How forty-one women--including Dorothy Parker, Gypsy Rose Lee, and
Lena Horne--were forced out of American television and radio in the
1950s "Red Scare."
At the dawn of the Cold War era, forty-one women working in American
radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from
their industry. The ostensible reason: so-called Communist influence.
But in truth these women--among them Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, and
Gypsy Rose Lee--were, by nature of their diversity and ambition, a
threat to the traditional portrayal of the American family on the
airwaves. This book from Goldsmiths Press describes what American radio
and television lost when these women were blacklisted, documenting their
aspirations and achievements.
Through original archival research and access to FBI blacklist
documents, The Broadcast 41 details the blacklisted women's attempts
in the 1930s and 1940s to depict America as diverse, complicated, and
inclusive. The book tells a story about what happens when non-male,
non-white perspectives are excluded from media industries, and it
imagines what the new medium of television might have looked like had
dissenting viewpoints not been eliminated at such a formative moment.
The all-white, male-dominated Leave it to Beaver America about which
conservative politicians wax nostalgic existed largely because of the
forcible silencing of these forty-one women and others like them. For
anyone concerned with the ways in which our cultural narrative is
constructed, this book offers an urgent reminder of the myths we
perpetuate when a select few dominate the airwaves.
