Arnold, Sarah (2022) Experiments in early US television: windows of opportunities for female technical workers in the 1940s. Women's History Review, 31 (4). pp. 561-579. ISSN 0961-2025

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Abstract

This article examines the case of the Women’s Auxiliary Television Technical Staff (WATTS) of the Chicago television station WBKB: an all-female technical and production crew that operated from 1942 to 1947. In tracing the employment and work of the WATTS, this article examines, firstly, the conditions that enabled women to engage in television technical and production work. Secondly, this article considers the conditions that resulted in decline in the numbers of women working at the station in the post-war period, which were related to men’s return to work after the war, the shift in television’s evolution from experimental to professional and commercial, and, finally, to the gendered culture of work that emerged when men engaged in production work with women. Through an analysis of the trade and popular press discourses that first celebrated women’s television work and later dismissed it, women’s place in the earliest years of television is foregrounded.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Experimental television; WBKB; women; production; WATTS;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > Media Studies
Item ID:	17838
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.1944346
Depositing User:	Sarah Arnold
Date Deposited:	14 Nov 2023 16:11
Journal or Publication Title:	Women's History Review
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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