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Visiting on the Air: Radio Homemakers and the Professionalization of Domesticity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2016
Abstract
An unusual kind of community existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters in the American Mid-west – known as radio homemakers – and their listeners, one that depended on mutual trust. Radio homemakers established this trust via the concept of “visiting,” where the broadcasters used the familiar notion of informal social interaction to establish an ostensibly intimate relationship with their audience. Through playing with their listeners' understanding of visiting, radio homemakers made public the professionalization of domestic work that emerged from the Progressive Era's home economics movement. Because their shows primarily addressed domesticity, radio homemakers linked the conventions of domestic work to modernity through the technology of radio, drawing attention to women's frequently invisible household work.
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References
1 Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
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17 Smethers and Jolliffe, “Homemaking Programs,” 2. As an indication of listeners' isolation, one subscriber to Kitchen Klatter magazine, an offshoot of a radio show of the same name, had a mailing address of Route 1, Carroll, Iowa.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Indeed, the shows were so successful that they generated thousands of letters from listeners and resulted in a number of spin-off products such as newsletters and kitchen accessories.
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25 Smethers and Jolliffe, 5.
26 “Visit,” Oxford English Dictionary.
27 See discussions on the following websites: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1500551 and www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=6649. In particular, participants in the latter discussion recognize the regional nature of the use of “to visit with.”
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35 The technology to record radio shows did not exist until after World War II. Consequently there are no recordings of early radio homemaker shows. Even after 1945, few recordings of shows were made as the technology was in its infancy and expensive. Birkby's 1950 show is one of the few for which a complete recording exists.
36 Up a Country Lane, KMA Radio, Shenandoah, IA, 15 May 1950.
37 Ibid.
38 Marilyn Maxwell, “After 25 Years, Folksy Broadcaster Remembered,” Fort Collins Triangle Review, 14 Dec. 1983.
39 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 42.
40 Kitchen Klatter, KMA Radio, Shenandoah, IA, 1946.
41 Leanna Driftmier, “Letter from Leanna,” Kitchen Klatter, Oct. 1950, 2.
42 Ibid., Nov. 1950, 2.
43 The tone of Young's introductory letters resembles that of Leanna Driftmier's letters in Kitchen Klatter as if letters of this kind fit some kind of genre convention.
44 Jessie Young, Jessie's Homemaker Radio … Visits, March 1951, 2.
45 Oakley interview with Birkby.
46 Ibid.
47 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 97.
48 Oakley interview with Birkby.
49 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 91.
50 Lucile Driftmier Verness, The Story of an American Family (Shenandoah, IA: Driftmier Publishing Co., 1950).
51 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 97.
52 Ibid. To resolve the problem presented by such a volume of correspondence, Driftmier began publishing Kitchen Klatter Magazine, which “at its peak had a subscription list of nearly ninety thousand.” Ibid., 97.
53 Ibid., 119.
54 Ibid., 118.
55 Smethers and Jolliffe, “Homemaking Programs,” 2.
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57 Ibid.
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59 Janet Floyd, “Coming Out of the Kitchen: Texts, Contexts and Debates,” Cultural Geographies, 11 (Jan. 2004), 61–73, 62.
60 Ibid.
61 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 66.
62 Ibid., 71.
63 Ibid., 85.
64 Ibid. 85.
65 Ibid., 133, 235.
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69 Smulyan, 5.
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71 Ibid.
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75 Verness, The Story of an American Family, 44.
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77 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 216.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 217.
80 Casey, “Agrarian Landscapes,” 96.
81 Ibid., 99.
82 Ibid., 97.
83 This emphasis on work contrasts with conventional advertising of radios that depicts families gathered around the radio doing nothing but listening.
84 Sarah Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” in Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 17–33, 19. For further discussion of the home economics movement see Megan J. Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
85 Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” 22.
86 Ibid., 28.
87 Ibid., 29.
88 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 59.
89 Stage, “Home Economics: What's in a Name?”, 9.
90 Casey, “Agrarian Landscapes,” 98.
91 Ibid.
92 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 92.
93 Ibid., 107.
94 Catherine Beecher quoted in Allen, “Clockwork Nation,” 76.
95 Allen, 77.
96 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 256.