1940s through the mid-1950s, ‘‘girl-centered entertainment properties,’’ such as novels, comic books, films, radio programs, live theater, and television programs, ‘‘saturated American popular culture’’ (Kearney, 2004, p. 270). In sum, the previous scholarship argues that immediately preceding and during World War II, teenage girls were constructed as highly sought-after consumers of popular media products. This study presents a complementary but different perspective: how this generation of women actually recalls consuming and making sense of girlhood experiences with mass media and popular culture, notably radio and popular music. Using a combination of oral history and narrative analysis, we were able to better understand how some girls born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s used radio and popular music in their lives. 120 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 Memory Study as Theoretical Framework Media memory studies provide a conceptual framework within which to better understand women’s memories of the popular communication and culture they encountered and used in their youth. For example, Volkmer (2008) and others in her edited volume, News in Public Memory, describe how the negotiation of memory, often over generations, works to construct reality—or ‘‘global public memory’’ on an international, intergenerational scale (p. 266). Furthermore, memory is unstable, unpredictable, and often changing (Zelizer, 1998). Memories of media in this framework must be understood as a representation, rather than objective reality, yet representation is an important aspect of understanding women’s pasts—particularly when others have represented those pasts on women’s behalf (Behar, 1994). Methodology This project was undertaken within the context of mid twentieth-century teen girl culture, conducting interviews with 30 adult women who were born in the United States during this time frame. The sample includes 10 women born in each of the following three decades—the 1920s,1 1930s, and 1940s. Previous projects based on these interviews have focused separately on those respondents born in 1933 or earlier (Thiel-Stern, Hains, & Mazzarella, 2011) and 1934 or later (Hains, ThielStern, & Mazzarella, 2011). For this project, we conduct a comparative analysis looking for commonalities and differences across the three age cohorts defined here. Although the women as a whole were from a variety of ethnic, socio-economic, and regional backgrounds, only one informant was African American and the rest were Caucasian. Many were the children of immigrants; their families’ countries of origin varied, from French Canadian to European descent. Most were raised in lower to middle socio-economic backgrounds, while a few described their families as socioeconomically ‘‘fortunate’’ or ‘‘lucky.’’ Although different socioeconomic backgrounds are represented, we acknowledge the lack of racial diversity as a shortcoming of our research; we actively attempted to recruit women of color to participate, but these efforts failed. Although our informants’ experiences cannot be generalized to reflect those of all girls who came of age during that era, their recollections provide snapshots revealing a diversity of girlhood experiences. (Refer to Appendix A for demographic descriptions of each participant.) To learn more about our informants’ girlhoods and media use during that time, we employed the method of interviews in an oral history tradition in which interviewer and interviewee engage in a dialogue about past experiences. Allowing women from different walks of life to share their stories in this way is preferable to the frequent use of official historical records to explore the same time periods because such records, constructed by people in positions of authority, can reflect only the worldview of people with ‘‘power’’ and ‘‘agency’’ (Thompson, 2000, p. 7). We are cognizant of memory work’s limitations in that memory reconstructs past Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 121 experiences filtered through the lenses of more recent events and newer knowledge. Therefore, we recognize our informants might have originally interpreted their experiences differently than they do now, and that these interpretations may have likewise varied at other points in time. We also recognize that, as with any research methodology, our informants’ participation in the research process may color their responses. However, the findings presented are also interesting in that recollections and personal representations have implications for women’s articulation of identity. Each of the authors conducted interviews for this study. Most interviewees were recruited via snowball sampling, through which the authors first interviewed women whom they knew, then asked for referrals to other women to secure a larger group of research participants. Requests were also posted to a genealogy listserv and a council on aging.2 Each participant was asked a predetermined set of questions in a semi-standardized interview structure, but depending on the conversations’ flow, questions were asked in differing orders and often included follow-up questions. Interviews were conducted by phone or in person, and were audio recorded and transcribed. All but three respondents were interviewed individually. Two, a pair of sisters, four years apart in age, were interviewed together, and one woman was ‘‘interviewed’’ via email at her request. In conducting our analysis and presenting our data, we used an emergent coding method to document the larger themes or narratives culled from the interviews and focused on women’s recalled experiences with media and popular communication. For this article, we chose the passages that best represented the dominant narratives, and have provided an analysis of our participants’ stories to better highlight the role of mass media in a historical time period. Our analysis identified more similarities than differences in informants’ media experiences across the three age cohorts. Their narratives revealed several trends, including 1) their lack of access to or interest in girl-oriented media and popular communication artifacts; 2) an engagement with media oriented towards adult or mass audiences; 3) their attraction to stories of adventure, bravery, and courage as seen particularly in their choice of role models; 4) the shared experience of radio listening; 5) an emphasis on the ‘‘experience’’ of using media artifacts rather than on the content; and 6) the appeal of music and dance as a girlhood pastime. In this essay, we focus on the last of these trends, while the first three are discussed in a separate essay (Mazzarella, Thiel-Stern, & Hains, forthcoming). Findings Radio in Girlhood Memories: ‘‘We Played : : : And Then Listened to the Radio’’ We began our research by asking: ‘‘What did you do for fun when you were a child? How would you describe your leisure time?’’ and then asked about their 122 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 teenage years specifically. Almost all thirty informants immediately focused on outdoor activities—tag, hide-n-seek, jumping rope, picnics, hiking, swimming, bike riding, random adventures with friends, and so on. Regardless of whether our informants grew up in a rural or urban setting, they typically recalled their girlhood as a time when media and popular culture were peripheral or absent from their lives. Only a handful mentioned childhood media use without prompting and noted it was not central to their girlhood, and those informants grew up in urban and suburban areas where they probably had greater access to media than did their rurally situated peers. Moreover, these women were more likely to be in the younger age cohort, such as Maggie (b. 1940), who was raised in urban North Carolina, and who told us: ‘‘I read a lot. In the afternoons, we played softball. We played kick the can. We played—[thinks]—we rode our bikes. We played a lot at night. Well, until it was dark. And then, listened to the radio.’’ Even for those women who spontaneously mentioned media activities, play activities were always mentioned first and discussed in greater depth/detail. Like Maggie, many of our informants were girls during the golden age of radio, an era often considered to be from the mid-1920s through the mid-1960s (Siegel, 2006), so it is understandable that radio was the mass medium most referenced by the women in our study. As the medium first came to mass popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, radio executives realized quickly the value of radio to its audiences both for entertainment (with the dawn of popular music and fictional serials) and breaking news and political communication (Sterin, 2011). According to Schrum (2004), ‘‘Teenage girls listened to the radio frequently and actively from its beginning, and it proved an important symbol of high school life’’ (p. 103). Indeed, our informants spoke of the importance of a range of radio programming formats in their childhoods. For example, many, notably those in the older cohort who grew up during the early part of radio’s golden age, spoke of listening to radio news with their families. Sophie (b. 1932) recalled that their family radio ‘‘was always on the news. We always would listen to the news. Six o’clock news while we were having supper. My father would always listen to the sports on it. You know? Yeah.’’ Rosemary (b. 1927), who grew up in New Orleans, recalled a wide range of soap opera programs, but also stressed the importance of news listening: ROSEMARY: I remember in the evening after supper children would be out playing on the banquet and you could go for blocks listening to Amos and Andy, and you could listen to the whole program block to block and hear it from other people’s houses because everyone was listening to it. My grandmother listened to a soap opera. I think the lead was named Stella. And she’d listen during the day to her soap. And of course, we all listened to FDR when he gave the fireside chats. Everyone sat around and listened to the president. Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 123 Although women in the older and middle cohorts interviewed valued the memory of news content on the radio, women in the youngest cohort were more likely to mention remembering listening to music on the radio—perhaps because the sound of music on radio vastly improved with the launch of FM channels in the late 1940s, or the elevation of celebrity DJs and rock and roll that followed soon after (Sterin, 2011). Across all age cohorts, however, women recalled favorite or popular radio programs: Amos & Andy (WMAQ/NBC 1928–1955), Lux Radio Theater (NBC/CBS 1934–1955), The Lone Ranger (WXYZ/MBS/NBC Blue/ABC 1933–1954), The Shadow (MBS 1937–1954), Little Orphan Annie (WGN/NBC Blue/MBS radio 1930–1942), Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy (WBBM/CBS/NBC/ABC, 1933– 1951), The Green Hornet (WXYZ, 1936–1952), Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941– 1952), Jack Benny (various program titles; NBC/CBS, 1932–1955), The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (NBC/CBS 1936–1950, various soap operas/serials (e.g., Stella Dallas [1937–1955]) and news (especially those growing up during World War II). As with other media, their recollections are primarily of the same general interest programs their families listened to, and not of girl-oriented programs/ characters (with the exception of Little Orphan Annie). For example, Amanda (b. 1943) from a small town in upstate New York, recalled listening to radio soap operas, a memory shared by other informants as well: AMANDA: During the day, I remember the soap operas were on the radio, and my mother loved the soap operas. And there was [begins singing] ‘‘wonderful Ivory Snow.’’ That was always an ad. And, uh, The Life of Helen Trent. It was sort of a love story, I guess. But you know, you always heard the organ music in the background, and the sounds of, you know, people walking. You know, how the sounds are of different things. But, uh, radio was always, always, always a part of our lives. Rose (b. 1936) who was born and raised in urban Massachusetts, likewise recalled the soap operas as well as a range of other programs: ROSE: Oh, we listened to the radio a lot. My mother—especially on the weekends when my mother was home, or in the morning—well, in the summer I was outside playing with my cousins. But when I was in high school—or it must have been before high school—when my mother was working in the mills, I remember the radio used to be on in the morning if it was a non-school day. So there were all these programs: Stella Dallas. In the evenings, on Sunday evenings, we used to all gather around the radio, and we used to listen to Inner Sanctum; I think on Monday nights The Lone Ranger was on—that was the cowboy; and Dick Tracy, and then they used to have, for a long while they had a program on Saturday evenings sponsored by the FBI, how they were catching the criminals and all that—it was a story-type thing. 124 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 Although Rose, Amanda, and others remembered specific characters and program titles, their recollections about radio listening seemed to be tied more to memory and experience than the characters or stories in the radio shows. This relates to the notion that memory is constructed through a process of individual, social, and cultural meaning making (Slade, 2008). This is a significant insight explored in the following section. Radio and Shared Cultural Experience In many instances, when our research informants recalled a memory of radio or other media from their childhood or teen years they instead described (sometimes in detail) the circumstances in which they remembered consuming it rather than the actual content. Memory work was tied to a sense of location and time rather than specific content, especially among the older cohorts (Slade, 2008). For example Ella (b. 1927), who grew up in rural Iowa, recalled listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats with the family gathered around the radio in their living room, while sisters Tillie (b. 1922) and Evelyn (b. 1918), who grew up in the industrial mill city Lawrence, Mass., both associated the radio with the cold, unheated room where it was placed. Tillie said she rarely listened to the radio as a result of its placement and that her parents would close the room off in the fall and winter months. But Evelyn said she would gather with their other siblings in their winter clothes to hear a favorite show. Martha (b. 1929), who grew up in a middle- to upper-middle-class family in San Francisco, was in an unusual position of having her own radio in her room. She remembered listening along with her parents and their friends to election results. MARTHA: As far as radio in our house, we had the main one in the living room and then I, from the time that I was probably 9 years old, had my own radio in my room. My parents were very conscious of news programs and when it was election time, my dad was a Republican, my mother was a Democrat. I was raised in rather a lively political atmosphere and I know on election night, my mom and dad would usually host a dinner party and Mother would set up card tables so that the Republicans sat together and the Democrats sat together and then they would listen to the results of the election. Harriet (b. 1939) who was raised in Kentucky Appalachia recalls the radio in her dad’s country general store as being one of the only ones around: HARRIET: From the time I can remember, we owned a radio, and in these early years, my dad was the only who had one where we lived. People would come in to the store and listen to Amos and Andy, Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 125 and my dad loved Jack Benny. The people in the community would gather at the home of people who had radios, and later on they would do the same when people had TVs. That reminds me that the first time I heard about TV. One of our neighbors came into the store and said he’d heard about this thing that was like radio, but you could actually see it. It had to be a little before 1945. ‘‘What will they think of next?! Landsakes!’’ he said. Leslie (b. 1941), who grew up on a farm in Iowa, remembers listening to radio programs while doing her daily chores: LESLIE: And in the morning, if we helped clean out the barn, there were certain morning radio programs, and then, The Shadow was on, as I recall, on Sunday afternoons, and usually just before milking would start. And there’d be usually one stall that didn’t have a cow in it. There’d be nice, fresh straw in it, so I could sit in that empty stall and listen to The Shadow [NOTE: She vocalized the title of the program the dramatic way the promos did.] Others recalled things like hurrying home from school for their favorite programs (Alice, b. 1926; Phyllis, b. 1929; Leslie); the family gathering together to listen (Ella; Tori, b. 1935; Stella, b. 1940s); listening at relative’s homes (Edwina, b. 1935; Winifred, b. 1936); when they were home sick (Sophie); or in bed at night with a sister (Amanda). Sometimes it wasn’t with whom they listened, but rather the technology itself, as Evelyn recalled: EVELYN: We didn’t need a whole lot of stuff like they have today to be able to amuse ourselves. That was it. And listen to the radio a little bit. In those days, a squeaky radio. INTERVIEWER: Squeaky? How was it squeaky? EVELYN: Well because they had one of those big, big, things like a horn on it and that’s where the sound came out. That was really old and they had all kinds of dial on it and whenever you were trying to get something it would be screeching. You know you had to have just the right dial and right number or whatever, ya know, to get it right. It wasn’t easy. Then it came out through some kind of a speaker and it wasn’t too too clear sometimes. Radio wasn’t the only medium about which informants recalled the ‘‘experience’’ moreso that the content. Many recalled the size of the early televisions (Melissa, b. 1936; Rose; Winifred; Maggie) or the lack of programs and/or the ever-present test patterns (Rose; Tori; Amanda; Maggie; Stella; Winifred) as we have discussed 126 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 elsewhere (Hains et al., 2011; Thiel-Stern et al., 2011; Mazzarella et al., forthcoming). However, the theme of radio and sharing the listening experience with family, friends, and community was a strong thread among the narratives of women interviewed. The Influence of Early Radio Programming: ‘‘Everything Was : : : Aimed at Boys’’ Our informants often reminded us that their childhood media options were nowhere near as extensive as those offered to children and teens today, and this included radio programming. For example, Maggie asserted: ‘‘We didn’t have the choices that you have now : : : the radio stations were only AMs at that time, and when they had to cut off—at sundown, I think it was—there was, you know, only a few stations that you could pick up at night, and all of the static was very, very bad on them. And we didn’t have the choices in books. We just didn’t have the choices.’’ While their overall media options were perceived as limited, the options specifically for girls were recalled as even more limited. Our informants said that little of the media content available at that time truly appealed to them as girls. As Winifred said after being prompted about whether she recalled any popular media in her life, ‘‘I don’t recall [media] being an influence on : : : who and what I became. Everything was media aimed at males or boys.’’ Other women remembered radio programs but none that were specifically memorable to them in the context of girlhood: MAGGIE: Most of the things that were on the radio or anything like that seemed to be geared toward boys. STELLA: I remember a program called The Shadow, and another called The Green Hornet, and different radio soap operas : : : I don’t recall any of the characters speaking to me specifically as a girl. ROSE: [On the] radio, everything was really oriented toward, it was always men. RAMONA (b. 1944): There weren’t very many [girls]. Mostly they were guy things, cowboy and Indian things, and every once in a while there was a girl. Lacey (b. 1938) and Honey (b. 1942), raised on a successful sheep ranch in Utah, noted no main women characters on television and in radio programs with whom they identified. Instead, Lacey remembers being ‘‘just more or less forced’’ to consume stories featuring male characters. Similarly, Leslie and Stella spontaneously recalled that news programs such as The Today Show (NBC 1952-present) featured mostly men: ‘‘I don’t remember seeing any women in any of that media at that time—news media,’’ Leslie said. While recent historical accounts of girls during this time period document a wealth of young female characters and girl-targeted media, our informants were not familiar with, did not have access to, or did not recall such characters as Corliss Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 127 Archer from the Meet Corliss Archer series (WGN/NBC Blue/MBS radio 1943– 1956; Kiss and Tell film 1945; CBS television 1951–1952; syndicated television 1954–1955), or Judy from the A Date with Judy series (NBC/ABC radio 1941–1950; film 1948; ABC television 1951–1953). In fact, few interviewees mentioned female characters. When they did, it was often Nancy Drew (1930-present) whom we discuss in a separate project (Mazzarella et al., forthcoming). The Importance of Music and Dance Perhaps some of the women who were unable to see themselves within radio programming content during radio’s golden age were able to find a more inclusive space within recorded and performed music—especially dancing to it. While not as commonly mentioned as radio, music and dance were recalled excitedly by those women who did mention these forms of popular culture. Moreover, this trend was noticed across the three age cohorts, although older women were more likely to report they played musical instruments, while younger women were more likely to report listening to recorded music on record players and/or on the radio. About half of our respondents recalled attending dances sponsored by their local YMCA, schools, communities, or commercial venues (Ann, b. 1928; Cecelia, b. 1928; Ella; Martha; Phyllis; Clara, b. 1934; Melissa; Rose; Sophie; Tori; Winifred; Amanda; Leslie; Mary, b. 1948; Stella). Whether these dances were called ‘‘jumps,’’ ‘‘canteens,’’ ‘‘sock hops’’ or just ‘‘dances,’’ and whether the music played was ‘‘boogie woogie,’’ ‘‘big band,’’ ‘‘jazz,’’ or ‘‘rock’n’roll’’ they were important to our informants during their teen years For example: Ella told us she loved going to local dances as a teen. ‘‘My sister and I were the eldest, and we’d go up to Maquoketa when the best big bands were in town. We were a little older then, though— probably sixteen.’’ Tori mentioned going to venues where big bands played in the Boston area, while Phyllis mentioned canteens in her small town, and Stella mentioned jumps in St. Paul: TORI: Oh, oh, that was, that was the time. It was more big band: : : : But it was all music. And everybody dressed. It wasn’t this dungaree business and t-shirts, and shirts advertising for companies. We dressed, and we dressed in our heels and, you know, the full skirts and all that stuff. And jitterbugging. I loved to jitterbug. I just loved to jitterbug. And even school, the schools had dances, would have dances like on Friday nights. PHYLLIS: Yeah, we had, uh, every week there was a canteen. It was called a canteen because it was during the war. And, uh, we just had, uh, the high school one night a week, usually it was like Wednesday night a week would have, uh, dances with the jukebox down in the cafeteria, and, uh, anyone was free to go, you know. Probably once a week. Just go and dance to the jukebox. 128 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 STELLA: As a teenager, I can recall that my peers would have what we called ‘‘jumps.’’ I have no idea why they were called that, but they were basically parties. They had the usual teenage party stuff, maybe the same as what they have today, basically. They would take place in a dark unlit basement and there was a lot of dancing and making out on the dance floor and in the dark corners. I recall my parents being very derisive of jumps, and nine times out of 10 not wanting to let me go, and four out of five times, not actually letting me go. They would always take me there and go in with me, and if they wouldn’t find an adult or if the adult there wasn’t suitable enough for them, we’d turn around and go back home. But it wasn’t just dancing to music that spoke to our respondents, it was music in general. While women in our older age cohort often spoke about playing musical instruments, women in the middle and younger cohort spoke about recorded music or about listening to/watching broadcast music programs such as Your Hit Parade (NBC/CBS radio 1935–1955; NBC/CBS television 1950–1959) (Edwina; Elizabeth, b. 1944) and American Bandstand (WFIL/ABC/syndicated 1952–1989) (Rose; Elizabeth; Robin, p. 1944; Leslie). Younger women were more likely to talk about having had their own phonographs and/or purchasing records in record stores. In a previous piece, we wrote specifically and extensively about the importance of music to those women who came of age after WWII (Hains et al., 2011), so we won’t go into detail on that here, but rather will provide some examples of how music use crossed the three age cohorts being discussed in this paper. Cecelia fondly recalled skipping classes when she was 14 or 15 years old to see the Andrews Sisters when they performed in Plymouth, MA, while Amanda recalls seeing Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello perform. Martha, like Tori both spoke of how music brought them and their friends together, while Stella (the only African American informant in our study) provided more of a social/cultural context for the importance of music to the lives of her and her friends: STELLA: When I was a teen, all my friends and I were heavily into 45 RPM records. During that timeframe, there were a lot of Black records produced and made—much more there in terms of media content than could even approach what was on TV or even the radio at that time. That (music) was the predominant media landscape for Black children and teenagers, I’d say. The memory of enjoyment of popular music in girls’ youth is one of the strongest narratives in this research; both music and dance were cultural experiences shared by girls across these three age cohorts and across socio-economic and regional backgrounds. While the specific music and dance styles may have changed, the linking of music and dance to youth/girl culture, particularly in the teen years is undeniable. Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 129 Conclusion Although one mission of this research was to ascertain differences and similarities in how adult U.S. women who were born in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s recalled girlhood interactions with media and culture, we were surprised to find more similarities than differences in girls’ media experiences across the three age cohorts studied. While the forms of media may have changed (radio giving way to television, for example, or big band music being superseded by rock ’n’ roll), the means of experiencing and sharing media were quite similar. Our findings demonstrate the ways in which some girls who grew up during these time periods experienced popular communication artifacts, specifically radio and popular music, and how they made sense of them through memory today. Certainly, U.S. girls born long before our informants also interacted with and created cultural artifacts (e.g., diaries, novels, sheet music, musical instruments, and so on). For example, Hunter (2003), in her discussion of Victorian girlhood in the United States, discusses the role of such artifacts, while Chinn (2008) focuses specifically on public dancing (dance halls) at the turn of the 19th into the 20th Century and its role in creating an adolescent culture of working class, urban, immigrant adolescents. She argued such dances provided a ‘‘public space’’ where young people could ‘‘experiment with new social and sexual arrangements’’ (pp. 10–11). Similarly, Schrum (2004) notes that U.S. teenage girls as early as the 1920s (when some of our informants were just infants) ‘‘integrated commercial music into their lives’’ (p. 98) and that even before the 1920s, their ‘‘letters, diaries, and yearbooks recorded the popularity of dancing among teenage girls’’ (p. 113). While girls in previous generations may have participated in similar forms of cultural engagement, what is unique about the women in our study is the role of the mass medium of radio (and recorded music) in providing a shared cultural, coming of age experience regardless of the decade in which they were born, the region in which they were raised, or their family’s social class. Our informants represent the first generation of U.S. girls to grow up in age when electronic media played a role in sustaining a youth culture that transcended geography and demographics. Our informants also represent a transitional generation—a generation both connected to the non-mediated leisure activities of earlier generations as well as to the promise of what new technologies could offer. As we discussed, these women rarely if ever began their childhood reminiscences by talking specifically about media and popular culture. Instead, they told us of a range of non-mediated childhood play activities that dominated their leisure time. But other than the outdoor childhood play of which almost all spoke so fondly, it was in the discussion of music and dance that many of them became truly animated and excited. The latest dance crazes and music trends may have afforded them the opportunity to attend dances away from the watchful eyes of their parents and to interact with the opposite sex in a way, adventurous to these girls in an era where they could be shamed for public demonstration of sexual agency. For example, Schrum’s (2004) research of girls diaries, yearbooks and other writings led her to conclude that ‘‘many teenage girls loved 130 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 dancing—an individual activity and a highly social one. It represented freedom, energy, shared activity with friends, and physical contact with boys’’ (p. 119). We found it interesting that these women were often likely to recall the ‘‘experience’’ of radio listening (e.g., ‘‘squeaky’’ sounds, gathered families, unheated living rooms, and so on) more vividly than they recalled the content. Older generations often refer to place-specific memories (Slade, 2008), and researchers using oral history must be careful to note that it is often impossible to remember mediated events and popular culture artifacts outside of collective frames of reference. Slade reports they also treat some media technologies—radio and early television, for example—as ‘‘sacred relics’’ within the household, granting the media itself more importance than it would have been given in future generations by attaching a different meaning to these objects than members of younger generations would (p. 197). For example, a family’s ownership of an early media technology bestowed social capital on family members, such as when all the children in a neighborhood would come over to the house of a classmate whose family was the first on the block to get a television (Slade, 2008) or the only sibling in a family to be taken to the movies by a beloved uncle, as one or our informants recalled (see Thiel-Stern et al., 2011). As media became more common and accessible, people increasingly began to understand media through encounters with its content. As a transitional generation, it makes sense that our informants would recall their experiences with what were to them new technologies. Although the research in this paper is framed through the lens or memory study, we must acknowledge the limitation of reliance upon memory. Other authors who have examined this time period studied cultural artifacts (e.g., diaries, yearbooks, films, novels, magazines, and so on), which serve as relatively stable historical documents. We instead interviewed women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, asking them to reflect back on their childhood and teen years. This request posed a challenge to our interviewees, but it’s not a challenge limited to older respondents. As Hains (2011) found in a recent follow-up study with teenagers, they could remember few details of the television programs they had discussed with her in detail during their pre-adolescent years only five years earlier. In the case of our informants, then, it is quite likely that their recollections have not only been filtered through the lens of history, but have also been dulled by time. Memories of specific episodes of radio programs, issues of magazines read, non-classic movies seen, television programs viewed, as well as celebrity icons and crushes may have faded. But these are still their memories, and those memories are worth studying for what they can tell us about how adult women make sense of their girlhoods. Appendix A: Descriptions of Research Participants (All names are pseudonyms) Alice: Born in 1926. Grew up in Mayfield, UT; Poor; Caucasian. Amanda: Born 1943. Born and raised in a small city in upstate New York; parents owned a business; Caucasian (Polish descent). Mazzarella et al./GIRLHOODS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO 131 Ann: Born in 1928. Grew up in rural Pennsylvania; middle class; Caucasian. Cecilia: Born in 1928. Grew up in Worcester, MA, but moved around Eastern part of United States through childhood and teen years; ‘‘Very poor;’’ Caucasian. Clara: Born in 1934. Grew up in Mobile, AL; Poor; Caucasian. Edwina: Born in 1935. Grew up in a small town in Utah; describes family as having been relatively well-to-do. Caucasian (of Danish and British descent). Elizabeth: Born in 1944. Born in Flushing, NY, and grew up in a college town in upstate New York; middle-class; Caucasian (of English, Dutch, and French descent). Ella: Born in 1927. Grew up in rural Iowa. Poor. Caucasian. Evelyn: Born in 1918. Grew up in Lawrence, MA. Poor. Caucasian. (Sister of Tillie.) Harriet: Born in 1939. Born and raised in Southern Kentucky (Appalachia); describes family as having been poor; Caucasian (of English, Dutch, and ‘‘possibly Irish’’ descent). Honey: Born in 1942. Born in rural Utah; describes family as having been uppermiddle-class and very fortunate; Caucasian (of Scandinavian descent). (Sister of Lacey.) Joy: Born in 1922. Grew up in Milwaukee, WI. Middle class. Caucasian (Jewish). Kathleen: Born in 1946. Grew up in Minneapolis, MN; Middle Class, Caucasian (of Norwegian descent) Lacey: Born in 1938. Born in rural Utah; describes family as having been uppermiddle-class and very fortunate; Caucasian (of Scandinavian descent). (Sister of Honey.) Leslie: Born in 1941. Born in rural Iowa and grew up on a farm in rural Illinois; Caucasian (self-described WASP). Maggie: Born in 1940. Grew up in urban North Carolina; responded to childhood SES question by saying ‘‘we didn’t have a lot’’; Caucasian (of German and Dutch descent—‘‘more German than Dutch’’). Martha: Born in 1929. Grew up in San Francisco, CA. Middle class to upper middle class. Caucasian. Mary: Born in 1948. Grew up on farms in Iowa; middle/low to middle class; Caucasian (of Irish and German descent). Melissa: Born in 1935. Grew up in rural upstate New York; poor; Caucasian (of English, Scottish, and German descent). Phyllis: Born in 1929. Grew up in small town in Indiana, outside of Indianapolis. Income level not discussed. Caucasian. 132 Journal of Radio & Audio Media/May 2013 Ramona: Born in 1944. Born in Ann Arbor, MI but spent early childhood in Pennsylvania, then grew up in Memphis, TN; middle-class; Caucasian (of Pennsylvania Dutch or German descent). Robin: Born in 1944. Born in Cleveland, Oh and raised in rural Ohio on a farm; working-class; Caucasian (of Hungarian/German descent). Rose: Born 1936. Born and raised in urban Massachusetts (in a mill city); describes family as having been particularly poor during her junior high and high school years; Caucasian (of French-Canadian descent). Rosemary: Born in 1927. Grew up in New Orleans, LA. Poor or lower middle class. Caucasian. Ruth: Born in 1931. Grew up in Richfield, UT. Poor, but said her family were ‘‘fine’’ because they supported themselves through their own farm. Caucasian. Sophie: Born in 1932. Grew up in Brookline, MA; Poor. Caucasian. Stella: Born in the 1940s (declined to be specific). Grew up in Spokane, WA, and St. Paul, MN; middle- to upper-middle-class; African American. Tillie: Born in 1922. Grew up in Lawrence, MA; Poor. Caucasian. (Sister of Evelyn.) Tori: Born in 1935. Born in Boston, MA, but spent teen years in suburban Boston; working class; Caucasian (of Italian descent). Winifred: Born in 1936. Born in small Illinois town; SES not discussed; Caucasian (of Scandinavian descent). *Note: Informants described their own socio-economic statuses, and we elected to use their own words in these summaries. Each SES listed indicates the participant’s family income levels in childhood, rather than in the present day. Notes 1 One of the women in this category was actually born in 1918. recognize that our use of snowball sampling may have contributed to our study’s lack of racial diversity, as we are all ourselves Caucasian. While we hoped the council on aging would help us locate women of color, the respondents from that source were all Caucasian, as well. 2 We References Aries, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New York, NY: Knopff. Behar, R. 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