For any of you that are familiar with the Broadcasting Yearbook (and I know many of you are), I enjoy looking through the various years, searching for radio stations and obtaining information about them (their formats, their ownership, management, signal power, etc.). One peculiar job title that I am finding in many station listings during the 1950's (and some years before that) is women's director. I have never heard of this title before. I understand the duties and responsibilities of a news director, music director, sports, program director, chief engineer, sales manager, general manager.....you get it. But does a women's director do? (Or I guess I should say, what DID they do, since that job title doesn't appear in any listings from the mid 1960's onward?) Also, does anyone know if the Broadcasting Yearbook is still being published? The last edition I am able to find is on www.americanradiohistory.com and it's from 2010.
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Women's Director
- Thread starter js6592
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Back then, they were the ones who got everybody caught up with the current local social gossip (nothing scandalous) And gave out the home ec tips, recipes to the housewives in the audience. I know most of the big networked AM stations back then had that position since the '20s. Sometimes the position was reserved for the station owner's/manager's wife or daughter on some stations. But more often, a local socialite or female newspaper columnist took the role.
By the '60s, such a position was seen as patronizing archaic nod to aging cultural traditions for women instead of relevant of how women of that time actually saw themselves. They didn't want to grow up like their mothers. That and consolidation into investment wings of non-radio businesses and the usual rounds of fat trimming at these stations shortly after acquisition also took their toll. But the position remained at some stations into the '70s, if not mentioned or under a less gender specific title and not added to the listings. Others moved to TV.
I don't know if we ever used this title for her, but the late great Janie Henderson at WCSM AM/FM, Celina, Ohio, who hosted Janie's Corner for years. It was the housewife time type show with just a bit of an edge. She and her husband Carl owned an antique store, and Carl was Janie's "Fang", the butt of gentle jokes. Off-air, Janie could take and tell an off-color joke. Love and miss her.
K
kf4rca
Guest
What really happened to women's directors...
is probably what happened in Canada.
When the Canadian Radio TV Commission was doling out frequencies, a women's group applied for some.
They were denied the applications. The CRTC said, in their denial, "are women any different than the rest of us."
is probably what happened in Canada.
When the Canadian Radio TV Commission was doling out frequencies, a women's group applied for some.
They were denied the applications. The CRTC said, in their denial, "are women any different than the rest of us."
Two newspapers I worked for had such columns. "Mary's Musings" and "Jottings," they were called, and they were interchangeable. Both written by elderly women, the silent partners of the Greatest Generation. The columns were written for their contemporaries, full of sad notes on passings and rapturous praise for the delightful travelogues the ladies had enjoyed at the Senior Center or the Library last Wednesday, or reminders to crochet cute items for the grandkids because Christmas is coming. As they and their contemporaries died, so did the columns, although enough of the 20-somethings and 30-somethings of the '60s and '70s are still doing the sort of things their moms and grandmothers did to put people in the seats for those Wednesday morning slide shows of that trip to Italy at the library.
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