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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
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.
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