Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women's Liberation

Clark, Jennifer S. Book Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women's Liberation Feminist Media Histories, No. 6 Provided in Cooperation with: University of California Press Suggested Citation: Clark, Jennifer S. (2024) : Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women's Liberation, Feminist Media Histories, No. 6, ISBN 978-0-520-39930-3, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.180 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/302599 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ PRODUCING FEMINISM PRODUCING FEMINISM Jennifer S. Clark TELEVISION WORK IN THE AGE OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION PRODUCING FEMINISM TELEVISION WORK IN THE AGE OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION CLARK ISBN: 9780520399297 9 780520 399297 In this archivally informed work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which the feminist priorities of the 1 97 0 s were strengthened by women who labored in the American television industry. Carefully synthesizing an array of interviews and primary sources—from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas—Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform‑oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynam‑ ics of media workplaces and the cultural products created therein. “A terrific model of feminist media historiography. Jennifer Clark expands our under‑ standing of 1 97 0 s American television, the women’s liberation movement, and the deep connections among gender, labor, and activism while innovating new strategies to examine the media industries.”—Elana Levine, author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History “A massively important and enlightening contribution to the field, offer‑ ing a nuanced treatment of industry cooperation and compromise. Clark uses rare archival findings and a wide range of cultural objects and case studies to generate fresh, bold conclusions around second‑ wave feminism and American television.”—Annie Berke, author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television Jennifer S. Clark is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. _______________________________________ FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES, 6 University of California Press www.ucpress.edu A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane Cover illustration: Adobe Stock 6 × 9 SPINE: 0.511 FLAPS: 0 Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Eric Papenfuse and Catherine Lawrence Endowment Fund in Film and Media Studies. Producing Feminism FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES Shelley Stamp, Series Editor 1. Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television, by Annie Berke 2. Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits, by Victoria Ruetalo 3. Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive, by Naomi DeCelles 4. A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives in Early Hollywood, by Diana W. Anselmo 5. Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon 6. Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation, by Jennifer S. Clark UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Producing Feminism Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation Jennifer S. Clark University of California Press Oakland, California © 2024 by Jennifer S. Clark This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Clark, J. S. Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.180 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clark, Jennifer Susanne, author. Title: Producing feminism : television work in the age of women’s liberation / Jennifer S. Clark. Other titles: Feminist media histories (Series) ; 6. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2024] | Series: Feminist media histories ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023040997 (print) | LCCN 2023040998 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520399297 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520399303 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women in television broadcasting—United States— History—20th century. | Feminism and mass media—United States— History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1992.8.W65 C54 2024 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.W65 (ebook) | DDC 791.45082/0973—dc23/eng/20230919 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040997 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040998 Manufactured in the United States of America 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 v Contents Introduction 1 1. Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform at Network Television’s Corporate Headquarters 18 2. From “Jockocratic Endeavors” to Feminist Expression: Billie Jean King, Eleanor Sanger Riger, and Women’s Sports on Television 49 3. Working in the Lear Factory: Ann Marcus, Virginia Carter, and the Women of Tandem Productions 79 4. Television’s “Serious Sisters”: Experiments in Public and Regional Television for Women 120 Epilogue: What the 1970s Can Teach Us about Feminist Media Reform 153 Acknowledgements 163 Notes 167 Bibliography 195 Index 203 6 Introduction as this approach considers processes enacted by agentive women who actively challenged and reformed television workplaces and production protocols. Assessing women’s gains in media industries requires multiple evaluative means, as scholarship by Natalie Wreyford and Shelley Cobb, Miranda Banks, and Vicky Ball and Melanie Bell demonstrates.19 By the early 1970s, with changing employment laws and regulatory pressure to hire more women, television stations across the country were compelled to hire women in greater numbers, and network television promoted women to executive positions. Program content also changed and included an archetype for a “new implicitly feminist woman coping with her everyday world.”20 While the industry used these actions to announce a newfound awareness of feminism through quantitative (statistics on employment) and qualitative (program content) means, neither dataset on its own provides compelling evidence of feminist influence over television. Rising employment numbers for women at stations were manipulated by recategorization of jobs; promotions at networks involved newly created job titles without corresponding increases in prestige, power, or compensation; and progressive on-screen content was not necessarily tied to women working on its production.21 Therefore, an uptick in screentime for women characters, “improved” representation for women, and increased employment and promotions for women do not necessarily evince achievements of feminist goals. A production studies approach to the advancements of women in television tells us what employment statistics or image analysis alone cannot. Workers’ perspectives and documents internal to the television workplace reveal how women actually experienced supposed or real opportunities. This evidence augments and complicates the “objective” information conveyed in industry press releases, formalized policies, and statistical reports. It also showcases how workers themselves enacted important political changes in television through logistical decisions, interpersonal dynamics, and the everyday operations of making television, as formative production studies scholarship demonstrates. People who worked on innovative programs of the late 1960s through the 1980s offer particularly rich insights into how transformative moments in television happen. In her analysis of Soul!, a public television show of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced by and for Black Americans, Gayle Wald recognizes the plans made about set design, interviewing techniques, camera angles, and editing as vital contributions to the program’s “intimacy and connection with viewers.”22 In his carefully considered ideas about running the show, producer Ellis Haizlip cultivated “black cultural self-definition that refused to accept white aesthetic standards and, in so doing, contributed to the emotion and spiritual well-being of the collective.”23 Despite proclamations by the show’s producer that 1980s female-cop drama Cagney & Lacey was not a vehicle for feminism, Julie D’Acci charts how the production team crafted “explicit general feminism” for the show.24 D’Acci’s research of communications and planning internal to the production reveals that “commentaries and memos on various drafts of the scripts actually bespeak efforts Introduction 7 to be blatantly and ‘correctly’ feminist” and counter public statements to the contrary.25 Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s production history of 1970s single-girl workplace sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show locates the opportunities presented to women on the production team in small, interpersonal moments. Show cocreator Allan Burns promoted Pat Nando from secretary to writer when he walked her to her car and encouraged her to write for the show, saying, “I think you can do it.”26 These accounts make it clear that progressive changes in the television industry take place not just through regulatory measures, industry-wide reform economic incentives, or other large-scale, systemwide factors. These changes also, and perhaps more often, transpire in the granular details of planning and logistics, conversations both personal and professional, and minutiae of behind-the-scenes relationships. In corresponding fashion, Producing Feminism calls upon interviews, memoirs, and primary documents generated in the workplace, just as it cites statistical data about employment numbers, ratings, salaries, and profits. Throughout the book, I turn to multiple narratives generated by women workers, as well as qualitative evidence from sources that were not public-facing and that counterbalance data used for industry self-promotion. Using interview transcripts, journalistic interviews conducted by others, and my own interviews with workers, I relate firsthand accounts of the changing nature of television labor across a wide array of occupations, including producers, hosts, actors, reporters, writers, researchers, consultants, creative directors, and executives. I call upon materials housed in archives— including memos, workplace communications, meeting schedules and minutes, production plans, workplace memos, floor plans, diagrams of sets, and employee newsletters—to further contextualize policies within experiential and informal aspects of their execution. These materials are housed in a range of collections focused on television (Mass Media and Culture Special Collections, University of Maryland; Norman Lear Script Collection, Emerson College; University of Wyoming, Heritage Center; and Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University), women’s political and cultural history (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College), state government (Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Archive), and corporate broadcasting (CBS News Reference Library). Collectively, these resources spotlight women who experienced and intervened in the gendered politics of television and reveal the operations of television workplaces as important sites of feminist reform. TELEVISION RESPONDS TO THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT With the growth of the US women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s, television was compelled to take notice. To capture an emerging demographic of women viewers and to capitalize on popular ideas about liberated women, fictional programs deployed what Bonnie J. Dow and Katherine Lehman identify as “lifestyle feminism.”27 This consumerist-friendly mediation of feminist politics, 8 Introduction according to Patricia Bradley, was inevitable, as “the movement’s goals would be met only in ways that were consistent with the values of commerce.”28 Lauren Rabinovitz’s assessment of feminist-inflected sitcoms leads her to a similar conclusion. “A generic address of ‘feminism’ became an important strategy,” she argues, “because it served the needs of American television executives who could cultivate programming that could be identified with target audiences whom they wanted to measure and deliver to advertising agencies.”29 When feminists, like other activist groups, demanded that television be pressed to uphold its responsibility to the public, television tried to contain the impact of those demands. In 1969, WLBT-TV, a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, had its broadcasting license revoked when it refused to air civil rights perspectives and violated the Fairness Doctrine, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy adopted in 1949 that stipulated equal airtime be given to opposing viewpoints on an issue. The case provided precedent for media reform groups to file similar petition-to-deny cases. Local stations needed to respond to such action, but they “regularized their relationship with activist groups in their communities,” as Kathryn Montgomery explains, and satisfied their demands by providing these groups with low-cost, low-impact programming; such tactics “placated the groups, without cutting into the stations’ profits.”30 Even though television reacted to the women’s movement through containment, co-optation, and superficial appeasement, feminist scholars identify triumphs and gains that were made despite such responses. While Bonnie J. Dow concurs with prevailing narratives about the feminist protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant as the source of “image problems that have plagued feminism ever since,” she also regards the event as a “success in terms of energizing the radical wing of the second wave.”31 Montgomery’s scholarship on advocacy groups notes that reform efforts paid off when the National Organization for Women (NOW) began targeting network-owned stations and prime-time programming and identified them as “vulnerable” to protest.32 Regardless of the efficacy of NOW’s licensing challenges, Allison Perlman recognizes that the organization’s petitions-to-deny demonstrated feminism’s legitimacy as an organized political movement. By engaging in television reform, feminists insisted on their “consumer or economic power as viewers” and defined themselves as “active citizens” who warranted recognition through federal policy.33 Bernadette Barker-Plummer demonstrates how feminist groups were able to exploit a “dialogical” relationship between themselves and commercial news outlets.34 As such nuanced scholarship on the meeting of the television industry and feminism in the 1970s makes plain, any analysis of this relationship must acknowledge the complexity of the dynamics involved. By focusing on women workers and their feminist influences on their respective television workplaces and production cultures, Producing Feminism adds further fissures to accounts of the industry’s co-optation of, or blanket hostility toward, feminism. Introduction 9 To exemplify this point, I turn briefly here to network television’s engagement with the Women’s Strike for Equality, a momentous public action of the women’s movement. NOW organized the strike, which took place on August 26, 1970, and involved a number of events across the country, including church sermons conducted by women, boycotts of products deemed demeaning to women, women refusing to provide unpaid domestic labor in their own homes, mothers bringing children to fathers’ workplaces to demonstrate the need for childcare, and radio stations giving over broadcasting to women staff and listeners for the day’s programming. A broadside published by Women’s Coalition Strike Headquarters encouraged women, “CONFRONT your own unfinished business of equality at your office, on your job, or at home,” and exhorted them to join the march on Fifth Avenue.35 Anne Ladky, women’s workplace activist and president of the Chicago chapter of NOW (1973–75), describes the strike as “a big, big, big deal” that “launched Chicago NOW,” “brought all sorts of members in,” and “really did scare the forces of the status quo.”36 When NOW “invited women from across a range of activist organizations to overlook their differences and unite for womankind,” it proved a successful call to action.37 The New York City march included “radical feminists, lesbians, Black Power advocates, pacifists,” women of all ages, and some men, and the “diversity of the crowd astounded even the NOW organizers.”38 Given the scale, coordination, and political significance of the strike, television’s response to the event was both surprising and disappointing. Barbara Walters, who was working at Today (NBC 1952–) at the time, recognized that the collective action of the over fifty thousand women who marched in New York City’s Strike for Equality was a newsworthy event. But when she urged NBC president Reuven Frank to increase special coverage of the protest and to air informational reports on the women’s movement, the network did not respond favorably. Frank rejected Walter’s pitch for a one-hour special, telling her, “Not enough interest.”39 Ultimately all three networks ended up covering the strike, but when they did, their treatment of the event, according to Patricia Bradley, “had not been sympathetic.”40 Coverage of the event reified the sexist representational practices of commercial television. In Bonnie J. Dow's assessment, all three networks framed the strike for the “visual pleasure” of an imagined male spectator and deployed “sheer spectacle,” “absurdist entertainment rather than reasoned protest,” and anxiety-fueled concerns about “femininity under attack” in their reportage.41 The investments of television and feminists in depictions of the strike were, according to Dow, fundamentally antithetical: “Although the feminists who created the strike were attempting to exert control over the image of the movement—by making it visible, by demonstrating widespread support for it, and by dramatizing its demands—television’s framing of the action within dominant cultural representational norms undermined those purposes.”42 Feminist reaction to television reports on the strike was not favorable, and their “anger at network coverage was profound.”43 10 Introduction Television coverage of the Strike for Equality marked an inauspicious start to the relationship of the women’s movement and television and seemed to forestall hope that feminism could make meaningful inroads into television. Yet responses to worker involvement in the strike suggest another way in which television could, and did, respond to feminist activism at this stage of its development. If on-screen images repurposed, diluted, and trivialized something as formative in the women’s movement as the strike, women workers at the networks experienced a different response to the very same event. This difference suggests the more successful impact of feminist activism from within, rather than from without, the television industry. In anticipation of the event, CBS acknowledged that its employees might participate in the day’s activities and offered them the option of taking either unpaid time off or a paid vacation day. NBC and ABC had “no enunciated policy” but instead “left it up to department heads” to determine how to deal with absent workers on the day of the strike.44 In contrast to on-air treatment of the Strike for Equality, network management’s policies about worker participation—even if only a nonpunitive response—marked acknowledgment of, and a degree of respect for, the event. The single example of the Strike for Equality (something I discuss further in chapter 1), suggests a broader pattern of television’s responsiveness to feminism in workplace matters, which often operated independently from the industry’s decisions about on-screen depictions of the women’s movement. By uncoupling television’s decisions about how to depict feminism from its internal responses to workers’ feminist politics, we can consider the impact of the women’s movement on television’s practices beyond representation. This perspective allows us to see, regardless of the messages about feminism that ultimately made their way to viewing audiences, the presence and efficacy of feminist influence within the television industry. To extend considerations of feminism’s impact on television beyond the screen, I call upon more-than-representational and material feminist frameworks. This approach helps locate feminist political activity inside the industry and through experiential aspects of the workplace. “More-than-representational” theorization reorients analysis from assumptions about the fixity and finality of images to considerations of “how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions.”45 In critical geography studies, this approach fosters scholarly emphasis not on landscapes that are texts to be read but rather on sites that are experiential, embodied, and affective. In its concerns with “actions and processes” and with the fluidity and mobility of prerepresentational moments, a “more-than-representational” framework translates well to studies of workers, labor, and experiences in image-producing realms.46 Although my project investigates feminist activism within the labor and spaces of production, it is not a refutation or rejection of the immense value of represen- Introduction 11 tational analysis. With an emphasis on the “more than” rather than the “anti-” or “notrepresentational, Producing Feminism does not entirely disregard the correlation between production cultures and their output. In instances when workers’ feminist practices resulted in meaningful changes in television content, I tend to the planning involved in creating images and the hoped-for impact on audiences. Creating images, however, is but one of many in the labors of television production, and I consider representations not as primary indicators of feminist influence in television but as a correspondence with numerous other feminist efforts in production. Indeed, representations matter to this project because they reveal something to us about the nature of production. This perspective reverses traditions of television histories, in which industry issues offer a means by which to understand what happens on screen. Maya Montañez Smukler’s work on women film directors of the 1970s offers a helpful model for this approach. While film content and biographies are part of her examination of women directors, “textual analysis is not the framework for the project as a whole.” Instead, Smukler utilizes these texts to consider “a crucial historical juncture during the 1970s” that afforded women greater inroads into the film industries.”47 By regarding labor practices and the places in which they occurred, I am able not just to look at the product of women’s work in the television industry but to see the processes by which they created that product and the conditions that afforded that creation. This perspective gets at critical engagements and experiential qualities of television that exist alongside—and sometimes apart from—on-screen representations. This perspective also situates feminists as active and strategic agents in the production of television rather than only reactive critics or passive fodder for sensationalized media coverage. SCOPE AND ARRANGEMENT OF PRODUCING FEMINISM Producing Feminism focuses on the 1970s, with a start at the beginning of the decade. While the existence of the women’s movement preceded this time period, its popularization and everyday presence in American life reached critical mass in 1970. Feminist historian Sara Evans describes that year as one during which “ ‘women’s lib’ was on everyone’s lips.”48 In its assessment of feminism’s growth, Newsweek identified 1970 as a watershed moment, “the year in which American women became intellectually aware of the modern feminist movement,” and predicted that, in the years to come, women’s liberation would “become part of [wom- en’s] everyday lives.”49 This was the point at which feminism achieved visibility in legal and political realms and made significant inroads into popular culture. New York State liberalized abortion laws; the House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); and the aforementioned Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City became the “largest demonstration for female equality in American histor y.”50 Sexual Politics, The Dialectic of Sex, and Sisterhood Is Powerful all became 12 Introduction bestsellers, and activist interventions in popular culture, such as the occupation of Ladies Home Journal’s corporate office with demands for a “liberated issue of the magazine to be done by women,” were highly publicized events.51 The year 1970 also marked television’s engagement with the women’s movement and feminist interventions in the industry. NOW established its Media Task Force and successfully lobbied the FCC to include “sex” as part of Equal Employment Opportunity rules. Bonnie J. Dow maintains that this was the time when network news “gave their most sustained attention to the second wave as a movement.”52 On May 25, 1970, ABC aired “Women’s Liberation,” a news report aimed to inform viewers about the “unfinished revolution of American women.”53 Marlene Sanders, writer, producer, and on-air reporter for the program, served as a “feminist sympathizer” who was “self-conscious” in her attempts to “represent the movement fairly.”54 Sanders’s involvement marked a significant opportunity for a woman to helm coverage of the movement and influence how television news would pay attention to it. While the relationship between television and women’s liberation has a clear origin point in 1970, the end point of the relationship is less certain. By and large, commercial television found feminism attractive when it provided compelling stories and easily digestible images and conveyed relatively conservative liberal feminist ideas. This limited perspective not only overlooked the complexity of the movement but also hastened a premature end to its media coverage. According to Patricia Bradley, workplace equality overshadowed concerns of the movement articulated early in its existence that “sought to put on the public agenda issues of how women’s secondary nature in U.S. society adversely reflected attention to women’s health, child support concerns, rape and legal protections, and domestic abuse—issues that were discrete problems to be corrected well as related to the overall pattern of culture.”55 Events like the high-profile televised tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 helped confirm the narrative that women’s equality had been achieved. By 1975, this perception had solidified, and full-scale media interest in the movement had effectively come to an end. By comparison, production cultures reveal more sustained investments between feminism and television. The investments and endeavors of women television workers extended the impact of the women’s movement on television beyond the 1975 expiration date that Bradley establishes. Women’s careers exceeded shortlived media interest in the movement, and their understanding of feminist issues surpassed the single issue of workplace equality with which television coverage was preoccupied. In tending to women whose career arcs continued throughout the 1970s and beyond, Producing Feminism acknowledges their continued energies and identifies the ways that feminist investments operated in television years after the industry’s initial interest had waned. The first chapter of Producing Feminism, “Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform at Network Television’s Corporate Headquarters,” explores women’s Introduction 13 groups that formed at the headquarters of all three networks in the early 1970s, with a focus on the Women’s Advisory Council (WAC) at CBS.56 This chapter considers the impact of women’s workplace groups on corporate media culture. These groups gave voice to feminist concerns at network television’s corporate headquarters, a sector of the industry that was notoriously inhospitable to activist reform efforts. As a workplace collective, the women’s groups organized across occupational divisions and focused on employment concerns for all women workers employed at the corporation. WAC, in particular, harnessed the will of the collective to successfully modify policies and practices at CBS that ranged from reproductive health care, the sexism of the network’s office culture, and consciousraising measures in the workplace to more expected issues of equitable promotion and job training.57 By starting Producing Feminism with workers often employed at a remove from television production, conventionally defined, I signal the project’s investment in the breadth of labors women undertook and reformed in television throughout the course of the 1970s. Secretaries and support staff, researchers, and accountants, as well as “creatives,” participated in the network women’s groups and collectively agitated for improved workplace conditions. This community of media workers bridged hierarchical divisions of the corporation and recognized unpaid and undervalued labor as central to the operations of the network. In doing so, WAC provides an instructive model of successful, if atypical, feminist television reform. By focusing on the workplace and operating from within the industry, WAC was able to introduce eclectic feminist principles into network television at the very heart of its operations. Producing Feminism’s second chapter, “From ‘Jockocratic Endeavors’ to Feminist Expression,” explores television’s role in expressing the feminist potential of women’s sports. In a context where feminist leadership and female athletes were ambivalent, at best, about the need to join forces, commercial television provided an environment in which women could demonstrate the productive correspondence of feminism and athleticism. This chapter focuses on two figures who helped actualize this dynamic: tennis pro, television celebrity, and sports commentator Billie Jean King and Eleanor Sanger Riger, the first woman producer at ABC Sports. King’s famed Battle of the Sexes match with Bobby Riggs in 1973, her advocacy for legalized abortion and equal pay for women, and her sports celebrity made her one of the most visible and effective ambassadors for women athletes in the 1970s. Her celebrity translated to a television career as a commentator for ABC Sports, a position that Riger helped broker. Riger was hired as a direct result of feminist protests against ABC’s sexist employment practices and spent her career at the network championing female athletes as viable on-air talent, mentoring and training women to take on the role of on-air announcers, and creating new types of programming for women’s sports. She challenged assumptions about voices, 14 Introduction announcing styles, and color commentary that were implicitly and powerfully gendered and biased against women. Riger also created a cooperative and collegial workplace in sports television, which welcomed more women into its production and helped ensure their success there. As a producer in a highly competitive, male-dominated preserve, Riger faced considerable challenges to her career advancement and to the changes she wished to bring to television. Despite these obstacles, Riger helped usher in a new era of women’s televised sports. When ABC invested in sports in the early 1970s, Riger helped modernize its aesthetics and outreach. She envisioned women’s sports in new ways, particularly through storytelling, training for on-air talents, and techniques of camerawork, which redefined women’s sports as a viable part of television programming and helped establish ABC as a leader in the genre. This chapter considers how Riger’s efforts to showcase women in sports television—evinced in her detailed scripts, shot setups, and correspondence to executives and colleagues—successfully leveraged the industry’s economic self-interest to improve its treatment of women in sports, both in coverage and in the hiring and treatment of production staff. Chapter 3, “Working in the Lear Factory,” turns to Tandem Productions, the influential independent production company helmed by producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin. The notion of Tandem as a factory, as alluded to in the chapter’s title, circulated in popular coverage of the company at the height of its success and was deployed to both praise and critique the rapid, seemingly inexhaustible output of the company. A concept that Lear himself roundly rejected, the factory serves as a useful descriptor that decenters Lear as the singular, auteurist producer and makes room for the contributions women made to Tandem’s success. This perspective also acknowledges the workload women shouldered in keeping pace with the company’s output and the feminized skills—such as writing efficiency and high levels of productivity honed in work on soap operas—as central to the creation of Tandem’s renowned “relevant” television. Although Lear is credited with revolutionizing television in the 1970s, this chapter supposes that he was but one element in Tandem’s innovation and centers the multiple feminist forces and players who were also responsible for the groundbreaking nature of the company. To better understand the impact women had on the making and selling of Tandem’s programs, I consider women who played key roles in creative and executive capacities. Their output included the much-beloved cult series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (syndicated, 1976–77), as well as shorter-lived and lesser-known programs, such as All That Glitters (syndicated, 1977). While the feminist sensibilities of these programs reflect the outlook of the women who worked on them, they also influenced Tandem’s production and employment practices that privileged unlikely decision-making by and around women. Whether hiring physicist Virginia Carter as director of creative affairs on the basis of her credentials as a feminist activist or creating a new distribution model necessitated by the networks’ reluctance to pick Introduction 15 up provocative programs, Tandem’s business practices challenged prevailing industry models. To do so, it relied on the presence of women and feminist politics both on- and off-screen. The chapter concludes by tracing how women at Tandem translated their work experience there to other career accomplishments, to heightened creative control, and to increasingly feminist programs. As the women’s movement gained momentum and visibility, the US television industry developed programs that challenged long-standing traditions in women’s television. Chapter 4 looks to television’s “serious sisters,” as a 1972 Broadcasting article called them, programs made for women that were produced for local, syndicated, and public television.58 Unlike commercial, network television, these programs were supported through modest financial backing, employed large numbers of women, and articulated a wide range of feminist politics both on-screen and within the spaces of television production. In this chapter, I focus on Woman Alive! (1974–77) and Yes, We Can (1974), notable examples of television’s “serious sisters.” Coproduced by Ms. magazine and public television stations in Dallas and New York City, Woman Alive! employed a majority-female production team and used decidedly feminist approaches to making television for women. Coordinated with a woman’s fair by the same name, Yes, We Can aired on Boston station WBZ. Jointly produced by area feminists, women employees at WBZ, and members of the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, the program was broadcast for sixteen hours on a single day, interrupted only by the local nightly news. In this fourth chapter, I consider how the “serious sisters” managed educational outreach to their audiences and pragmatic and political issues involved in making their programs. The women on the production teams employed adaptive feminist politics to meet unique production challenges, from negotiating resources and workflow informed by sexist traditions in the industry to balancing highly trained media acumen with antielitism and accessibility for viewers. Their innovative production practices resulted in distinctive aesthetics, storytelling devices, and production spaces that signaled a feminist ethos to those who worked on the program, to public and private funding agencies, and to audiences. Collective cultural memory celebrates the impact of the women’s movement on television through programs and characters from the 1970s but largely overlooks women who worked behind the scenes in the industry to enact feminist change. While this tendency has shaped popular and academic understandings about recent history, it also has serious consequences for contemporary media reform. In a brief epilogue, I explore this concern within the context of the #MeToo movement and its aftermath. As women’s experiences of exploitative and abusive conditions in media industries came to light yet again in the 2010s, little was ultimately done to systematically overhaul the workplaces that fostered such abuse. This is true, in part, because of the paucity of well-funded, high-visibility organizations dedicated to feminist media reform. Those that do exist, such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media and its corporate and academic partners, have 22 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform The alacrity with which both ABC and CBS responded to their respective wom- en’s groups suggests that the networks were increasingly aware of the disruptive potential posed by organized workers and the validity of their complaints. WAC, in particular, benefited from management’s growing awareness of feminist activism that included actions taken by the NBC and ABC women’s groups. News of a lawsuit from ABC women and plans by the National Organization for Women (NOW) to file suits against all three networks prompted CBS to take a proactive stance. As a result, according to NBC’s Equal Opportunities Commission cofounder Katherine Kish, CBS was “the most receptive of the three networks” to input from its women’s group. WAC also benefited from strong in-house support from workers in departments across the company’s holdings. Priscilla Toumey, one of the original members of the CBS women’s group, estimated that—in comparison to the formative meeting for ABC’s Women’s Action Committee, attended by an estimated thirty-five to forty women—“upwards of three, four hundred women” participated in WAC’s election for committee members, and four to five hundred women attended meetings in the early days.8 The formation of women’s groups at the US networks coincided with the rise of women’s workplace groups that expressed feminist-oriented media reform during the 1970s. Research by Jeannine Baker and Jane Connors on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, by Marama Whyte on the New York Times, and by Anne O’Brien on Irish newspapers illuminates a global movement of women worker-activists across a range of media industries, occupations, and national contexts.9 While these groups deployed different strategies and privileged different priorities, to varying degrees of success, they all shared advantages as industry insiders: professional expertise of group members; relationships with workplace leadership; and knowledge of their respective media industry’s culture, protocols, and priorities. Like their contemporaries, the women’s groups at NBC, ABC, and CBS benefited from their status as industry insiders. The nature of their workplace, however, distinguished them from other media worker groups. First, unlike public sector broadcasters in other countries, US networks managed their obligations to the public in ways that protected their commercial interests. This limited the impact of activism from outsiders and in matters of programming. Second, corporate broadcasting headquarters were neither focused on a single media product nor dedicated exclusively to media production. This shaped their workforce, which was both sizable and dispersed. Workers were employed across multiple divisions and, in addition to media production, purchased and managed media content and conducted and supported the business operations of the company. These conditions shaped the composition and actions of the women’s groups at broadcasting headquarters: they needed to represent the interests of women workers who were not unified by occupation and to contend with their employers’ resistance to particular modes of media reform. Figure 3. A transcript of the first meeting between the Women’s Advisory Council and CBS president Arthur Taylor and CBS’s response to the Council’s concerns were published in a multipage report made available to employees. (CBS News Reference Library) 24 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform In recalling the origins of WAC, researcher Judith Hole highlights the abilities of workers to utilize corporate resources and their professional expertise to their advantage. A policy note issued to executives on February 13, 1973, proved to be the catalyst for women organizing at CBS. The document claimed that the company did not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, or national origin. Skeptical of this account, Hole and her colleagues called upon their training and researched CBS’s claims. “We went to the CBS internal phone book, which in the back of it had every department and the director of that department, the manager of that department,” Hole recollected, “and there was not one female any w here.”10 Priscilla Toumey, CBS Radio Network publicist, also remembers that evidence of a male-dominated organization provided WAC with leverage to meet with CBS president Arthur Taylor. In Toumey’s account, a small group of women “disagreed” with some of the points Taylor made in the February 13, 1973, policy note.11 On the basis of discrepancies between Taylor’s statement and findings from their own research, they requested a meeting with Taylor to “discuss the areas of disagreement.”12 The women’s request for a meeting was “granted quickly,” and Taylor issued a formalized response to the concerns presented in that meeting within three weeks’ time.13 At that point, the women suggested that they have an “ongoing method of communicating with top management regularly on a more organized basis,” to which Taylor agreed.14 WAC’s access to Taylor marks its success among the network women’s groups. But although WAC effectively pushed CBS to acknowledge the “flood of problems being identified by the women’s movement,” the corporation was not always amenable to feminist politics and reform pressures, particularly when they originated from women outside the company.15 CBS AND FEMINISM “We do not dislike women.” So said CBS board chair William S. Paley in 1970 at the company’s annual board meeting. The meeting proved unexpectedly eventful when the feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WLF) disrupted the proceedings. In comparison to NOW’s legislative path to righting sexism, WLF’s radical feminist approach involved consciousness-raising for women and activism directed toward “changing societal structure, informational efforts, and shock tactics.”16 The WLF demanded that the company improve employment opportunities for women, allocate half of all jobs and half of the seats on its board for women, provide airtime for feminist ideas, and remove sexist programming and advertising from the air. These actions compelled Paley to weigh in on the network’s attitude, or its lack of “dislike,” toward women. Paley’s ambivalent statement reveals the fundamental gender problems of the television industry. That network leadership would respond to feminist protest in such underwhelming fashion indicates the magnitude of the struggle feminists faced in changing the television industry and the unpreparedness of industry Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 25 leaders to respond thoughtfully to feminist demands, particularly when these came from industry outsiders. CBS was so affronted by the WLF that at its next annual stockholders meeting in 1971, the network took “extra security measures” and hired eight plainclothes L.A. police for the event.17 Industry publications supported the CBS board’s resistance to the activists’ demands, amplified Paley’s tepid response, and were disinclined to treat these women with respect or to take their activism seriously. Lest this seem like a matter of typical journalistic attitudes of the time, the Wall Street Journal’s coverage offers an instructive difference. Overall, the Wall Street Journal struck a more objective, dispassionate tone than the leading media industry publications. The Wall Street Journal’s article title, “Ten Women Disrupt CBS Meeting, Assert Daytime Network Shows Turn Them Off,” draws upon the rhetoric—being “turned off”—that the feminists themselves used to protest CBS’s sexist language in advertising.18 In comparison, Variety’s title, “ ‘Liberation’ Women Explode, Finally Get Bounced,” places scare quotes around “liberation” and characterizes the protesters as out-of- control, emotional women.19 Beyond title choice, the Wall Street Journal’s coverage avoids sexist language and describes WLF’s actions in political terms. The article leads off with WLF’s action. It goes on to relate that once the WLF women left the meeting, they encountered a protest against the Vietnam War, which they greeted with a “clenched fist” and shouts of “Right on!”20 Details of political legitimacy and solidarity do not appear in Variety’s or Broadcasting’s coverage of WLF’s actions. In Broadcasting, the activists were not even mentioned in the article title, “CBS Strides into the 70s,” and their actions constitute relatively little of the article. When industry publications did mention the feminists, they invalidated the political character of their group. Broadcasting described WLF women by their “unwelcomed strident tones” and seemed more concerned with the activists’ violations of Robert’s Rules and gender norms than with the merits of the criticisms they lodged against the network.21 Variety did little better. It described the activists as a “covey of quarrelsome, cursing women” who “broke up” the board meeting with their “complaints.”22 When the “largely male board” yelled at these “loud lasses,” WLF women responded with “certain profanities.” With an incredulous tone, Variety noted that, upon exiting, the protesters “even refused to talk to male reporters—speaking only to newshens [sic].” 23 Both Variety and Broadcasting characterized the protest as an unwelcome disruption to the real business of television. Despite Variety’s teasing news about “explosive” women getting “bounced” from the meeting in its sensationalized headline, WLF’s protest essentially was used to frame the business report of the meeting, which constituted the majority of the article. Variety’s article opened with a two-paragraph description of the activist disruption and then moved to the scheduled business of the meeting. Four out of the article’s twelve paragraphs dealt with the women’s protest; the remainder reported on the network’s concerns about the ban on cigarette advertisements and Federal Communication Commission 26 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform (FCC) restrictions on the network’s station ownership.24 Like Variety, Broadcasting presented CBS business as the centerpiece of its coverage and assured readers that, against the “backdrop” of “the unscheduled cacophony,” “CBS leadership ... managed to get its message across.”25 In both articles, Paley was cast as a sympathetic figure trying to keep order, someone who, in Variety’s report, was “finally forced to stop the session until the women could be bounced from the building.”26 Though feminist activism from outside the industry provoked anxious and defensive reactions from the network and industry publications, feminist activism expressed by CBS workers garnered a markedly different response. Soon after the infamous April 1970 board meeting and Paley’s apathetic statement about not disliking women, CBS formulated a more cogent stance on its relationship with women and with the women’s movement. In August 1970, just four months after the WLF interrupted the CBS board meeting, Variety noted in front-page coverage that “CBS ha[d] come a long way, baby,” when it “extended formal recognition to the Women’s Liberation Movement” on the eve of the Women’s Strike for Equality.27 In anticipation of the strike, CBS executive vice president John Schneider provided employees with a background on the women’s movement and argued both publicly and within the company for the need to take feminism seriously. Schneider warned that “ ‘embattled women’ ” would “ ‘not be prepared to wait’ ” for rights, anticipated a forceful and longlasting feminist movement, and argued that feminist demands “ ‘deserve[d] calm, respectful and understanding consideration.’ ”28 As Schneider’s reaction to the strike indicates, CBS was more inclined to acknowledge the relationship of its own workers to the women’s movement than it was to respond to feminist activism from outsiders. The confirmed and potential involvement of the CBS workforce in feminist actions proved a significant catalyst in changing the corporation’s attitudes. As the discussion of the August 26, 1970, Women’s Strike for Equality in the introductory chapter of this book indicates, the networks recognized that their workers would participate in the action in New York City. Workers at the networks were at worst not punished and at best given leave to participate in the Strike, and CBS led the way in its response to its workers. Unlike NBC and ABC, which came up with an ad hoc policy on employee absences on the day of the strike, CBS formulated a coherent, company-wide policy that offered women the option to take unpaid time away or to use a paid vacation day in order to attend the action. Broadcasting regarded CBS’s policy on the Strike as exemplifying the company’s overall outlook; CBS now understood that the women’s liberation movement was, in Schneider’s words, “ ‘serious business.’ ”29 The dissimilar ways that CBS treated its own workers and outsider activists could easily be attributed to the groups’ distinctive approaches to feminist reform: WLF’s direct action and demands for change as opposed to WAC’s researched responses to policy notes and requests for meetings, for example. Yet the distinction between CBS women and overtly politicized feminist groups appears more complex when one considers the political leanings of CBS women who joined Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 27 feminist protest on the streets or the commonalities between the points of reform WLF demanded and the ones that WAC expressed to CBS. It is productive, then, to see that CBS women were not wholly divorced from feminist organizations and that WAC’s goals were similar to those of feminist groups, even radical ones. How WAC achieved gains for women at CBS was not so much a question of political investments or engagement with media reform. Rather, WAC’s almost exclusive focus on workplace reform, its knowledge of CBS culture and relationships with company executives, and its expertise in engaging company policies account for the group’s successes. OUTSIDER VERSUS INSIDER MEDIA REFORM In the US, media reform has been defined by media advocacy traditions and by campaigns mounted by political activist groups. In the early 1970s, NOW, the “largest organization of feminist grassroots activists,” coordinated challenges to FCC broadcasting license renewals, which was one of the most significant media reform efforts associated with the women’s movement.30 NOW’s petitions-to-deny, as documented by Patricia Bradley, Kathryn Montgomery, Anne W. Branscomb, Maria Savage, and Allison Perlman, positioned women as an underserved public to whom media industries were beholden.31 WAC does not easily align with prevailing traditions of feminist media reform. It was a group neither composed exclusively of like-minded feminists nor engaged with public-oriented impact. Nonetheless, its efforts affected the labor conditions of women media workers and altered a media industry workplace, thereby contributing to the feminist media reform movement of the time. WAC’s purpose at the corporation and their obligations to all women workers meant that WAC was not, strictly speaking, a feminist organization. This was the case with many women’s workplace groups of the time. In her exploration of the Women’s Caucus at the New York Times, Marama Whyte addresses a limitation in prevailing understandings of feminist movements. Rather than looking only to “women who self-identified as feminists or participated in activism coordinated by feminist organizations,” scholars must also consider how to assess and recognize “women who undertook feminist actions while actively not identifying as feminists.”32 There is clear evidence that, while WAC was not a feminist organization, its membership included active feminists and women familiar with the strategies and ethos of the women’s movement. For instance, group members Judith Hole and Ellen Levine took an approved leave from CBS to research and write Rebirth of Feminism (1971), a “comprehensive survey of the modern women’s movement based on extensive interviews and painstaking research into the mound of recent feminist literature.”33 And, while some WAC women clearly identified with the women’s movement, there were others who likely did not. This does not, as Whyte helpfully argues, preclude a group from undertaking actions with feminist consequences. It does, however, require a nuanced sense of how feminism operates in 28 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform nonfeminist groups and/or groups with nonfeminist members. It also complicates how feminism appears and registers in group actions. Perhaps counterintuitively, CBS shaped WAC’s capabilities to take on the work of the women’s movement and provided the group with certain advantages in its relationship to feminist politics. Unlike the univocal reform efforts of NOW to challenge license renewals, WAC was able to—indeed, compelled to—engage in eclectic strategies and forms of feminist thought to meet the needs of a variety of women workers at CBS. It defined its operations and agenda according to multiple practices and values of the women’s movement: consciousness-raising, antiracism and antiageism, recognition of private sphere concerns in employment, and identification of gendered power imbalances in cultural and economic forms. Although WAC was not a feminist group, its ethos and impact underscore Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin’s idea that organizations bear feminist value not just through the orthodoxy of “ideal” political affiliation and identity but also through “the places in which and the means through which the work of the women’s movement is done.”34 Workplace reform, as Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo point out, frequently utilizes liberal feminism, as it “meshes well with the political ideals of free market labour and the meritocratic workplace, and uses those ideals to critique existing gender inequities like those in wages and positions of authority.”35 Given the profit-driven and hierarchically arranged organization of the networks’ corporate operations, WAC called upon tenets of liberal feminism to identify “structural impediments to women’s progress” and ways that women could fairly compete with male coworkers.36 While its use of liberal feminist approaches may seem unsurprising, WAC complicated a univocal approach to improving workplace conditions. It drew upon an assortment of feminist practices and priorities, including consciousness-raising, antiracist measures, recognition of private sphere issues in employment, and exploration of affective and interpersonal aspects of labor and power. The eclectic feminism deployed by WAC demonstrates the adaptability of the women’s movement, the ways that feminist politics influenced the business of television, and the transformative possibilities of feminist activism within the staunch conservatism of corporate culture. Commercial television was disinclined to respond to activist pressures when they threatened what CBS reporter Marlene Sanders called the “sacrosanct” nature of “program content.”37 The inviolable nature of programming meant that, at best, activists who tried to influence on-screen content would be “placated if possible but not at the cost of changing programming.”38 When advocacy groups protested objectionable content, as Kathryn Montgomery demonstrates, the networks developed strategies for “managing” advocacy groups, primarily through its standards and practices department.39 Arthur Taylor made CBS’s position on the matter clear in August 1973 in a special issue of Columbine, the CBS company newsletter, that reported on the corporation’s relationship to a newly formed WAC. “ ‘The question of programming,” he wrote, “is an area in which CBS has historically resisted pres- Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 29 sure from all groups outside its programming organization: government, religious groups and countless other entities that wish to influence programming decisions.’ ”40 Even as Taylor supported women’s advancement in the workplace and proved receptive to the majority of WAC’s demands, his stance on programming portends the ways that the networks would treat calls from their own women’s groups to reform televisual representation. When pressure to reform on-air content came from within the industry, via the network women’s groups, the networks responded even more directly and defensively than they had with outsider activists. While it is clear that the Equal Opportunity Committee at NBC faced resistance from management because it was the first of the women’s groups to form, it also encountered refusals from NBC because of the nature of its complaints against the corporation. Along with improved opportunities for women in the workplace, NBC women also pushed for improved representations of women. This agenda “added to their difficulties” in negotiating with management, so much so that negotiations grew “hostile” and “legal intervention became necessar y.”41 In 1973, after a year of stalled negotiations, twenty-two women at NBC filed a class action suit against the network. Charged with “across-the-board sex discrimination” by the Women’s Committee for Equal Employment, NBC lost the lawsuit. As a result, it was forced to pay out a cash settlement to employees and to institute a series of policies to ensure an equitable workplace for women.42 But, even with this victory for NBC workers, issues of programming remained unaddressed. Although it expressed less hostility than NBC did, CBS took an unapologetically protectionist stance when dealing internally with critiques of programming. CBS women were warned against “seeking a voice in CBS program content,” which was deemed by John Schneider, president of the Broadcast Group, to be a “highly controversial issue, touching as it does on First Amendment (Freedom of the Press) considerations.”43 When WAC members did request that CBS address the issue of representation, which appears only once in transcripts of their presentations to management, they were careful to link the issue to that of workplace investments, an area that proved less controversial to company leadership. In anticipating gains in women’s promotions, WAC argued that a woman in power at CBS would require improved programming for her “self-respect”: “Any executive will be proud to say that her company was in the vanguard, was first to determine that something should be done to portray the new woman as she really is.”44 Tellingly, CBS did not respond directly to this presentation point. Instead, Taylor made a statement that he was “in agreement that the public image of women was another area in which CBS would provide leadership” and welcomed “comments and suggestions” from CBS women.45 But Taylor ultimately insisted that the company retain its authority, with himself and the president of the Broadcast Group as the representation of that authority, over programming. John Schneider, the same executive who, in response to the Women’s Strike for Equality, circulated information to CBS employees about the women’s movement 30 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform and called for respect for the movement, also cautioned CBS women against seeking influence over programming. In a 1974 Columbine article, “Broadcasting: The Issue of Influence,” Schneider opined that if CBS women oversaw changes to programming, “practical and philosophical problems” would arise, including issues of what content would best represent women’s interests and elitist assumptions that CBS women were positioned to tell women audiences what they “ ‘should’ rather than want to see.”46 On representational issues, CBS struggled to represent the women’s movement. It did fare better when dealing with its workforce and the culture of its workplace. To be clear, CBS’s internal responses to feminism were not without disappointment and compromise. Yet its responses included legitimate attempts to reform sexism in the corporation, primarily through education of its workforce and cooperative policymaking between management and women workers. The variability with which CBS addressed feminist issues confirms what Kylie Andrews identifies as the “paradoxical” nature of media organizations. In her study of women workers at the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Andrews views the broadcaster not as a monolith but as an entity constituted by human interactions, drives, and engagements. By looking to broadcasting history through workers and the conditions of labor, as Andrews does, it becomes “possible to recognize the competing factions and personalities, motivations and missions of its participants, to contextualise the individuals who affect the policy and processes of broadcasting and to historicise how broadcasters imagine the social function of their work.”47 ARTHUR TAYLOR, ACTIVIST EXECUTIVE While CBS president Arthur Taylor fell in line with network television traditions in terms of outsider activism and programming reform, in other ways he proved a significant force for progress. Hired in 1972, Taylor was hailed as an “Activist Executive” and positioned among “an increasing number of corporate heads” in the early 1970s who took “aggressive roles in improving the status of women in business.”48 WAC credited various members of management, including CBS vice president Sheldon Wool, with a willingness to meet with the group to hear their concerns. But no one was acknowledged more readily or frequently as an ally to the group than Taylor, who was invested in equitable employment opportunities, which he saw both as ethically correct and good for the performance and standing of the company. Taylor’s support was so vital to future WAC members that they called themselves “the Taylor Committee” when they first organized. While so-called activist executives were viewed as a new breed of leaders, they were not the first to operate according to what counted as principled politics in business. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Lynn Spigel points out, “corporate liberalism was a general mentality of the era,” and television executives, along with other business leaders, “put faith in the idea that corporate growth would create not just Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 31 a stronger economy but also a better world.”49 Taylor retained aspects of corporate liberalism in his business philosophy, but he adapted to the political unrest of the time and its role in the labor conditions of the workplace. This aligned him with a style of corporate leadership that emerged in the 1970s. In 1971, Harvard Business Review polled 3,453 of their subscribers to find that one-sixth to one-half of them were “willing to encourage activist elements in a company.”50 The study also indicated that executives were particularly receptive to an “employee insurgent group” if the issues it raised were “less controversial, less related to public pressure, and more related to everyday standards of decency, honesty, and ethical behavior.”51 Soon after he took the job as president, Taylor countered CBS’s sexism by correcting gender disparities in job promotions, which he characterized a “terrible situation.” “You had women who had worked there for many years,” explained Taylor. “A good many of them had advanced degrees as secretaries because everyone wanted to get into the television industry. And they had passed these men in through their offices to other offices who have now become executives and they’re still sitting there as secretaries and assistants.” When William S. Paley, thenboard chair and former president of CBS, took a vacation early in Taylor’s tenure, Taylor moved swiftly and without Paley’s permission to rectify the problem. Taylor promoted every woman who had worked at CBS for five years or more. By Taylor’s estimation, this included around fifty women. “So everyone got promoted,” recalled Taylor, “And then we had all kinds of new policies which would allow women to advance as quickly as men.”52 While promotions demonstrate a commitment to women’s advancement on business ledgers, in annual reports to investors, and as compliance with federal laws on equal employment, titles alone did not guarantee corresponding gains in power, prestige, and workplace conditions. In an oral history for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Ethel Winant recounted her promotion to vice president of casting and talent at CBS in 1973, the first for a woman at any US television network. Winant explained that, with her groundbreaking promotion, there was no discussion of a salary increase or any negotiation of benefits that would come with the title. Once promoted, she encountered a lack of accommodation, quite literally, for her presence as the sole woman in the executive ranks. When she started using the executive dining room, Winant realized that she would have to take an elevator to a lower floor each time she needed to use the bathroom, since there was only one facility, which the men used. One day, after deciding, “I’m not going to do this anymore,” Winant used the men’s room, which did not have a lock on the door, and left her shoes outside to signal her presence and prevent men from walking in on her.53 While Winant’s promotion was groundbreaking in the early 1970s, women’s advancement to vice presidential positions accelerated soon after. Unfortunately, these appointments signaled a corresponding devaluation of the job. Anne Nelson, whose sixty-eight-year career at CBS saw her advance from a temp to the 38 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform operations rather than members of any particular production.”86 Likewise, women who worked as secretaries, support staff, researchers, accountants, and marketing staff at network headquarters served the operations of the corporation rather than the creation of a single television program. In addition to their contributions to the creative aspects of the television industry, women in support staff roles were essential to the industry’s corporate workings. Ethel Winant understood and relied upon these contributions as essential both to the culture of the network and to her career. Because of her relationship with informal networks of information sustained by secretaries, Winant gleaned vital information at CBS. When her promotion to vice president was kept a secret from her, only to be revealed in a surprise announcement in 1973, Winant considered the plan’s success completely atypical of her experience at CBS. “They kept it a secret from me,” she recalled. “Now that’s really hard to do because nobody’d ever kept anything a secret from me at CBS. Because I went to the ladies’ room with all the secretaries, and they knew everything. And so they always told you everything. And so I always knew what was going on. And if I didn’t know, my secretary could find out.” Winant continued to rely on this culture in her executive position. As the sole woman in such a position, Winant had a “great relationship with a million secretaries” that provided her with information that her male colleagues did not have access to. Therefore, Winant’s unique status as a woman vice president, according to Winant, “was actually sort of an advantage.”87 Just as they did in countless other offices, the secretarial and clerical staff at CBS worked under circumstances that rendered their labor feminized, disrespected, and unrecognized by waged compensation. In addition to the technical or logistical support they provided, these workers produced what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously describes as “emotion work,” or the type of labor that “affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others.”88 In exploring the labor function of women in Hollywood during the studio era, Hill argues that “all women’s work” within the studios served the “larger purpose of absorbing routine tasks and unwanted emotion around men’s creative process,” and therefore qualified as emotion work.89 Within a presumably noncreative support function, studio women’s work consisted of “both the explicit labor they were assigned on the basis of gender—typing, sewing, inking, and painting—and the implicit ‘shadow’ labor—the interpersonal competencies, gender performativity, and emotion work their jobs required.”90 WAC identified gendered burdens of labor for women at CBS in the 1970s similar to the ones Hill calls out in the Hollywood studio system. This demonstrates the applicability of Hill’s assessment to many, if not all, women across media industries and historical periods. WAC underscored the problems of women’s labor on both the explicit and shadow fronts and made it clear that women’s work at CBS was exploited, undervalued, and undercompensated. It demanded an end to the unpaid and affective labors women were asked to perform and insisted on a workplace culture that would no longer demean work conducted by women. Since these concerns Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 39 were particularly applicable to secretaries, WAC focused much of its occupationally specific reform on those workers. It devised training and advancement schemes for secretaries that challenged beliefs that the “explicit labor” of these positions fully satisfied women’s occupational goals and utilized their professional competencies. When CBS offered training for the executive career path and reimbursement for college courses to all employees, WAC argued that these opportunities should be earmarked for secretaries. As for the “shadow labor” of secretarial jobs, this was no longer to be expected. WAC stipulated that job descriptions for secretaries be clearly defined and adhered to by supervisors and that male supervisors be retrained about their sexist behaviors toward support staff. Secretarial work was a particular priority for WAC’s reform efforts, so much so that WAC dedicated an entire subsection to “Secretarial Problems” in the presentation its leaders made to Taylor in 1973. WAC’s recommendations for improving work conditions for secretaries included formal policies and training as well as experiential aspects of power differentials in the workplace. The group advised CBS to revise the company manual for secretaries to “make it acceptable to intelligent, professional” women and to restore the once-clear function of a secretarial position as a “training ground for management.”91 Noting in its 1974 presentation that there were “some places in CBS where a woman must notify her supervisor when she goes to the ladies’ room,” WAC rebuked CBS for infantilizing its female workforce and overstepping professional boundaries with them.92 WAC argued that when “secretaries are treated more like ‘office wives’ than employees,” the relationship was not cooperative but based on exploitation and an abuse of power.93 Given patriarchal assumptions that women were responsible for men’s comfort and ease in the workplace, WAC had good reason to be concerned. While particularly egregious in the treatment of secretaries, these dynamics permeated every rank of women workers who had contact with men in positions of authority. Even after being promoted to vice president at CBS, Ethel Winant, the only woman in any given room where executive decisions were made, was charged with feminized tasks typically associated with secretarial work. Winant recalls that William S. Paley would go through his mail and then “always turn to” her and instruct her to convey the mail to his secretary Rather than agree, Winant “would take a deep breath and think, no, I’m not going to do that,” and would instead instruct Paley to ask the CBS butler in the room to carry out such work.94 Attitudes such as Paley’s were ingrained in the culture of CBS, which WAC needed to confront if women were ever to be seen as colleagues and coworkers rather than work-wives. Men’s learned helplessness forced women, regardless of position, to take on the work of dealing with paperwork, mail, and phone calls and arranging and packing for business travel. Winant’s refusals of work for which she was not compensated testify to the types of labor that women at CBS—even executive women—were assumed by men to perform. “It was just automatic,” Winant recalled. “If there was a woman in the room, you were the 40 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform one who took the mail, and you were the one who made the phone call. And the truth was, nobody in that room knew how to make a long-distance call. They didn’t know how to get an outside line.”95 When traveling with other senior vice presidents, all men, Winant realized that she was the only one among them who knew how to buy an airline ticket since this had always been the responsibility of their secretaries or wives. CONTENDING WITH RACE Given the relatively high rate of employment of women of color in support staff jobs, by prioritizing the needs of secretaries and other employees who labored at the peripheries of media production, WAC implicitly addressed intersectional issues of race and gender at CBS. As a group that focused explicitly and solely on women’s issues, WAC acknowledged its difficulties in addressing issues of race and successfully recruiting women of color for the group. CBS contributed to these problems, as it identified “minority” concerns as separate from those of women’s issues in its policies; employment programs; and other efforts for recruitment, hiring, training, and advancement. In defining concerns of racial equity as distinctive from those of gender equity, CBS reinforced cultural scripts that led to what WAC member Priscilla Toumey described as the “hesitancy” of Black women in joining WAC. According to Toumey, these women were afraid that, in supporting workplace improvements for women, they were depriving people of color similar opportunities. With perceptions of CBS support as finite and competitive— particularly in issues of racial versus gender equity—women of color were concerned that CBS’s efforts to improve racial inequalities “may be compromised in this rush to do things for women.”96 It is difficult to determine the racial composition of WAC’s membership. Information about individual members, when available at all, is generally restricted to a short list of names for women who attended a meeting, issued a memo, earned a promotion, or sat for a radio interview. If women occupied highervisibility, higher-prestige jobs, they were pictured in industry publications, which provides some evidence of their racial identity. Unsurprisingly, an overwhelming majority of these women were white. Sheila Clark proves a notable exception. She was listed among the twenty-nine women from the WAC Steering Committee who met with CBS management on July 11, 1974.97 By 1978, Clark was working as the director of minority programs at CBS; her position meant that she served as the public face of the company’s diversity initiatives. In 1981, Billboard published a photo of a luncheon where students who aspired to careers in music met with CBS executives.98 Clark was identified in the photo caption as one of those executives. This photograph provides visual confirmation of Clark’s identity as a Black woman and indicates at least a small degree of racial diversity within WAC’s leadership. Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 41 Most of the women involved in the CBS group whose racial identities are ascertainable occupied executive ranks or higher-level creative work at the time of their group membership or later ascended to these positions. This leaves out of the picture WAC members who worked in secretarial, clerical, and support staff positions and likely included large numbers of women who were not white. The impact and involvement of women of color in WAC and the other network women’s groups are, for these reasons, unquantifiable. Nevertheless, women of color were part of the groups and contributed to their functioning and agenda-setting, even if the long-standing racism of the television industry meant that they made up a less visible part of the workforce than their white counterparts. The difficulties of quantifying the role women of color played in WAC, even in the most basic of measurements, illustrate a larger research problem in assessing women’s contributions to and presence in media workplaces. In their research on women’s employment in the British film industry, Natalie Wreyford and Shelley Cobb needed qualitative data to demonstrate the scale and consistency of gender inequality’s operation in the system. Although this data was indispensable to their project, employment figures available to them were “imperfect and unstable.” According to the traditions of ostensibly objective research, this evidential deficiency compromised the validity of the project. But rather than let it sideline scholarship of value for women production workers and feminist scholars alike, Cobb and Wreyford reassessed the impact of flawed data and proceeded with their project. By doing so, their research facilitates new understandings of the issue of women’s employment in British filmmaking specifically and more broadly illustrated the illusory nature of comprehensive datasets by underscoring the “ellipsis” that underlies the “presentation of academic writing in a neat and ordered way.”99 In the absence of statistical data on the employment of women of color at CBS and their participation in WAC, contextual labor trends offer one way to identify their presence. Following the civil rights movement, Black women and men moved from farmwork and private service work to white-collar jobs. The US Department of Labor reported that, out of all of the Black women employed in wage-earning labor, 22.7 percent worked in clerical jobs in 1972; by 1980, that figure had risen to 29.3 percent.100 Employment in the television industry followed a similar pattern, with a significant number of women of color working in clerical positions. In their 1977 publication Window Dressing on the Set: Women and Minorities in Television, the US Commission on Civil Rights reported that “minority” women constituted 28.7 percent of clerical workers at the television stations involved in their study and that 58.9 percent of “minority” women employed at the stations were office and clerical staff.101 Given these figures, it is statistically probable that women of color were employed in considerable numbers as clerical, support, and secretarial staff at the networks. Dorothy Sue Cobble’s labor history indicates as much. Cobble’s research finds that “African- American women did not enter clerical work in any appreciable numbers before 42 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform World War Two, but by the 1970s almost as large a percent of African-American women were in clerical jobs as held jobs in the overall labor market.”102 Since there is clear evidence that WAC prioritized outreach to secretarial and clerical staff and developed policies aimed to improve the existence of these workers, it is reasonable to surmise that women of color were participants in WAC and beneficiaries of the group’s actions. From the start, WAC took steps meant to address racial disparities in employment. In 1974, its first year of existence, the group pushed CBS to implement required “conscientious” searches for women and “minorities” for all job vacancies. On WAC’s suggestion, the network also instituted training programs for women and people of color in the same year. These training programs were intended for employees who wanted to work in more prestigious positions but had not profited from “the advantages of training and experience needed to successfully move into these highly qualified areas.”103 Training comprised three components: “attachment,” a position that paired employees with a supervisor to learn more about a department; “internship,” in which the employee “learns by doing rather than by observing;” and “on-the-job,” which placed employees in a job, “permanent in nature,” that provided advancement in a current area or entrance to a different area of the company in which the employee wished to specialize.104 By the spring of 1976, the program was still intact. At that time, Columbine reported over one hundred enactments of the training program in the company’s New York City–area holdings, thirty to forty more to come in the upcoming months, and forty-three promotions that resulted from the program.105 In its report on their “women/minority training programs,” published in a 1976 issue of Columbine, CBS did not differentiate between the numbers of women and men who participated in the training programs, nor did it specify the racial identities of the women involved.106 The company newsletter, however, suggested that women of color were central in the program’s outreach and a measurement of its success. An illustration that accompanies the Columbine article features a Black woman sitting at a small desk in front of a typewriter, flanked by an overflowing trash can and file cabinet. With her hand resting on her chin, she looks at her imagined future, which floats near her head in a thought bubble. In this future, she is sitting at an organized, spacious desk with a phone and appointment book at her elbow. Behind her, a reel-to-reel tape player, a record player, and a speaker fill a credenza and shelves. The article opens with direct address to a “secretary in radio sales”—presumably the figure featured in the article’s illustration—who aspires to an executive position, an assistant to an editor in publishing who longs to become an editor themselves, and an assistant in the personnel office who wants to work in the newsroom. If the ideal outcome of woman/minority training programs was a Black woman’s promotion from secretary to executive, as the article suggests, it required long-term investments. CBS demonstrated its commitment to the program by extending it for at least three years beyond its inception. It also continued to Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 43 earmark the program as one designed to explicitly correct inequalities of race and gender. Joan Showalter, director of the training program and WAC member, noted that there had been “a few complaints of discrimination from white males” about the programs but that the company would continue its focused efforts on career training until there were “more women and minorities distributed throughout all areas of the Company.”107 Yet even with their intentions to correct disparities in workplace opportunities for women and people of color, CBS continued to specify redress for racial inequities as separate from gender disadvantages, which, in turn, fostered a lack of coalition building among workers. Although WAC’s goals of inclusivity were hampered by this situation, the group operated under the assumption that it represented all women. From this position, WAC addressed intersectional issues of gender identity that included race, economic status, and age, with a primary aim, according to Priscilla Toumey, “to equalize the system to bring it where it should be so that everyone has an equal chance.”108 HOLDING THE CORPORATION RESPONSIBLE: HEALTH CARE AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS Impediments to coalition building are among many examples of corporate culture’s negative impact on WAC’s reform agenda. Yet for all of the restrictions that CBS’s corporate logistics, ethos, and design imposed on WAC, the group challenged fundamental philosophies that underpinned the corporation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the reproductive health care and childcare provisions WAC secured for workers. This success repudiated fundamental aspects of what Joan Acker identifies as the “non-responsibility” of modern corporations. According to this capitalistic model, corporations seek to restrict their obligations to Figure 4. Illustration for a June 1976 article in Columbine, the CBS company newsletter, detailing information on the company’s Women/ Minority Training Programs provided to employees. (CBS News Reference Library) 44 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform workers’ well-being, whether in terms of environmental protections, childcare and health care, or protections of a limited workweek and child labor laws. Policies developed within such organizations therefore reinforce “everyday inattention to the non-work lives of participants” and “render peripheral and usually invisible the essential social activities of birthing, caring, and even surviving.”109 Nonresponsibility holds serious consequences for women workers. They not only are charged disproportionately with the unacknowledged labor in the “nonwork” lives but also are jeopardized by the very conceptualization of a worker under corporate nonresponsibility. As Acker argues, “Non-responsibility consigns caring needs to areas outside the organization’s interests, and, thus, helps to maintain the image of the ideal, even adequate, employee as someone without those obligations.”110 WAC’s proposal for comprehensive maternity benefits promised, in its words, to “put CBS in the vanguard of social responsibility.”111 By framing its plan for health care this way, WAC offered the corporation a means to distinguish itself from competitors through its socially responsible policies, a goal clearly expressed by Taylor and other CBS executives. Thus WAC recentered gendered concerns that had been eroded in corporate philosophies of nonresponsibility. Given the broader sociopolitical context of 1974—the year in which WAC secured reproductive protections for employees—WAC’s success in this area is particularly impressive. Various “right-of-conscience” bills and acts were proposed immediately following the January 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Of these, the one with the most impact was the “Church Amendment” to the 1944 Public Health Service Act. Adopted in 1973, this refusal law protected any health care professional involved in federally funded research from performing abortions or other reproductive health procedures that “would be contrary to his [sic] religious beliefs or moral convictions.”112 By August 1973, a total of twelve states had passed legislation aimed to “skirt or subvert” Roe v. Wade.113 From May through October 1974, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments held a series of hearings to consider “possible Supreme Court negligence” in its decision to legalize abortion.114 It was within this reactionary political climate that the CBS Women’s Joint Steering Committee, a subdivision of WAC, designed a plan to redefine abortion as a medical need. In July 1974, CBS accepted significant elements of the Committee’s proposals. In doing so, CBS expanded coverage for women’s medical needs that ranged from improved maternity leave to free, on-site breast cancer exams and mammograms.115 The Committee’s proposal also pushed CBS to normalize abortion as part of medical treatment and health care when it successfully argued that maternity policies should include not only “pregnancy-related disabilities” and illness but also abortion and miscarriage as grounds for sick leave for “the purpose of recuperation.”116 CBS agreed that all illnesses and medical procedures related to pregnancy, including abortion, would be treated “as any other illness” and would be afforded sick days.117 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 45 While unable to shift CBS policy to increase coverage for pregnancy-related hospitalization, something CBS deemed too expensive, the Women’s Joint Steering Committee succeeded in redefining the most conservative and paternalistic aspects of reproductive rights and parenting roles in company policy. CBS agreed to strike the “dependent coverage” women had previously been required to take out while pregnant in order to “protect themselves financially against the possibility of abortion or miscarriage.”118 The Committee argued that this was an unacceptable policy based on an inaccurate definition of a fetus as a dependent, a reflection of antichoice ideologies. CBS agreed to this redefinition of personhood and dependency and struck down the related policy. This decision was particularly momentous, considering that the fifth session of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, held just two months earlier, on May 1974, had debated whether a fetus was a human being with the same attendant rights and deliberated “at what time in the reproductive cycle life actually commences.”119 Under the influence of the Women’s Joint Steering Committee, CBS also reimagined caregiving for children. The company’s revised policy assumed that fathers as well as, or instead of, mothers would be involved in the labor of childrearing. Extended leave had previously been available only to women and for a four-month period. In 1974, this became available to both men and women for the care of children “natural or adoptive” and was extended to six months.120 This policy was a clear victory for the CBS women, and one won through persistence. When they first proposed this policy revision in 1973, they were denied and were told that CBS did not grant “non-medical leave, maternal or paternal, for the purpose of child-rearing.”121 A year later, CBS not only agreed to a more generous timeframe for parental leave and more expansive definitions of parenting roles requested of them by the Committee but actually improved upon the Committee’s original plan by no longer requiring that this leave be taken “directly following childbirth.”122 ASSESSING WAC By 1975, WAC’s efforts had measurable effects, which an article published in Columbine, “What Progress Women at CBS?,” conveyed to employees. This article provides an unusual assessment of work conditions for women in television. Reports on the status of women in television generated at the time typically tended to the industry’s obligation to the public interest (to protect FCC licensing) and adherence to legislated employment practices (to ward off lawsuits). As a result, most evidence was numerically driven and focused on employment, hiring, and promotion of women at television stations. In 1974, the Milwaukee Journal expressed frustration at the limited means of evaluating women’s progress in the television industry. While conducting research for their article “On or Off Camera, Women Move Up in TV Jobs,” it found that “the only comprehensive survey deals 46 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform with local stations, not networks,” and was restricted to the “number of women holding important jobs.”123 These figures not only lacked breadth but also were subject to manipulation. In the same year that the Milwaukee Journal expressed its concerns about the scarcity of available data, the United Church of Christ (UCC), who were centrally involved in FCC licensing challenges and media advocacy work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, questioned the validity of employment statistics stations submitted to the FCC. While numbers indicated improved employment for women, the UCC charged that stations likely manipulated job categories to reclassify positions without corresponding increases in prestige or salary.124 The Columbine article on CBS women, by comparison, provided an unusual and information-rich rubric by which to gauge women’s status in the industry. It focused on employees at CBS headquarters rather than stations, offered a mix of quantitative and qualitative assessments of women’s progress, and addressed company insiders rather than the public and/or the FCC. As a publication internal to CBS, Columbine was not designed for public relations or designed to ward off broadcasting licensing challenges; therefore it assumed a less protective position and, presumably, provided a more reliable perspective. To offer a “fresh set of eyes to the assessment of our programs to date,” CBS “turned to an outside writer,” Judith Hennessee, who was charged with evaluating the progress women had made at CBS.125 By hiring Hennessee, who was a member of NOW and was deeply involved in its media reform campaigns and whose journalism appeared in feminist publications such as Ms., CBS announced its investment in feminist assessment and outsider evaluation. After interviewing employees, compiling statistics, and narrativizing her findings, Hennessee found that “several hundred of CBS’s working women seem to have already benefited directly” from changes in management practices.126 Promotions and raises clearly demonstrate these benefits. In 1971, women constituted 13.2 percent of promotions within salaried positions; by the third quarter of 1974, this figure had increased to 36.2 percent.127 In Hennessee’s evaluation, women’s progress at CBS was not confined to economic indicators. Hennessee also gauged experiential evidence and found, overall, that interpersonal and cultural aspects of women’s work lives had improved. The “substantial changes in basic intangibles of attitudes,” something that WAC deemed necessary for true workplace reform, manifested in interpersonal, affective ways.128 Kathryn Pelgrift, Arthur Taylor’s assistant who had been promoted to a vice presidential position, noted that it was “ ‘no longer fashionable to put women down around here.’ ”129 Even a bureaucratic detail, such as the revision of the title of a training manual from “CBS Secretarial Manual” to “CBS Office Practices,” helped transform the tone of vocational instruction from one of condescension to professionalism. Whereas the earlier iteration of the manual indicated that secretarial duties included making coffee and “playing the gracious hostess,” the revised version “[stuck] strictly to business.”130 As a result of such changes, women who worked various “lower-level” jobs noted a decline in various on-the-job “indignities.”131 Women’s Groups and Workplace Reform 47 Despite the many workplace improvements Hennessee identified, not all employees had been helped by CBS’s new policies, nor were they convinced that they would be. Although some women felt the effects of the revisions to policies, “many more thousands of CBS women (and men) [were] watchfully waiting to see if the company’s 18-month-old push to change policies and attitudes toward women [would], in any direct way, affect them.”132 Hennessee interpreted this skepticism not as an indictment of WAC’s reform efforts but as a persistent effect of the corporation’s organization and the subcultures it fostered. Depending on the CBS division in which she worked, equality employment measures affected an employee differently. News and radio divisions, which reported on “women’s issues in the outside world,” adapted quickly, while CBS Records suffered from a legacy of “ ‘macho’ and ‘groupie’ mentality” and was therefore slow to change.133 The hierarchical organization of CBS also had an effect, and trickle-down adoption of policy was not ensured. One woman interviewed by Hennessee attested to the problem, saying, “ ‘If it doesn’t filter down to my boss, then it doesn’t matter how good Arthur Taylor’s intentions are.’ ”134 In her 1975 report, Hennessee was careful to acknowledge the uneven implementation of policies within CBS along with the positive impact of WAC’s efforts, but she did not predict the looming challenges to women’s workplace reform and to WAC’s efficacy. As the 1970s continued, WAC became less active and less powerful, not least because of the larger sociopolitical environment of the US in the 1980s. Arthur Taylor’s departure as CBS president in 1976 was also a loss given his concern about the advancement of women in the workplace. And, as with so many activists, some group women experienced burnout, while others missed the energizing effects of grassroots activism. Once WAC and the women’s groups gained official status within their companies and formal recognition by their employers, “a lot of the thrill of the original underground feeling [had] gone.”135 Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the success of all network women’s groups contributed to their decline. Women throughout the corporation came to depend upon group women to the point that they grew complacent and “believed that the activist women would take care of things.”136 More generally, given the significant improvements for women in the broadcasting industry under their watch, group members felt that the “movement had paid off” and that women’s “problems were over.”137 THE LEGACY OF THE WOMEN’S GROUPS By 1983, television journalist Marlene Sanders witnessed “backsliding” on gender equity issues at ABC, her previous employer, and “dissatisfaction” at CBS, her current employer, but “no organized effort of any significance” to address these problems.138 As a response to deteriorating conditions, women formed new women’s groups. Sanders recalled that the “most shocking revelation” about a women’s group that was forming anew at ABC at this time was that the new 54 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” Equal pay for female athletes was an issue that King tied to celebrity culture and its affective impact. In an interview with Dinah Shore on Colgate’s Women’s Sports Special (ABC, 1974), King articulated the connection between the amorphous qualities of fame, glamour, and celebrity with clear-cut monetary worth for women athletes. Shore first observed that women’s sports had “come such a long way” in both spectatorship and women’s participation. She then asked King, “What do you feel is the biggest step forward that women’s sports have made?” King responded by identifying “two significant steps: the money as well as appreciation from the public.” As a result of gains in both areas, female athletes, in King’s estimation, felt like “stars and entertainers for the first time in their lives and have a lot more self-respect because of it.” Increased public interest in women athletes helped King argue for their worth. Differences between the games women and men played, which were based on assumptions about women’s inferior physical stamina, justified unequal prize money. Wins in women’s pro tennis matches depended on winning two out of three sets versus wins in men’s matches, in which three out of five sets constituted a win. Shorter matches rationalized paying women players less than their male counterparts. King countered this formula for assessing players’ worth through women players’ star quality and entertainment value. In a 1972 Sports Illustrated interview, King justified demands for significant pay for women by identifying the “big business” of sports and the ways that athletes were increasingly part of an “entertainment industry.” King concluded that “if we can get the money, we deserve it.”16 To illustrate this point, King consistently emphasized in the press and in media appearances her growing fan base and resulting ticket sales. King’s celebrity was clear by the mid-1970s. In comparison to her earliest match, which drew two spectators, her matches now drew crowds that numbered in the thousands. King’s media savvy made her, as Ware succinctly describes it, the “right feminist in the right sport at the right time.”17 King famously beat Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes,” a televised tennis match that aired on ABC on September 30, 1973. The event was a highly anticipated, well-publicized one that demonstrated the might of female athletes, made a compelling case for the viability of women playing sports on television, and proved the correctness of Title IX. ABC publicized it as a feminist battling an egotistical misogynist. This concept sensationalized the match and hyped its entertainment value while, at the same time, it expressed ideas about gender and women’s legal rights that were at the forefront of contemporary cultural conversations. ABC’s approach, which hybridized spectacle with cultural relevance, both tested the viability of women’s sports on television and set a new precedent for how television would present sports. The King-Riggs match happened only a year after the passage of Title IX, the “early days” of the law when “public awareness of the law in general and its impact on women’s sports in particular” was not clear or widespread.18 Title IX served as a remedy to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and addressed discrimination in education. From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 55 It was broadly conceptualized through “admissions, counseling, course offerings, financial aid and scholarships, facilities and housing, health and insurance benefits, and discrimination based on marital or parental status.”19 The sheer scale of Title IX and strategic efforts to downplay certain elements of the legislation so as not to draw undue attention and counterattacks meant that “discrimination in sports was simply not on the radar” in its first few years of existence.20 Title IX’s impact on sports only became clear and well publicized in early 1974. At this time, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the regulatory body for college athletics, began intensively lobbying against Title IX to defend the primacy of men’s football in college sports. These efforts resulted in the Tower Amendment, a legislative proposal that would restrict Title IX’s influence on college athletics.21 This timeline meant that, at the time of the Battle of the Sexes match in 1973, Title IX gains were not yet part of the general public’s consciousness.22 According to Ware, no publicity for the event made mention of Title IX. While the King- Riggs match predated common awareness of Title IX’s relationship to sports, it increased visibility for women’s sports and for the value of women athletes, which bolstered positive public opinion about Title IX in the years to come. Once Title IX’s impact on women’s and girls’ sports was recognized, King served as a public and persuasive figure in the successful fight against the repressive Tower Amendment. In 1973, she used her newly minted status as a sports celebrity to testify in support of the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA), legislation that provided financial grants to secure the aims of Title IX.23 Amid legislative battles over Title IX and the growing participation of girls and women in sports, television reassessed the viability of broadcasting women’s sports, the value of female viewers for televised sports events, and the benefits of employing female sports talent as stars and commentators. Nowhere were these shifts in the industry more apparent than in the Battle of the Sexes match. The game unsettled traditions of sports television with new types of gameplay, storylines, and audience appeals as well as unconventional means of producing, selling, and marketing the event. With the King-Riggs match, Tandem Productions, the independent television company cofounded by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, entered the world of sports television. While best known for socially relevant situation comedies, Tandem applied its unconventional approach to business to this special event program. It bought the rights to the match from Hollywood promoter Jackie Barnett for $75,000. In a stance similar to one it would later use to get Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to air in 1976 (discussed in chapter 3), Tandem was prepared to bypass the networks, if necessary, to procure the best possible deal. If a network would not pay its asking price, Tandem planned to “arrange either an independent network or a closed-circuit presentation of the match.”24 ABC made a deal with Tandem, paying $700,000 for the two-hour, live television broadcast; the deal proved profitable to both the production company and the network. Tandem 56 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” reached a $1,000,000 payday with an additional $300,000 guarantee from the Houston Astrodome, and ABC recovered what it had paid to air the match by moving ad time in a “fast sale,” with advertisers paying $80,000 per minute.25 While figures indicate both the anticipated and proven success of the event, critics were unhappy with the production quality of the program. In wondering, “Where Was the ABC of Yesteryear?,” Variety compared the match negatively to ABC’s previous broadcasts. In the 1960s, ABC established itself as an innovator in televised sports by utilizing new technologies to cover major events. The network’s handling of the Olympics, in particular, established their reputation. ABC broadcast the first televised coverage of the Games in the US in 1960. In 1964, they flew back footage from events in time to put them on the air the same day. Their coverage of the 1968 Summer Olympics produced several firsts: recordbreaking remote coverage with the greatest “number of hours, personnel and pieces of equipment,” color broadcast, and satellite transmission that made live viewing of events possible.26 Variety may have lamented a decline in quality associated with ABC Sports, but King and Riggs provided an entertainment event in keeping with the network’s established style. When Roone Arledge became president of ABC Sports in 1968, he ushered in a new era of sports television that “privileged building stories over displaying events and assumed viewers might watch the tales it packaged no matter their interest in sports. It humanized competitions by presenting them through familiar narratives (rivalries, records about to be broken, battles against the elements) and by making their participants relatable.”27 The production of the King- Riggs match prioritized drama and spectacle rather than the technical intricacies of tennis play. In doing so, it drew spectators, both in person and at home, who were not tennis fans or even sports fans. Although by this point outsized narratives and exciting visuals had become the cornerstones of ABC Sports programs under Arledge’s guidance, the Battle of the Sexes drew particularly pointed criticism. Variety attributed what it considered substandard production values to the celebrity-driven aspects of the event Figures 5 & 6. Graphics reflect the “Battle of the Sexes” theme: the score board header and a split screen of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at match point. ABC, September 20, 1973. From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 57 and complained that ABC “certainly weren’t shy about using their ground level camera to show us the celebs in the $100 seats.”28 By privileging the celebrity element of the match, ABC minimized attention to the on-court action. Other criticisms of ABC’s coverage focused on fundamental technical elements, including poor camera placement that failed to highlight the finesse and athleticism of the match, Howard Cosell’s “ineptitude” in announcing plays, and the infrequency of score information.29 Whatever the flaws in the broadcast, viewers were not deterred. With an average audience of forty-eight million viewers and at least seventy-two million viewing the broadcast for some part of the coverage, the “wildly promoted event,” set in the “carnival atmosphere of the Houston Astrodome,” “dominated TV viewing.”30 Trendex reported a 34.2 rating and a 52.4 share for the match. NBC and CBS programs that aired at the same time lagged in ratings, with CBS’s The Waltons earning 14.4 and 22.0 and NBC’s The Flip Wilson Show earning 12.0 and 18.4.31 ABC’s ratings win proved women’s sports to be a sound investment and female sports fans a new audience to be considered. As Travis Vogan argues in his history of ABC Sports, if dramatic and spectacularized formulas “quickly became clichés” and were therefore “easy to discount as commercialized pandering,” they also “function[ed] through engaging the cultural codes that make TV so important.”32 Regardless of its commercialized aspects, the King-Riggs match captured the changing gender politics of the day and had tremendous viewer impact. It signaled a new stage of development for ABC’s sports broadcasting, which would require that resources be allocated to women on the playing field, in television production, and in the audience. A “LIBBER-LOBBER” AND TELEVISION CELEBRITY King emerged from the Battle of the Sexes a celebrity. More than that, she attained “sex symbol” status, something she acknowledged, though as an “advocate of women’s liberation” she did not “know what to do about it.” A 1974 Boston Globe profile on King describes how, since the match with Riggs, King had been the recipient of “mash notes, sexy suggestions and passes thrown by amorous makes [sic] .” 33 Although not an out lesbian by this point—something that would not happen until her personal assistant Marilyn Barnett filed a palimony suit against her in 1981—King implicitly presented an unconventional gender identity and incompatibility with heteronormativity, something that coverage about her sex symbol status both suggested and managed. The Globe article described King’s “fetching” appearance when she wore a pink sweater, printed flowered blouse, and gold jewelry as something that made her look, “well, feminine.” In this assessment, King’s feminine allure proved a surprising counterpoint to her athleticism rather than confirmation of queer identity. King “looked like anything but one of the great athletes of our times.” The Globe reporter indicated that, despite her feminine 58 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” appearance, King had not been to the hairdresser or “wor[n] a speck of makeup” and that “clearly, she thinks little about” her sex appeal.34 Characterizations of King’s “sex symbol” status affirmed her athleticism and her feminism. King countered media constructions of feminists as unlikable, unattractive activists who aggressively worked to destroy long-standing social institutions. She instead operated “out on the firing line, commanding respect on the tennis court and in the competitive field of commerce.”35 Her athleticism, discipline, and striving made her a feminist celebrity who meshed easily with all- American notions of accomplishment and individual endeavor and reframed negative associations with feminism. When ABC hired King at the end of December 1975, her celebrity feminist credentials played an important role. In the publicity surrounding the hire, King was described as a “libber-lobber,” a new type of hybridized feminist-sports celebrity that sports television eagerly embraced.36 Immediately following the Battle of the Sexes, King was hired as a commentator on ABC’s Wide World of Sports (1961–98) and various sports specials, and as host for Women’s Sports Special (1976). At this same time, King also developed a syndicated show, The Billie Jean King Show (1974–78), with ABC Sports’ Jim Packer as executive producer.37 King’s success in television indicates the acceptability of feminist celebrity when it underscored capitalistic terms of success. King parlayed the interest in her contract negotiations and lucrative television contracts, as evinced by articles like “How Green Was Her Volley” and “Billie Jean Courts Fat TV Contract.”38 But despite the conservative fashioning of King’s celebrity and publicity that used King’s accomplishments to tout television’s progressiveness, King brought critical attention to gendered inequalities under capitalism and sexist employment practices in television. When she negotiated her contract with ABC, King underscored the issue of income parity for women in television, just as she had with professional sports. Rather than responding to media speculation about the exact dollar amount of her “fat TV contract” with ABC, King sidestepped the sensationalized aspects of her salary. She instead repeated the simple mantra that she used in her demands for equal prize money in tennis: “I won’t take less than the guys.”39 ELEANOR SANGER RIGER AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS AT ABC Producer Eleanor Sanger Riger was a driving force behind the decision to hire Billie Jean King. Throughout her career, Riger helped introduce women’s sports to television and agitated for increased roles for women in its production. Riger worked at ABC from 1965 to 1969, moving up the ladder from manager of client relations to producer of promotional films to writer and producer. In 1973 she was hired at ABC Sports, the first woman “to hold full producership and executive position in network television sports.”40 In this position, Riger produced numerous Figure 7. Eleanor Sanger Riger behind the camera (date unknown). (Eleanor Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection SSC-MS-00286). 60 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” segments for Wide World of Sports, including the US–East Germany Swimming and Dual Diving Event from East Berlin, World Weightlifting Championships, the National Figure Skating Championships, Women’s World Cup Skiing, European Women’s Gymnastics, and the Pro Bowler Tour. She produced and wrote “two landmark prime-time specials on women’s sports;” the Colgate’s Women’s Sports Special (ABC, 1974), hosted by Dinah Shore; and the second edition of the Colgate Special, The Lady Is a Champ (ABC, 1975), hosted by Billie Jean King. Riger also produced and coproduced segments for the 1976 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, for which she won two Emmys.41 Throughout the 1970s, Riger would play a pivotal role in asserting the viability of women’s sports at ABC Sports and identifying actions the network needed to take to compete in the increasingly profitable area of televised women’s sports. With the express purpose of guiding the network in its “development of sports programming for women,” Riger was hired in response to NOW’s FCC license renewal challenge to WABC-TV in 1972.42 With a career so deeply enmeshed in liberal feminist activism, Riger worked toward equal employment of women and increased representations of women in sports television. While these approaches made inroads, they were not without limitations. By focusing on inclusion of women in existing systems, as Jennifer Hargreaves argues, liberal feminist approaches fail “to examine the extent and nature of male power in sports in the specific context of capitalism” and “to incorporate the ideological and symbolic dimensions of gender oppression.”43 Riger, however, did not only depend on the admission of greater numbers of women to the ranks of sports television as a corrective to its sexism. She also worked to reformulate what women’s sports on television looked like, to change production standards to accommodate women’s athletes as television workers, and to alter the ways that women’s sports were presented to audiences. Riger’s unaired project on Olympic figure skater and US national champion Maribel Vinson Owen illustrates her investment in elevating women’s achievements in sports and her methods for articulating women’s athleticism on-screen. In 1976, Riger coauthored a biographical teleplay on Owen. It was under consideration at 20th Century-Fox television but was never produced. Riger’s script told a dramatic story of Owen’s struggles to gain recognition as an athlete, her disastrous marriage and years of abuse at the hands of her alcoholic husband, her attempts to sustain her professional aspirations alongside domestic obligations and childrearing, and her untimely death in a plane crash. In the midst of this compelling melodramatic narrative, Riger stressed the structural issues of patriarchal power that had shaped Owen’s life and balanced uplifting, pioneering story elements with sobering reminders of what Owen and other female figure skaters of her time experienced. These athletes were deprived of access to facilities and coaching, mistreated by fathers and coaches (often the same person), and forced to relinquish their careers far too early when they married (often to abusive husbands). From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 61 As she would in other programs she produced, in relaying Owen’s story Riger maximized televisual techniques to balance emotional storytelling with athletic accomplishments and skilled athleticism. One scene features Owen in a practice session in which dramatic music plays under the voices and sound effects and then moves to multiple moments of training. At this point, Riger offers detailed instructions on camerawork in a script that, until then, was largely composed of narrative content rather than staging and shooting directions. She directs the camera to focus on the “intricate twists and turns of the skate; the intense concentration of skater and coach; the beauty of the precise and fascinating movements which are the basis of all skating.”44 The technical aspects of production included in Riger’s script involved relatively complex camerawork, sound design, and editing. They underscore her priorities in representing athletic performances: to pair emotionally rich storytelling qualities of an athlete’s struggle to succeed with the intensive physicality of the sport and the spectacle of athletic achievement. PIONEERING WOMEN’S SPORTS IN FRONT OF AND BEHIND THE CAMERAS While women were making gains in television production, they still lagged behind in sports television. Riger’s concerns for women’s advancements in sports television were as much about the workplace as they were about programming. In 1973, when ABC Sports hired Riger as a producer, network news had already hired “hundreds” of women as writers, producers, and reporters but sports television had none in similar positions. “Why was I the first? Why was it such a rare thing— a news item—when I got the appointment?,” wondered Riger. Her questions were rhetorical ones, as she understood full well the fictions that kept women from this job: only male sports were “salable” on television, women lacked interest in and had no “feeling” for sports, women lacked the “intelligence or dedication or stamina required for the admittedly demanding routine” in television sports, and women could not cope with the grueling travel schedule required for the job.45 Riger worked to counter these myths and to close the gap between women working in sports television production and other areas of television production. To accomplish this, Riger linked the pioneering accomplishments of women athletes with the capabilities of women for sports television work. Through this connection, she argued for the suitability of women for sports television on both sides of the camera. To Riger, the success and talent of women as athletes, on-air talent, and behindthe-scenes production staff were all related. She saw the increase in collegiate athletic programs for women—556 colleges with athletic programs for women in 1974–75 and 806 in 1976—as a reason for ABC to pay more attention to women’s sports. The growth of athletic programs, set in motion by Title IX, provided evidence for a steady supply of interest in women’s sports and made programming 62 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” women’s sports a low-risk proposition. Television sports and college athletics, to Riger, were inextricably linked. She argued that “the most important factor for the future involvements of women in sports on television is the accelerating worth of college sports for women,” since men’s college sports served as the “backbone” of participation in the Olympics and in “major” professional sports, which, together, made up “99 percent of the sports television programming.”46 Riger also capitalized on the growing celebrity of women in professional sports to pitch women’s involvements in television sports. She repeatedly made the case to ABC that the very qualities that made these athletes interesting to viewers would translate to their work on television as commentators and hosts. Their personalities would draw audiences to the broadcast just as they had to their sports matches. Unsurprisingly, given both her public support for Title IX and her celebrity status, Billie Jean King was a crucial figure in Riger’s plans. King’s celebrity and her authority as an athlete-activist broadened her appeals beyond tennis and garnered viewer interest across multiple sports events, making her a credible television personality. This was particularly so after the Battle of the Sexes, a time when Riger urged ABC to make the most of the success of the King-Riggs match. In a November 13, 1973, memo to Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, Riger expressed the need to move quickly. The “quite urgent” circumstances, according to Riger, involved increased competition among networks to hire King and an unprecedented opportunity to address growing demand for women’s sports on television.47 Riger equated King’s unprecedented athletic accomplishments with her own groundbreaking status as a woman producer hired to help shepherd ABC into the untested arena of women’s sports. In advising Arledge to hire King, Riger emphasized the investments ABC had already made, the role women would play in ABC’s future success, and the benefit of continued investments in women: After all you have done in trying to get more recognition for women’s sports by hiring me and [producing] that kind of programming, that we should lose the biggest attraction of all would be terrible. You really built Billie Jean up with the telecast of the King-Riggs match. You took a gamble on the price and it paid off. ... I am sure you wouldn’t want to see all the momentum ABC Sports has built up dissipated by an NBC coup with Billie Jean King. Certainly with women’s Olympic Sports like gymnastics, skating, skiing, track and field, swimming and diving, volleyball and rowing becoming more and more popular because of our television exposure, we would be at a disadvantage in this area too.48 Given Riger’s logic, it was not enough for women in sports to occupy more programming time: it was also necessary to train and cultivate the expertise of women working in production if ABC was to remain competitive. By 1974, Riger felt that, with the growing number of female athletes, the financial security of major advertisers sponsoring programs, and the ready-made audience of “sports-conscious women” and men who would watch women’s sports on From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 63 television, ABC needed to invest in production via female employees. With key elements in place for ratings, profit, and content, the only “real challenge” facing ABC was its need to “develop female commentators” who could announce wom- en’s sports “both on action coverage shows and more feature-oriented programs.”49 After sponsoring a Women’s Sports Special in 1974, produced by Riger, Colgate conducted a study that found that women were increasingly inclined to watch women’s sports. This information was somewhat surprising to them, since they “didn’t know if women would really want to watch a show about women athletes” and had commissioned the special with some reservations. The study, surveying attitudes before and after watching the show, found that “the special generated definite increases in interest among women in watching TV programs dealing with women’s sports” and that all of the sports featured in the special “showed attitude gains.” Although Colgate tracked women’s interest in sports television for the purpose of corporate profits, the proven impact of Riger’s special also helped create change that benefited women, albeit in capitalistic terms. The special demonstrated the viability of women’s sports to a major company who could sponsor and fund future programming; it also made the company rethink its conceptualization of women consumers. Sally O’Brien, director of market research at Colgate, reported that the company could no longer depict women in “some never-never land, or where she’s in that tacky old role some marketers still think women are playing, or where a product is positioned as some kind of father figure.” Instead, ads would need to acknowledge that “housework isn’t fun and games” and to recognize the interests of women had outside domestic work.50 Riger leveraged corporations’ changing perceptions of women into increased and improved programming of women’s sports. When companies wanted to capture a new market of women viewers, as Sears, Palmolive, and Fabergé did when they sponsored women’s golf, tennis, gymnastics, and amateur athletics, Riger transformed their interest in women as consumers into opportunities for women to work at ABC. She used corporate sponsorship to persuade the network to “develop a whole new slant on its sports programming, both expanding the coverage of women’s events and bringing women into the behind-the-scenes production and on-air talent areas.”51 THE COLGATE WOMEN’S SPORTS SPECIAL: RIGER’S PLANS IN ACTION Broadcast on January 10, 1974, on ABC, the Colgate Women’s Sports Special realized Riger’s goals for women’s sports television. The special employed female celebrity sports figures as on-air talent, displayed women’s athleticism through high-impact production values, and invited audience identification with inspirational moments of women’s athletic triumphs. In the buildup to the special, Riger emphasized the program’s ratings potential to promote the program and to 70 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” The difficulties Riger encountered in television production were magnified by working in sports. As the formation of a Women’s Action Committee at ABC in 1972 demonstrates, the network was not inclined to acknowledge the needs of its female employees or to reform sexist practices without a watchdog group. As discussed in chapter 1, NBC women formed the first of three women’s groups that sprang up at each network’s headquarters in the early 1970s. The Women’s Action Committee comprised women employees who represented women’s concerns to management and instituted an affirmative action program, sensitivity training, and a Grievance Committee. They also programmed lectures that addressed “interests of interest to all ABC women,” such as the ERA, gender discrimination in language, assertiveness training, and legal advice on workplace discrimination. In its January 1976 newsletter, the Committee awarded the sports department one of its “brickbats” for its “continued locker room morality” and called out an unnamed ABC executive who “expect[ed] his secretary to take care of his dirty squash clothes.”70 Whether manifesting in the working environment of the department or the leisure activities of powerful male employees, sports television contributed to a hostile and belittling workplace for women at ABC. Perhaps no one working in television knew the propensity for sexism in television sports better than Riger. According to Riger, “Television was mostly a man’s business,” and the “locker room rationale” (the argument that all-male enclaves were unsuitable for women) made careers in sports television particularly difficult for women.71 While Riger achieved success at ABC Sports, as evinced by the numerous Emmy wins for her work as producer there, she encountered obstacles to career advancement. She experienced behaviors on the part of her bosses and network executives that she regarded as workplace discrimination. By 1976, she sought legal representation in anticipation of negotiating a new contract with ABC. She supplied her legal counsel with documentation of her “constant struggle to get more assignments and more live assignments.”72 She tracked decisions and kept records of various moments in training and job assignments denied her. In a file she labeled “ABC Sports—Historic Discrimination,” Riger kept dozens of memos she had written to executives at various levels in the sports department— including John Martin, vice president, Roone Arledge, president, and Chuck Howard, vice president of production—asking for more producing experience that would expand her skill set. These requests started as early as 1975 and carried through into the 1980s and the end of Riger’s career in television. Riger made the sexist practices of television public in 1977 when she recounted her experiences at ABC in Judy Fireman’s TV Book: The Ultimate Television Book. In “Women in TV Sports,” Riger’s contribution to the edited collection, Riger contrasted the experience she had in films and pretaped shows with the relative lack of experience she had in other forms of production. ABC’s reluctance to assign her live broadcasts made Riger “suspect that uncertainty about whether a woman is up to the pressures of the live telecast” motivated decisions to prevent her from From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 71 producing such events.73 This prejudicial assessment kept Riger from developing women’s sports as she wished and prevented her from highly valued opportunities to produce live events. Riger’s frustrations centered on a general unwillingness of ABC Sports executives to grant her on-the-job experience that would position her to take on increased, improved, and varied assignments. In addition to assumptions about a woman’s capabilities to deal with high-pressure broadcasts, ABC cited Riger’s inexperience when rejecting her requests to produce particular events. This alleged inexperience was something that ABC created, perpetuated, and used to justify denying Riger opportunities and experience, thereby creating a selfperpetuating cycle. Riger kept logs of her producing credits versus those of other producers and retained handwritten notes made on memos from her bosses at ABC that indicated stalling tactics and outright rejection of her requests for work. These documents corroborated Riger’s claims about the disparity between her opportunities and those afforded her male coworkers and the network’s consistent practice of confining her to lesser productions. In one of the earliest memos kept on file, written in November 1975, Riger asked Chuck Howard, VP of programming for ABC Sports, for the opportunity to build her proficiency in live broadcasts in anticipation of the 1976 World Series of Wom- en’s Tennis. Riger had already been passed over as a producer of the US Women’s Open golf tournament in July 1975. Given that women’s sports were the “logical Figure 9. Eleanor Sanger Riger’s file folder that held evidence of discrimination she faced in her job as producer at ABC Sports (Eleanor Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College, SSC-MS-00286) 72 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” place” where she should work, Riger was troubled that she had missed out on such a high-profile event and felt it had cost her an opportunity for professional growth. Women’s golf tournaments in the mid-1970s were scarce and, as “the most difficult of live shows to produce,” would have been an invaluable experience for Riger as a producer. Riger presented the upcoming tennis series as compensation for missing this earlier opportunity and pitched her involvement as vital, since tennis was “the most likely women’s sport to get increased production.” Well aware of ABC’s prioritization of women’s sports at this time, Riger called upon her mandate as the woman who was hired to help ABC expand and improve its coverage of women’s sports. She assured Howard that if she were given the chance to produce the World Series of Women’s Tennis, then when ABC Sports covered “more women’s events live,” Riger would “be prepared to work on them.”74 In early 1976, Riger continued to push for inclusion in live event production through her proficiency in women’s sports coverage. Fresh from an Emmy win for her role in ABC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Riger wrote to request that she be just as involved in the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics. But this time she would focus on women’s rowing, basketball, volleyball, equestrian, gymnastics, swimming, and track. Riger felt she could bring “a certain amount of expertise to the women’s events” and that her “talents would be better utilized” in these live events than “in the film unit exclusively.”75 In August of the same year, Riger again utilized a strategy of calling upon a recent triumph to ask for a better assignment. She reminded Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, about the significance of the Colgate Special, which was “good to do and made a necessary contribution.”76 With Colgate “having done their bit on that,” Riger hypothesized that “the future lies in live reportage of events.”77 She wanted to produce segments on women’s sports, but major coverage would not happen “until 1984,” presumably in conjunction with the Olympics. In the meantime, Riger asked to be assigned to regional college football games and track and swim meets. She reinforced this request in another memo a few days later to Howard, in which she expressed her interest in producing live football broadcasts and mentioned multiple attempts to broach the topic with Arledge and others. By November 8, 1976, Riger had renewed requests to work on live football events. When asking to produce the Harvard-Yale game, Riger called on personal connections to Harvard. The retiring athletic director was a friend of hers, her son was applying to Harvard in the next year, and her family had long-standing ties to the school. In a memo to Chuck Howard, Riger explained that the experience “would be sort of a nice relationship since my father was class of ‘15, and four greatgrandfathers etc. going back to Zedichiah Sanger, Class of 1771,” had attended Harvard.78 Validating her interest in and abilities to produce the Harvard-Yale game through patriarchal lineage was a necessity. Riger had not attended Harvard and did not personally possess insider knowledge that would enrich the production. She did, however, strategically deploy this disadvantage. She reminded Howard From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 73 that if she had wanted to attend school in her hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Radcliffe would have been her only option. Harvard did not admit women at that time. By calling on her past experiences with institutionalized sexism and loss of opportunity, Riger implicitly, but none-too-subtly, called out the same problems she faced at ABC. Despite Riger’s persistence and multiple rhetorical strategies, her requests to work on live production were repeatedly rejected. In a December 1976 petition to produce the Colgate Triple Crown, Riger again called upon her previous association with Colgate as her qualification to continue working on their sponsored events. Howard wrote back to inform Riger that he was planning to produce it. For the 1977 Women’s Superstars, a special rematch from an earlier Battle of the Network Stars program, Riger asked to be involved in order to “improve.”79 Dennis Lewin, coordinating producer, responded by informing Riger that, after discussing “various possibilities,” Roone Arledge “wanted to see [producer/director] Doug Wilson do it.”80 Rather than being deterred by these rejections, Riger continued to ask to work on live broadcasts as well as on tape in 1977. Throughout the year she wrote memos that asked her bosses to assign her to a number of live events, including the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, baseball regionals, NCAA Football, and the Pro Bowler’s Tour.81 By March 28, 1978, the situation had not improved, and Riger expressed her frustration to Arledge about the upcoming production schedule. With no live shows assigned to her for three months, she was concerned that the quality of some of her recent producing efforts was being used against her. Riger challenged perceptions about her shortcomings as a producer; she described a lack of support provided to her by others (namely men) on the production team and rushed production timelines. A recent National Figure Skating Show, which Arledge had found “choppy without enough transition,” was compromised by flawed supervision of the project: she had received “little guidance” from Lewin and had been erroneously told that she could fix problems in postproduction with a larger window of time than she was granted. The production values of the show were further compromised by the “experimental direction” of director Terry Jastro.82 This correspondence marked a turning point in Riger’s career and her attitude toward her job. Rather than accept blame, Riger pointed out the disappointing efforts of others working on the production and the challenging circumstances of producing over which she had no control. She asked for better support staff that would allow her to “do as good a job” on live events as “any of the Associate Producers who have been given the chance.”83 She also asked “to be brought along with a reasonable amount of help to develop a strength in doing live shows,” a request that marked a new approach in Riger’s appeals to management. Whereas Riger had previously called upon her own strength and successes in previous productions, in this communication with Arledge she began to identify external forces that impeded the type and quality of work she wanted to undertake. 74 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” Riger took a proactive stance to address her lack of experience. In early 1978, she offered to take on bowling and other lower-prestige programming in preparation for higher-level productions but was informed by John Martin, vice president of ABC Sports, that she “was too ‘good’ ” for such assignments. When she was kept off the production schedule, she cited Martin’s objection and sardonically commented, “I guess I’m too good to work for three months.”84 Riger also bypassed her usual channels of communication at the producer level and voiced her concerns to higher-level members of the executive ranks. In January of 1978, Riger wrote directly to Martin to provide him with evidence of being refused production experience. She enclosed with her correspondence the memos she had previously written to Arledge, Howard, and others about her “interest in becoming a more productive and valuable producer at ABC sports.” While she felt “fortunate” to be assigned to three football regionals in fall of 1978, this opportunity was the exception to the rule. She recounted the “discouraging” responses she had to other requests and the lack of response to other memos. She also expressed how “anxious” she was to talk to Martin, along with the management at ABC Sports, “about the chance to do more live shows and more responsible Wide World [of Sports] shows.”85 Involving Martin seemed to improve Riger’s opportunities in producing live and electronic productions, yet when Riger continued to campaign for opportunities she was met with rejection at best and hostility at most. In a memo to Martin on August 6, 1979, Riger voiced her appreciation for being assigned to produce the Women’s and Men’s Gymnastics Trial, the Prescott Rodeo, and the Lumberjacks and Firemen’s competitions and asked to do the same for surfing shows based in Hawaii. Riger used what had become by this time her strategy: approaching multiple executives at different levels of power within the sports department. She informed Martin that she had asked Howard and others if she could produce the surfing shows and asked for Martin’s “consideration and help in this matter as well.” Martin wrote in response, “Don’t get greedy now!”86 CULTIVATING WOMEN ATHLETES AS SPORTS COMMENTATORS Although many of Riger’s career ambitions were thwarted, she tirelessly championed other women and created a mentoring workplace, particularly for on-air talent. She saw her training and support of commentators as a major contribution to ABC and emphasized it as one of her “assets” when she communicated her worth to her bosses at the network. When writing to Martin in 1978 in an exchange of memos concerning the stagnation of her career, Riger argued that she “work[ed] well with talent and [took] great pains and effort to help color people and announcers.” She backed up these assertions with a long list of color commentators—including high-profile talent Al Michaels and Frank Gifford, From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 75 female commentators Cathy Rigby and Andrea Kirby, and male athletes-turned- commentators Ron Johnson, Mark Spitz, and Verne Lundquist—who would attest to her skill and dedication to talent development.87 If ABC understood the value of “expanded programming” because of viewer interest and commercial investments, Riger argued, they should regard the development of women in production as equally important. Women athletes should be hired and trained as play-by-play announcers and color commentators, as their expertise and “point of view” would “add to the excitement of the telecast.”88 Playby-play announcers “describe the pertinent action” of the game “without delving too far into minutiae,” while color commentators offer analysis based on their own experience in sports and create narrative arcs, often with emotional elements, for gameplay.89 In supplementing the technical aspects of play-by-play announcing, color commentators help attract viewership, elevate viewer enjoyment, and provide a sense of “quality” and “enhanced entertainment value.”90 Both are vital to the success of televised sports, and Riger felt women could fulfill both roles. When proposing retrospective highlights of the Olympics to be aired in December 1975, Riger approached both Bruce Jenner (Caitlyn Jenner, who was then known as Bruce and publicly presented as male) and Dorothy Hamill as onair talent who would speak to the Olympic experience even before she approached ABC with the details of her production plans. When she did propose commentating teams to the network, she suggested that if Hamill was not available speed skating champion Sheila Young could be the next person to consider for the job. Thus Riger built into her proposal a (presumed) male and female pairing of the commentators and alternate plans for the female (but not male) commentator. This extra care preserved the gender balance in on-air talent and testifies to Riger’s priorities: creating space for women in sports broadcasting and naturalizing their presence there. When Riger promoted women for commentator jobs, she was not just providing them with important career opportunities, she was also shaping representations of women athletes. The language of commentary on televised sports is steeped in ideological assumptions about gender and race and “tends to weave a taken-for granted superordinate, adult masculine status around male athletes. Typically women are “linguistically infantilized and framed ambivalently” according to physicality and traits (e.g., aggression that makes them good athletes but atypically gendered women) and fall at the bottom of the “hierarchy of naming” (e.g., are called by their first rather than last names and are referred to as “girls” rather than women).91 More women commentators, even when paired with men, promised to correct those issues. Riger converted the profitability of women’s sports into opportunities for women to work in television in positions previously considered unsuitable for them. She fought for Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby as a color commentator and argued for Rigby’s potential in spite of criticism about her on-camera persona and delivery. As she did in many cases of athletes who were working on television for the first 76 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” time, Riger volunteered to undertake Rigby’s training. She had briefly assumed responsibility for the task when Rigby worked as a commentator on a gymnastics event in Moscow. Riger felt that Rigby did “very well on her on-camera pieces” and was careful to explain any flaws in Rigby’s performance. The production context was a challenging one: a “horrendous editing fiasco” caused an eight-hour delay in the voice-over, which started at 11:30 p.m. and ended at 3:00 a.m.92 Considering the circumstances, Riger felt Rigby had performed well. Riger also addressed the volume and pitch of Rigby’s voice. She noted the differences in male and female voices but minimized concerns about the “difficult contrast” created “with a male announcer off camera.” When Rigby appeared with a male cohost on camera, Riger told Chuck Howard that “the softness of her voice is not so jarring in contrast with the male voice.”93 Riger’s assurances about the quality of women’s voices for broadcasting address long-standing anxieties about women and sound technologies. As numerous feminist media scholars demonstrate, women’s voices have been scrutinized and deemed unsuitable for various sound technologies, from phonographs, radio, and telephones to film and television.94 Amy Lawrence’s historical overview of sound-based media notes that “woman’s place has been an issue argued in marketing reports, hiring practices, advertising strategies, in sound studios and in programming. And her ‘place’ in sound media is measured by the presence of her voice.”95 In a 1975 LA Times article that focused on the growing numbers of women in sports radio and television, Roone Arledge acknowledged that the “sound of women’s voices” was one of the many “prejudices” facing them in sportscasting.96 Under Arledge’s leadership, ABC had invested in Billie Jean King with the hopes that she would make an “excellent” commentator. According to Arledge’s criteria, King possessed knowledge that enriched play-by-play analysis as well as “a certain kind of voice, a heavy voice” that would “cut through crowd noise” and overcome “technical problems” of live broadcasting.97 When advocating for women to join the ranks of ABC Sports, Riger called upon known signifiers of “excellent” production work while identifying additional qualities that were specific to her own experience and priorities as a woman in a male-dominated industry. In her first year as producer at ABC, Riger pushed to hire swimmer Donna de Varona as the “first woman commentator under contract to a TV Network for regular work on television sports.” Her memo to Arledge underscored the value in the forward-thinking hire, with a subject line “ABC’s First Staff Woman Commentator” and language that reinforced the payoff for ABC. Riger used her own hire as a “first” and the subsequent publicity it brought to the network as incentive for them to hire the “FIRST regular [female] commentator.” Just as she had done with King’s hire, Riger called on future demand and the possible loss ABC would experience if they were not the frontrunners in all areas of women’s sports. She emphatically predicted the “expansion of programming in women’s sports,” which she saw evidence for in “clients’ interest, From “Jockocratic Endeavors” 77 magazine coverage, public response.” With this guaranteed future in women’s sports, Riger painted a troubled future for the network if it lost a vital worker who could assist in their success in a competitive marketplace: “WE MUST STAY AHEAD! CBS is trying to make up ground and they already used Donna and are making noises about more work for her. We should really put her under exclusive contract or we will lose her.”98 Riger’s comment positioned de Varona as a symbol of ABC’s progressiveness and as a sought-after worker with strong qualifications for the job, all of which challenged assumptions of women’s unsuitability for sports announcing. Riger took care to stress de Varona’s professional capabilities. Her “talent and experience,” evinced in local broadcasts and talk show interviews, and her knowledge of sports, including and beyond swimming, made her capable of commentating on a variety of events. Riger also credited de Varona with affective and interpersonal skills that were less typical qualifications for the job and instead were used to disqualify women from commentating. As someone who “knows and is liked by her athlete peers,” de Varona possessed qualities typically associated with women and femininity— likability and cooperation—which Riger identified as assets for the job.99 RIGER’S LEGACY, OR DOES IT MATTER IF A WOMAN WORKS IN SPORTS TELEVISION? Unlike the legacy of her on-air contemporary Billie Jean King, Riger’s contribution to women’s sports on television is not an obvious one, in part because of the relative invisibility of production staff versus a sports celebrity and in part because of the lack of opportunities Riger experienced at ABC Sports. Even as Riger advocated for women in sports television, she met obstacles in her own career aspirations to the point that, in the late 1970s, she publicly aired ABC’s discriminatory practices and took legal action. After that, she continued to produce for ABC, most notably segments for the 1980 and 1984 Olympics. In 1985, Riger shifted to part-time employment at the network, where she continued to produce high-profile events like the 1988 Summer Olympics but increasingly focused on lower-budget productions in cable television. As her producing career shifted to cable, Riger continued to champion female talent in sports television. While she had worked in prestigious network programming, Riger felt that women’s programming in cable offered an opportunity “for entertaining as well as enlightening women.”100 She worked on Basic Fitness with Diana Nyad, a ten-minute exercise segment for Daytime (1982–84), a four-hour programming block for women on cable television that, through a series of mergers, would become Lifetime Television Network in 1984. Riger was committed to the value of cable television for women and proposed, in 1982, “future programming” featuring Nyad.101 In 1985, Riger continued to work in exercise programs with women at the center, producing ABC Funfit (1985–86), hosted by Olympic 78 From “Jockocratic Endeavors” gymnast host Mary Lou Retton. She suggested ABC-Hearst hire Kaoru Nakamuru, the “Barbara Walters of Japan,” as someone who should become part of Daytime and arranged for videotapes of Nakamuru’s show in Japan to be viewed by the head of programming.102 In 1983 she wrote to James Spence, the senior vice president of sports at ABC, to express how “impressed” she was in his interest in “developing female talent” and his “perceptive way of going about it” and recommended a “serious training program for new and also most current talent” that she would supervise.103 In 1984, Riger also put herself forward as someone who could develop European programming for ESPN.104 While few of her plans came to fruition, Riger continued, to the end of her career, to identify areas of growth for women’s sports on television and paired her own ambitions with those of other women who wanted to break into sports television. In addition to her influence on sports television, Riger’s legacy was one of making visible the gender-specific circumstances women had to deal with across professions. In 1981, Riger joined the board of directors for the Wonder Woman Foundation, an organization that awarded grants to women over the age of forty so they could pursue their occupational goals. The organization’s recognition that women’s careers were frequently delayed because of marriage and child-rearing resonated with Riger’s own experiences. She knew that her time away from production in the late 1960s had put her behind her male contemporaries when she was hired as a producer by ABC in 1973. In a 1977 letter to Roone Arledge, Riger described the disadvantages she faced with the gap in her career at ABC: “Unfortunately the years I missed were those years of training in live production which production assistants and associate producers received at ABC Sports. I have observed how associate producers like Terry O’Neil, Terry Jastrow, Bob Goodrich, etc. have been brought along by this route. I hope I can still be allowed to catch up.”105 By 1979, Riger negotiated for better pay, realizing that she did not have “that many more maximum earning ye ars .” 106 In addition to the professional development she had less time to experience, Riger’s shortened wage-earning lifetime was something she felt keenly. Last, and not least, Riger offers instructive lessons about unprecedented television careers for women. With the sexism endemic to sports television and the feminist activist pressure that brought about her position, Riger was often treated as a token hire at ABC. Despite this constraint, Riger influenced the aesthetics of sports programs, proved an important advocate for female talent, and served as a meaningful mentor to women working in sports television. Riger did not just pressure ABC to make room for women within the traditions of sports television, she sought to alter the terms of these traditions. She challenged what defined a viable worker, a marketable athlete, and a ratings-winning broadcast in sports television. She used ABC’s investment, regardless of motivation, in her pioneering role to argue that in order to succeed in a competitive new era of sports television, the network needed to value women as viewers, the subject of programming, and workers in the industry. 79 3 Working in the Lear Factory Ann Marcus, Virginia Carter, and the Women of Tandem Productions When television writer Ann Marcus proposed writing a memoir about her time working on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, she described the project as “the very subjective—but funny (and sometimes painful) story of my experiences as the co-creator and head writer of America’s most talked-about television show.” To illustrate what she had in mind, Marcus recalled a lengthy description of the pressures she faced in resolving the numerous cliffhangers left at the end of the first season. She set up an appointment with Norman Lear, the show’s producer and head of Tandem/TAT Productions, to discuss her concerns about starting the second season. She wrote about her exchange with Lear as follows: “Norman,” I said, “we’re in terrible trouble. The hiatus is almost over. Production is going to start up in two weeks and we haven’t decided whether the bullet ricocheted off Merle’s belt buckle and shoots Charlie’s ball off or not!” “Annie,” said Norman, pinching my cheeks, “there are six hundred million Chinamen [sic] who have never even heard of MARY HARTMAN.” What he was telling me was that the world would survive whether the second season of MARY HARTMAN started or not and that was all well and good, but there were times during the first season of MARY HARTMAN when I damned well didn’t think I would survive.1 Marcus’s anecdote underscores the offbeat qualities for which Mary Hartman was famous, as well as the intensive demands of managing the program’s complex story world. It also reveals that, even though Lear is credited for the innovative output for which Tandem was known, women like Marcus were central in cultivating and sustaining the company’s signature style. While Ann Marcus was working on the second season of Mary Hartman, another writer, Paddy Chayefsky, was pondering the state of television. With the 86 Working in the Lear Factory impotence, venereal disease, and the yellow waxy buildup on Mary’s kitchen floors.” When Wallace asked Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie Bunker, “What do you think of Mary Hartman?” O’Connor talked over the question, ignored it, and continued his thoughts on his ongoing salary negotiations for his work on All in the Family. When Wallace came back to the question later, a visibly uncomfortable O’Connor struggled to respond. “Uh, I haven’t seen ... well, I, uh, enjoy it,” he stammered. He then asked Wallace, “You’re not asking for uh, a, uh, a kind of a, uh, of critical thing ... ?” Wallace pointedly countered, “I’m asking for a television criticism.” At that moment, costar Sally Struthers came to O’Connor’s rescue. She instructed Wallace to “ask [O’Connor] again what he thinks of Mary Hartman” and then held a “Do Not Disturb” sign up to the camera.28 The hesitancy, equivocation, and stonewalling of the All in the Family cast responses indicated wider unease with Mary Hartman. Although the pilot was initially scripted for CBS, the network did not pick up the series. CBS’s reaction seems surprising, considering that Tandem supplied the network with socially responsive content that was both highly rated and critically acclaimed. By the 1972–73 television season, the network had revamped its image and positioned itself as a formidable ratings winner by using “three sitcom anchors” (All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H [1972-83]) to contend with “overtly with social issues of the day.”29 By the time of Mary Hartman’s airing in January 1976, CBS had aired Tandem programs that addressed a host of “controversial” concerns (All in the Family, Good Times, and The Jeffersons [1975–85]) and centered female protagonists who represented changing gender roles and the influence of women’s liberation (Maude and One Day at a Time [1975–84]). Seemingly, Mary Hartman would have complemented CBS’s evolving relationship to relevance and, more particularly, would have worked with what Elana Levine describes as the “politicized brand of sexual humor” of its comedies. In the early 1970s, CBS led the way into “new sex-themed territory,” and the other Figure 11. Norman Lear looks on while Sally Struthers saves Carroll O’Connor from an uncomfortable discussion about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. 60 Minutes, CBS, April 11, 1976. Working in the Lear Factory 87 networks soon followed.30 NBC relaxed its standards and practices, and dramas at ABC and NBC featured content involving sexual issues and identities. With depictions of and discussions about sexual dysfunction, exhibitionism, bisexuality, a relationship between two men, gay marriage, and group sex, Mary Hartman effectively merged the soap opera with comedy and social commentary that fit in with television’s new sexual frankness and experimentation. Despite what seemed like an ideal product for television at the time, all three networks passed on Mary Hartman, and Lear turned to Rhodes Productions— a company that specialized in syndicated programs, including game shows and animation—for distribution.31 Publicity generated by Tandem redefined rejection by the networks into a positive value. The press kit for Mary Hartman uses the networks’ reactions to underscore the program’s unprecedented unconventionality: “Regardless of the impressive credentials of Lear (All in the Family, Maude, Good Times) and his superlative writers and cast, all three networks rejected the series on the grounds that it was ‘too far out’ for their viewers.”32 Lear amplified the oddity of the program by describing Mary Hartman as “simply taking a look at our life and times through another kind of prism” and followed this innocuous description with a more unsettling one: “Of course the prism may appear to have been fashioned by a drunken lens maker in a darkly wooded German forest.”33 This promotional framework positions Lear, the only named figure involved in the production, as responsible for shepherding a perversely innovative show past the unimaginative gatekeepers of the television industry. Crediting Lear as the central agent of Mary Hartman’s success is tempting and perhaps inevitable. Erin Lee Mock’s scholarship on Mary Hartman identifies the problems of focusing on individualized creation mythologies, given the collaborative dimensions of television production. Yet Lear is a difficult figure to decenter. Mock maintains that “Mary Hartman could only have existed due to the stewardship of Lear, whose prominence and history of genre play prepared him to create this unique program and prepared viewers to accept it.”34 Journalistic coverage at the time of Mary Hartman’s airing supports this assessment. A Newsweek article decreed, “Only Norman Lear has the power—and the chutzpah—to bring such a mind-blowing mélange to television.”35 Lear’s creative abilities were matched by his talent to generate publicity through his dynamic and self-assured personality, all of which made him a central character in the story not just in Mary Hartman but in all of Tandem’s productions. In his 2014 autobiography, Lear looms large in his retrospective history of the company’s ingenuity and popularity: The way I experienced the wonder we were caught up in was on a number of redeye flights from L.A. to New York. I would look down anywhere over America and think it just possible that wherever I saw a light there could be someone, maybe an entire family, I’d helped to make laugh. In my dissociated fashion I marveled at this, but it was nothing compared to what I understand now, that I was the architect of all that.36 88 Working in the Lear Factory Despite the mystification of collective labor through the exceptional individual, other workers—the drunken lens makers who skewed conventional storytelling to tell unsettling truths about contemporary culture—very clearly played critical roles in Tandem’s products. At the height of his and his company’s success, Lear took care to acknowledge the collective force of workers and to minimize his centrality in Tandem’s operations. Although, given the ways that Lear’s auteur status was advantageous to the company and his career, this move seemed counterintuitive, it was crucial in challenging the reputation of Tandem as “the Lear Factory.” This moniker was used by Wallace in his 60 Minutes profile of Lear to sum up the company’s intensive productivity and method of content creation. When, in the interview, Lear claimed that television’s commercialism and concerns of retaining advertisers made getting Tandem’s shows to air difficult, Wallace countered by claiming that Lear’s interests were very similar to those of the forces he criticized. With seven shows running concurrently at the time of the interview, Wallace asserted, “the Lear Factory is in the business of improving last year’s profits.” In Wallace’s assessment, the organization of the company mimicked an assembly line workflow, with Lear functioning as “a foreman” who “spots problems and solves them fast, because time is money.”37 While Lear evaded the issue of his drive for profitability, the physical organization of Tandem confirmed a goal of maximizing efficiency. The production of all programs at the time of the 60 Minutes interview, with the exception of Mary Hartman, took place in a single building. This arrangement afforded Lear efficient access to the company’s shows and reinforced the factory concept. A factory model positions Lear as the central figure who drives the output of the company; all other workers are rendered invisible or envisioned as cogs in the machinery run by Lear as overseer. Lear rejected this conceptualization of his company, and Wallace noted that Lear “hated” to hear Tandem called the Lear Factory. In a rejoinder to Wallace’s characterization, Lear argued, “Each show, as you well observed, is staffed by the best writers, the best producers, the best directors, the best actors, the best in this town.”38 Regardless of Lear’s true feelings about profitability, in order to maintain Tandem’s brand Lear needed to foreground the creativity, individual perspectives, and exceptional skills of each of the company’s workers. With such qualities, the company’s workforce positioned Tandem as a unique entity within the commercial television industry. Lear’s investment in Tandem’s image as artisanal and collectively driven was doubtless strategic as well as ideological. Lear championed progressive movements through his own celebrity and the programming his company produced, and his sense of self and public persona were clearly grounded in “liberal” politics. Therefore, his valuation of workers aligned with his political sensibilities and commitment to innovative television production. But it also made good business sense. Relying on its workers for their unique insights and talents helped Tandem respond to changing cultural norms and enriched the company. This was particularly Working in the Lear Factory 89 true of women workers at Tandem. They brought with them important points of view about gender, professional capabilities and work practices atypical for primetime television production, and personal commitments to projects about women that shaped the company, enriched its product, and fostered its standing as a maverick force in the industry. Mary Hartman was notable for the number of women involved in its production. In its first season alone, the show employed women as producer (Viva Knight), two out of four directors (Joan Darling and Harlene Kim Friedman), three out of seven writers (Ann Marcus, Peggy Goldman, and Lynn Phillips), one out of two program consultants (Elizabeth Haley), two out of four creators (Gail Parent and Ann Marcus), both of the costume designers (Rita Riggs and Sandra Baker), the casting director (Jane Murray), the production assistant (Susan Harris), and the director of publicity (Barbara Brogliatti). With a cast that featured Louise Lasser as protagonist Mary Hartman, the “project was further enhanced” with Joan Darling as a director.39 When publicity was not focused on lauding Lear as the guiding force of the production, it highlighted the accomplishments of these women and, in doing so, touted Tandem as a company that offered women remarkable opportunities for advancement. The press kit for Mary Hartman included biographical information on producer Viva Knight that traced her journey from North Texas University to California. Along the way, she had worked as a secretary while taking courses in television production, and then had taken jobs as a student talent coordinator for a local television show, an assistant to the producer for a local public affairs program, and a script secretary for a network series. Her success “prove[d] that a woman’s place is anywhere she has the desire and initiative for it to be.”40 The story of Knight’s career at Tandem countered concerns that the hiring boom for women in television in the early to mid-seventies was merely, as the 1977 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights described it, “window dressing on the set.”41 When Knight came to the company in 1973, she rose rapidly through its ranks, and her talents were recognized even when she was working in a traditionally feminized and undervalued position. Knight started out at Tandem as a secretary for Good Times producer Allan Manings and was promoted to associate producer of the show within six months.42 When the show went on hiatus, she served as the associate producer for Lear’s pilots, one of which was Mary Hartman. Knight’s impressive “performance” on the job, along with a producer’s unexpected leave, prompted Lear to “break precedence” and make Knight—who was not a writer, as would be expected background for such a promotion—a producer for the show. Her entire trajectory from secretary to producer at Tandem took “some two years and two months.”43 In an interview with Ms., Ann Marcus confirmed how her personal background shaped her vision for Mary; it was based in her own “sense of the everyday absurd, based on years of housewifely domesticity.”44 Although Marcus shepherded the 90 Working in the Lear Factory program through its complex development across two seasons and 195 episodes and is named as one of the show’s creators, she credited other women with bringing the titular character and her gender complaints to life. She acknowledged Gail Parent as the originator of the characterizations of Mary and her family, initial ideas that Marcus used to build a fully formulated story. Lear wanted to make a “funny soap opera,” and from that guidance alone Parent worked “solo for a long time” as a “first creator” to produce a show bible that, in her description, was “more than a treatment.” Whereas a treatment would typically run ten pages and cover what a show was “going to be about,” the bible, in comparison, “actually took you a little more into a season” and was “about what could happen.”45 Although Parent was not directly involved in Marcus’s work on the show—she was working on another project by the time the show moved into production—and was “not there on a day-to-day basis,” Marcus honored Parent’s contribution to the development of Mary Hartman’s story world.46 Parent also inspired Lear to cast Louise Lasser as Mary Hartman, as both women had a “very slow way of talking” and Lear wanted to bring that aspect to screen.47 Marcus also credited Louise Lasser as the other primary influence on the character. Lasser “became Mary Hartman” and, in this transformation, “created that crazy little girl look ... puffy little housedress and slow way of talking.”48 Lear himself recognized the influence women had on Mary Hartman. The show “became an amalgam of what [he] wished to do and of the great gifts that Louise Lasser as an actress brought to it and that Joan Darling brought to it.” Lear went on to argue that one could not “separate” the contributions these women made: “ ‘Mary Hartman’ would not have been the same ‘Mary Hartman’ had another actress played the character, and it probably would not have been the same if another director had directed it. All of those components were important.”49 Acknowledging the collaborative nature of a television show’s creation answers back to the rise of auteurism that was taking hold of Hollywood and film criticism, both academic and journalistic, during the 1970s. Television was following a similar path, searching for the singular authoring figure that would redeem it from the commercial morass of the industry. In 1977, Horace Newcomb named Lear as the “most prominent of the ‘self-conscious’ producers, a type of television worker that brought added value to productions.”50 Their personal vision, Newcomb argued, made it possible to “suddenly cut through the massive anonymity of television.”51 In centering women in American film of the 1970s, Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer identify the “critical construct” that is New Hollywood and the ways that the “academic cult of the auteurist New Hollywood” “only replicates and reinforces the industry’s own exclusions.”52 Centering women in television places similar pressure on notions of authorship and how texts identified as key to the era of “relevant” television in the 1970s were produced. The women involved in making Mary Hartman merged their individual creative visions and acknowledged as much, thereby accurately and Working in the Lear Factory 91 ethically reflecting the shared labor of television. Their testimony about their communal creativity also calls into question Lear as the primary creator of Mary Hartman and the notion of the “self-conscious producer” as television’s analogue to New Hollywood’s auteur. Women including and beyond Parent, Lasser, and Marcus put their talents and labor toward creating a “prototypical” 1970s housewife who, in Marcus’s words, “never felt she was living up to her full potential and didn’t know what her potential was.”53 The impact these women had on the program surpassed their job titles. Lasser credited both the director and the costume designer as key contributors to the character of Mary Hartman. The actor described Darling as a “director that cast everything, and it was her vision of the show that got shot, and she was the one that was like an acting teacher, so we were very dependent on her.”54 The genesis of Mary’s look came with the unusual intervention of costume designer Rita Riggs. After consulting with Lasser about the types of colors she liked, Riggs told Lasser, “I’d like to make a costume for you” —a unique offering at the time because, according to Lasser, “no one in those shows had that kind of a separate costume before.”55 With this “brilliant costume to take through everything,” Lasser and the women who worked on her hair “all sort of nursed [Mary] along.”56 ANN MARCUS AND THE FEMINIST-HELMED WRITERS’ ROOM Ann Marcus’s expertise as a soap opera writer allowed her to actualize Mary Hartman. The program needed to both satirize the conventions of the soap opera and “have enough of a storyline going for it, so that it would attract people on that level, too.” When she interviewed for the job, Marcus was working on Search for Tomorrow (CBS, 1951–82; NBC, 1982–86) and understood very well the work demands of soap opera writing. Marcus “didn’t have a reputation as a top comedy writer” but won the job as head writer for Mary Hartman over “a lot of male top comedy writers at that time” who interviewed for this highly coveted position. None of them could capture the complexity of the storylines and tone of the show. Marcus, however, knew how to “keep the story going” with a storyline, “a lot of characters,” and intermingled stories. Such work was not just rarefied but onerous. As Marcus said of the work, “It’s difficult. It’s hard. It’s tricky.” Knowing how to keep up the pace of producing a daily program was something Marcus brought to the production. She maintained focus and efficiency in the writers’ room and moved conversations to larger-picture issues when others in writing meetings were mired in smaller details. The “chore” of working on a serial and the “hard, hard work turning out five scripts a week” was something, again, that Marcus knew well.57 As Mary Hartman’s head writer, Marcus took responsibility for story structure in the development of scripts and often reminded the writing staff and Lear 92 Working in the Lear Factory about the structural elements that the serial form required. Given her background in soaps, Marcus was able to prioritize story arcs, economy in reaching climatic moments, and believability in the midst of heightened drama. In one meeting, the writers struggled to find a satisfying end to an episode that involved a dramatic death of a character and the ongoing decline of Mary’s marriage. They debated the consequences of two choices: a discussion of a funeral or a scene with Mary in her kitchen. The argument for the former was the alleviation of work for Lasser, who already had two full scenes, or half of the episode, in which to act. Anything additional would be “a nightmare to handle.” Marcus countered with a bid to end with Mary in the kitchen. “All we’re trying to do is to give it a kind of flow,” Marcus reasoned, “and to remind [viewers] to tune in tomorrow so they’ll tune in.”58 In other meetings, Marcus guided writers on what and how much content would successfully constitute an act, what would help move storylines along, and what would help remind viewers of multiple storylines and conflicts. While Marcus was capable of fostering a culture of productivity, she also pushed back against pressures on output, particularly when they compromised her own needs and the pacing of work she felt necessary to work through a script. Seemingly without exception, these pressures came from male coworkers. Mary Hartman writer Daniel Gregory Browne said to Marcus in a writers’ meeting, “I just want to throw you ahead to what Norman had said in terms of the end of this week and where we go from there.” Marcus replied, “I haven’t finished because I’m getting to there,” and proceeded to return to the plot concern that was under discussion.59 At a meeting held in late December, before a vacation break, when someone asked Lear when he wanted an outline for a complex storyline, Lear answered, “They’re due. The scripts are due. They should be done right before you hit the slopes.” Marcus responded, “You’re kidding. You have two weeks of scripts.”60 After this comment, Lear relented and asked for outlines rather than completed scripts before Marcus left for her vacation. As head writer on Mary Hartman, Marcus occupied an authoritative position on the production of the show, something that she worked hard to define and defend. She struggled in the first season of the show to balance “wanting very much to succeed, to be loved and needed and admired,” with the difficulties of working in “the midst of all those other people with egos just as big or bigger even than mine.” Even as she negotiated her desire for acceptance, Marcus kept sight of the importance of her perspective and held the line on telling stories that reflected women’s experiences. When Lear and the show’s writers proposed their various storylines, Marcus was “most times the only woman in the meeting.”61 As transcripts for Mary Hartman’s writers’ meetings demonstrate, Marcus was keen to offer women’s perspectives and was able to insist on introducing them to and keeping them in the script. In a writers’ meeting held on December 30, 1975, program consultant Oliver Hayley raised an objection to a storyline involving a pregnancy that ended in a Working in the Lear Factory 93 miscarriage. The ensuing conversation reflects the contested efforts to ground a storyline in realistic and meaningful women’s experiences. Hayley began the conversation by asking, “May I just say something, and everyone can get offended? I HATE dead babies. I don’t think there is anything funny about dead babies.” He then pitched “an outrageous idea” from director Joan Darling. Darling suggested that the pregnancy itself could be a false alarm: and that rather than carrying a fetus, the character would have a misdiagnosed fibroid tumor. Marcus responded to this suggestion by saying, “I think it’s hysterical” and proceeded to build, with others in the room, a string of humorous scenarios and lines. Writer Jerry Adelman was not convinced by this plan, arguing that “this is a honest-to-God tragedy.” After Hayley further defended the comedic possibilities of the scenario, Lear asked, “How big a mistake is that for a doctor to make?” Someone else in the room argued, “It’s a ridiculous mistake.” Hayley replied, “It is not. There are a great many women who think that they are pregnant and turn out to have a fibroid tumor.”62 The fibroid storyline that originated with Darling made it to air on the twenty-fifth episode of season 1 with very few changes made to the idea generated in the writers’ meeting. The successful corrective to the original storyline revised a potentially unfunny storyline about “dead babies” to one that highlighted women’s experiences with reproductive health care; it also indicates how the writers’ room, under Marcus’s guidance and with collaborative efforts, protected an idea that originated with another woman on the production team. The very notion that Mary Hartman should explore a woman’s dissatisfaction, something that defined the series, was a concept that had to be defended in its early stages of development. In a writers’ meeting that took place on January 20, 1976, just two weeks after the inaugural episode aired, Lear outlined the terms of Mary Hartman’s unhappiness as a working-class wife and mother. The complications of her situation stemmed from her desire to be something more, which conflicted with other messages women like her received from powerful antifeminist, anti-ERA forces and television’s consumerist address to women. Lear reminded the writers of the class-based dynamics of the character: “We forget all of these commercials that are interrupting our shows are about oven cleaners, etc. and it’s because the bulk of America is still wrapped up in those problems and we forget about all those products if we can afford to have somebody do this for us, we forget how much time is spent cleaning ovens, etc.” Lear wanted to develop the complexity of Mary’s awakening as someone who “lives where she lives, has only as much knowledge as she has,” and is therefore “trying to break out and denying at the same time that that’s what she’s trying to do.” Marcus supported this characterization for the efficient way it determined the story world. “Giving her this whole inner thing that you’re talking about,” she argued, “defines the other characters immediately” because Mary gauged her sense of self through the women in her life who presented various options for emancipation.63 94 Working in the Lear Factory Not everyone in the room was supportive of this framework. Writer Daniel Gregory Browne responded negatively to characterizing Mary’s struggle with empowerment. He described the central conflict as “very boring and not very comedic because it’s been done to death all over the country.” Browne elaborated his misgivings by asserting, “I think it’s done on television a great deal. I think that everyone is somewhat into it—I think we’re very deep in the women’s movement now.” After some back-and-forth with others in the room, Browne noted that Alice (CBS, 1976–85) was forthcoming and “we don’t want to ace Alice out on this.” Someone else felt that the frustration of a woman was not unique and that it “doesn’t manifest into terribly exciting or funny scenes because it’s where every woman is at.”64 The objections raised in the writers’ room suggest the fragility of launching a project that expressed women’s disillusionment and connected to themes of the women’s movement. Resistance to such a project was based on assumptions that there was a finite capacity for stories about women on television, that they were abundant, and that women’s concerns had been more than adequately expressed. Here Marcus intervened and clarified that those who objected to the idea were mistakenly “taking what Norman is saying as a story line, this is only a subject.” When the discussion continued along the same lines, Marcus broke in to move the discussion forward to more productive outcomes. “I don’t think we should spend any more time on the philosophical underpinning of Mary Hartman,” maintained Marcus. “I think we are in agreement on that. We need strong stories that aren’t just 3 or 4 scenes. But based on this kind of character we have to build a strong story that has all kinds of things—we have to do wonderful inventive things. I haven’t come up with these things yet because we haven’t talked about them yet and I hope we can talk about this.”65 Marcus pushed the meeting past its sticking point. She prioritized her agenda—the development of “inventive” ideas— while asserting consensus on women’s liberation as a central issue in the program. This small but effective gesture put an end to the momentum that was gathering against telling the story of a female protagonist’s complex relationship to the women’s movement. In writing to Gloria Steinem, whom she credited, along with Simone de Beauvoir, with her feminist consciousness, Marcus described her staunch allegiance to feminism. “I have been in the Movement, spiritually, ever since I was a kid,” Marcus informed Steinem.66 Marcus’s feminism played an important role in shaping Mary Hartman, particularly because, from her perspective, “Norman was a chauvinist in 1975.”67 Although Marcus credits Lear with being a “modern,” “openminded liberal” with an “incredibly inquisitive kind of mind,” the timeline of his conversion to feminism is unclear.68 Sometime in the 1970s, during his marriage to Frances Lear, whom their daughter Kate Lear described as a “feminist who changed the lives of many women,” Norman Lear began to identify as a feminist.69 “Frances was very much engaged in the women’s movement,” Lear recalled, “and I, Working in the Lear Factory 95 as the father of three daughters at that time, was also. So we all became feminists.”70 Regardless of when, precisely, Lear identified as a feminist, his gender politics were not fully evolved at the start of his professional relationship with Marcus. If Lear’s chauvinism was intact and on display in the year prior to the premiere of Mary Hartman in January 1976, then it follows that Marcus, rather than Lear, was a central agent in articulating feminist sentiment and progressive gender perspectives in the planning of the show. Marcus’s feminist consciousness helped move script ideas in development away from offensive and regressive content. When one of Mary Hartman’s neighbors, who was a closeted gay man, was outed to Mary by another character, a writer suggested that the line read, “By the way, your neighbor is a fag [sic].” Someone else at the meeting suggested that the “best euphemism you can find,” along the lines of “They weren’t really brothers after all, you know,” should be used instead of the homophobic slur. Another writer questioned how anyone would know someone’s secret sexual identity: it was “awfully convenient that a total stranger drops in” and, after a brief encounter, knows that Mary Hartman’s neighbor is “a fag [sic],” repeating the slur introduced earlier in the conversation. The writer then suggested that, rather than an uneventful, off-screen encounter that results in the revelation of the neighbor’s sexuality, “there has to be something there to build it up. I think if it’s made funny, it will work.” Without hearing further details, Marcus shut down this potential storyline by saying, “That isn’t funny.”71 Given the offensive language used in the pitch, it was likely that anything else that would make a gay man’s sexuality signify clearly enough for a stranger to identify it would be equally offensive. HYSTERIA, MONSTROSITY, AND OTHER GENDERED ANXIETIES ABOUT THE STATE OF TELEVISION Among its many accomplishments, Tandem introduced feminized genres into prime-time and late-night programming, appealed to women viewers, and acknowledged and accommodated activist concerns. Because of this, the company was credited with ushering in a new era of television that would reverse the industry’s worst offenses. In other contexts, however, these very same changes were ones that alarmed the most vocal of television’s critics at the time. In bemoaning the fate of television, even as they praised Lear, these critics identified women and minorities as the forces that were diluting and perverting television and its artistic potential. Most notably, as discussed at the opening of this chapter, self-professed Lear fan Paddy Chayefsky worried about feminizing forces corrupting even the most visionary creative who worked in the industry in the 1970s. When he predicted Lear’s corruption by the “monstrous test pattern,” Chayefsky described how “hysterical” Lear would become once he encountered problems with ratings.72 In calling on hysteria, or “the symptom, to put it crudely, of being a woman,” to describe the downfall of a fellow television innovator, Chayefsky 102 Working in the Lear Factory By the late 1970s, AWRT had been charting incidents of discrimination in the workplace long enough that it could track changes in those areas. In 1978 it noted that while the “typical” AWRT member reported to a man on the job, 40 percent of the women polled supervised the work of at least one man, which marked an increase of 10 percent over 1974 findings. In addition to numerical data about women’s place in hierarchical structures, the 1978 report included information about women’s workplace experiences in its “Women on the Job” section. AWRT’s 1973 survey found that 23.6 percent of members “cited sex discrimination as the major obstacle” in the workplace, but between that survey and the 1978 report, 75.8 percent of members had “personally witnessed or experienced an improvement in attitude toward women in their field of work.” By 1978, the “majority” of survey respondents indicated that they had “experienced neither sex favoritism nor sex discrimination on the job, and only 12.2% considered their sex a major deterrent to job advancement.” AWRT believed these findings demonstrated “a change in attitude” within the industry and signaled meaningful improvements Although hopeful about the progress women were making, the report was careful to identify new challenges for women in the workplace, primarily in the “lack of opportunity” that “impede[d] their progress.”90 In her work on equal employment practices during the 1970s, Miranda Banks corrects assumptions about workplace opportunities for women and minorities when these are gauged by statistics alone. She dissects numerical figures and supplements them with experiential evidence from women as they worked on productions. Even when women were employed on television shows that were “comparatively progressive about racial or gender inclusivity (few were both), the experience of women working on the series often involved playing educator to male colleagues about sexism.” When women were not in positions of authority on a production or in a company, their efforts at education generally had no measurable effect. For instance, when writer Treva Silverman worked on Mary Tyler Moore and called attention to sexism in a script, “the head writers were unresponsive.” Even in “best case scenarios,” Banks argues, “producers responded well to criticism and made adjustments—but with virtually all series run by white men, the parameters of inclusivity were still determined by white men.”91 VIRGINIA CARTER AND FEMINIST OVERSIGHT AT TANDEM When FCC chair Robert E. Lee addressed the AWRT at their 1975 meeting, he advised them on how best to make real gains in their professions.92 Characterized as a “champion” of equal employment, Lee identified the “divide and conquer” strategy the television industry used to “pit women against minorities for jobs” and advocated for “united action” among all marginalized workers.93 Lee especially urged “women in minorities” to seek out high-level jobs as “news directors, Working in the Lear Factory 103 program directors, producers, directors and editorial writers,” where “the real power” in broadcasting was located.94 Finally, Lee called out the entire film and television industry, including institutions that operated beyond FCC jurisdiction, to account for racist and sexist employment practices. Television networks, film studios, and production companies alike were responsible for improving the number of women and minorities they employed within and beyond creative jobs, particularly in executive positions that held considerable authority and influence. In 1973, two years before Lee’s speech, Virginia Carter was hired as an assistant to Norman Lear and as a consultant for feminist guidance and oversight within Tandem. Concerns about women’s role in television motivated Lear to hire Carter. Lear understood that his own production company was not immune from gender inequalities, particularly at its most powerful levels. In a planning meeting for All That Glitters (1977), a gender-role reversal satire in which women dominate the executive ranks of multinational corporations, Lear reflected on the persistence of sexism in business, including television. “This company is perhaps as open in that respect as any company I know,” observed Lear, “and yet look around. True, Virginia [Carter] and I have talked about this. ... The doors have not been opened enough.” Lear speculated that a woman would not ascend to his job “until the doors have been opened long enough, enough women have been able to write long enough, produce long enough, direct long enough. Women are only beginning to direct. They’ve never had the opportunities.”95 Lear’s assessment reflects his awareness of structural barriers and sexist traditions that restricted women’s full participation in the industry. In spite of Tandem’s shortcomings, women did possess the all-too-rare ability to control and counsel on certain productions and in specific roles in the company. Carter was an unlikely hire, in terms of both her job description and her professional background. Her primary purpose at Tandem, according to Lear, was to “establish and maintain equity in our hiring and in our scripts.”96 At the time Lear hired her, Carter was a trained physicist working at the Aerospace Corporation. Lear acknowledged the unorthodox decision of hiring a research scientist for a job in the entertainment industry but explained Carter’s worth through her feminist credentials. Lear valued Carter because of “ ‘what she could teach [him] and [his] company about the fledgling women’s movement and, in fact, about being a decent human being.’ ”97 Given Tandem’s status as an independent production company, which operated outside of FCC regulations, Carter’s hiring, influence, and ascent in the executive ranks there indicates the company’s investment in the types of equal opportunity practices endorsed by Robert E. Lee. Carter came to Lear’s attention through her relationship with Frances Lear, Norman’s then-wife and the “resident EEOC” in “the Lear household.”98 After hearing Carter speak in her capacity as the president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, Frances championed Carter as a feminist activist whose credentials and experience would benefit Tandem and urged Carter to meet with her husband.99 Carter 104 Working in the Lear Factory agreed to the meeting only as a favor to Frances, who “was a friend at that point because she was so supportive as I went about my business in NOW.”100 Otherwise, Carter “couldn’t imagine why” she would take the meeting.101 “I was embarrassed about it,” she recalled. “It was a waste of my time.”102 Carter had no experience in the television industry, to the extent of being unaware of who Norman Lear was. It was only when Carter’s partner, Judith Osmer, told her that Frances’s husband was on the cover of Time magazine the week she planned to meet with him that Carter understood the magnitude of the meeting. Although Carter initially was uninterested in a career in television, the benefits of working at Tandem quickly became clear to her. From her first meeting with Lear, Carter was impressed with Lear’s sensitivity, which suggested a similarly enlightened workplace and a welcome reprieve from the masculinized world of science to which Carter was accustomed. Since Lear knew nothing about physics, and Carter “didn’t know anything about show business whatsoever,” they “fell back on one issue we had in common,” their past encounters with cancer. Carter, a breast cancer survivor, and Lear, who had had a precancerous growth on his face, bonded over their health concerns. “And we sat there, with facing death as our common ground,” Carter remembers, “and we both wept a little. And I had Figure 13. Frances Lear and Norman Lear in the early 1980s. (Photofest) Working in the Lear Factory 105 only known men in engineering and physics-type subjects. I had not known this kind of a man who would cry.” Lear’s emotional intelligence was one of the reasons Carter took the job at Tandem, and the immediate interpersonal, affective bond between Lear and Carter defined their working relationship from that point on. When, in 2019, Carter looked back on her initial impressions of Lear, she stressed how much she valued Lear’s personality. “I never met anybody like Norman,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone like Norman since. Just the most amazing man. A gentle, caring man.”103 Carter had faced considerable sexism and pay inequities in her job as a research physicist, and the prospect of appropriate compensation and respect for her labor was another key factor that led her to accept Lear’s job offer. The position granted her several advantages over her previous job. The first was “the kind of decisionmaking power and respect she had been denied in her scientific work.”104 The sexism of the scientific community meant that Carter was unlikely to advance in her career there. “I felt discrimination every time I turned around,” Carter recalled. She did not get paid as much as her male colleagues did, and although she followed the same paths they used to get promoted, this “had no impact on [her] position in the company whatsoever.”105 In comparison, Lear acknowledged the worth of Carter’s labor and expertise in financial terms. When Lear offered her a job, Carter requested around $25,000, which significantly surpassed the $18,000 she earned at the Aerospace Corporation. Unfazed, Lear granted her request immediately. The economic benefits at Tandem continued for Carter after initial salary negotiations. After she had been working at the company for only a few months, Carter received her first end-of-the-year bonus. Unlike her previous employer, which gave employees a turkey, Tandem gave Carter a $5,000 bonus. The unusual compensation and continued pay raises Carter earned at Tandem signaled the company’s respect for her abilities and demonstrated their commitment to minimizing sexist pay differentials. Carter’s financial security had the added benefit of allowing her freedom and autonomy at work. Once she had accrued enough savings and felt secure enough in her position, Carter realized, “I didn’t have to worry about what I said,” and acted accordingly.106 What Carter had to say was deeply informed by her feminist activism, which was what had attracted Lear to her in the first place. With no previous experience in the television industry, the former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW and high-profile ERA advocate explained her unorthodox skills as a worker in this way: “I understood that the only reason possible to explain my presence in television was my expertise in Women’s Liberation. I knew I could be very productive with this focus, supplying this deficiency.” Carter’s activism proved a pragmatic asset as much as an ideological one. Her work within the women’s movement lent her translatable skills for her new job. Carter felt that “the way things work in show business is exactly the way they work if you are the president of a local chapter of the National Organization for Women and you’re trying to run the Board. The 106 Working in the Lear Factory financial stakes are just a whole lot higher. Being president of NOW, I learned a whole lot of stuff, especially about group dynamics.”107 Famed for representing topics previously considered taboo in the industry, Tandem attracted considerable attention from political groups. Rather than skirt controversial topics to avoid protest, Tandem used “clashes” with groups to reflect more “realistic” concerns in their programming.108 Described as the person Lear hired to do “nothing but negotiate with the pressure groups,” Carter understood input from activists as advantageous for the production process: “We do better story lines when we hear what people are caring about.”109 Tandem provided “advance screenings of his more sensitive episodes” for activists, whose feedback was “discussed in consciousness-raising sessions among the show’s writers.”110 Carter’s abilities to bridge the needs of the public and the demands of production reflected well on Tandem and resulted in praise from activists who sought to reform television. For example, unhappy with depictions of a same-sex couple on Hot L Baltimore (ABC, 1975), the National Gay Task Force met with Carter. The Task Force commended the resulting adjustments, which made the couple “more loving and less given to role-playing,” something they attributed to Carter’s decision-making authority at Tandem.111 It is important to note that not every group was equally pleased, particularly when it came to matters of race. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) protested The Jeffersons and Good Times for “stereotyping black matriarchs and emasculating their husbands.”112 Lear responded by producing three shows written by CORE-approved writers. Even with this concession, certain members of the group remained critical: “Gene Garvin, the chairman of CORE’s Los Angeles chapter, still calls Lear ‘the father of tokenism,’ ” and CORE’s western regional director, Charles Cook, described Lear’s comedic approach as “some white person’s idea of how black people live.”113 When Garvin frankly called out Lear as being dishonest—saying that he had “lied”—when making an earlier promise in November 1977 to hire more Black production workers, Carter managed the conflict in the press.114 She characterized a second, January 1978 meeting between CORE and Lear as “affable” and anticipated that she and Lear and “others in the company will attempt to continue a dialog with these interesting and passionate people.”115 Carter’s job included educating Lear on issues he did not yet understand and people he did not yet know. Using firsthand encounters and interviews, Carter gathered information from members of marginalized groups and created reports for Lear to read or brought people to Lear’s office so he could meet and talk with them himself. When he planned for storylines in All That Glitters, he asked Carter to assemble members of the LGBTQ communities in the area. Carter brought gay men, lesbians, and a trans man to Lear’s office, which resulted in a meeting where Lear knowingly met a transgender person for the first time in his life. In exposing Lear to experiences and perspectives of people he might not otherwise easily Working in the Lear Factory 107 come into contact with, Carter helped expand program content to include sexual minorities, presumably—but arguably not always successfully—from an informed perspective. Characters and storylines, which Lear would have had to approve, grew from stand-alone episodes about gay men (All in the Family’s “Judging Books by Covers,” aired on February 9, 1971) to recurring gay characters (Gordan and George, a couple on Hot L Baltimore) and the first recurring transgender character on television (Linda Murkland on All That Glitters). Personal interactions were critical in Lear’s growing political awareness. Here, too, Carter played an important role. As an out lesbian, Carter was able to “not scare” her interview subjects and acted as an effective conduit between Lear and LGBTQ communities. Lear was “comfortable” with Carter’s relationship with her partner, which helped pave the way for their discussions about sexuality. Carter remembers this part of her job as “easy and fun” because of the respect Lear showed her and her experiential authority and the ways that, in turn, that experiential authority played a central role in her job.116 When Hot L Baltimore featured two gay men as characters, Carter screened the content for twenty-five “major representatives of the gay communities” in Los Angeles and sixty-five in New York City, including press. In spite of the “heated,” “intense,” and “lengthy” discussion that ensued, Carter reported to the series’ writers and to Lear that “it all came to a clear consensus that the show is a major step toward improving the image of gays on television” and that she had been “asked to say thank you to you. ... For your information, you are appreciated.” Carter’s understanding of how gay relationships should be depicted on television was based on her earlier interventions on Mary Hartman. She conducted research and proposed how the show’s writers should consider their treatment of two men who had moved to town, were closeted, but were contemplating coming out and getting married. Her memo outlined three significant concerns: a stereotypical “dominant vs. passive” dynamic between men in a relationship; attempts to explain why a character would be gay, as “there is no real evidence about what made ‘gayness’ ”; and the absence of physical contact between the couple, when “everyone else touched everyone else.”117 Although a considerable part of her job, Carter’s work exceeded meetings with activist groups. She “had involvement in essentially all of the shows” at Tandem. She filled in for Lear when he “had an issue that he wanted to confront, and he couldn’t” because of the demands of multiple shows; she sat in on meetings and dealt with network censors. In addition to these bureaucratic tasks, Carter also found herself operating in the creative side of the company. At times, she pitched promising story ideas after they had been initially turned down by Lear. When writers came into Carter’s office after Lear had rejected one of their stories to express their disappointment, Carter would sometimes recognize the quality of the story and would facilitate its approval. “Once or twice, I would listen and think it was a hell of a good idea. And I’d wait for them to go,” Carter remembers. “And 108 Working in the Lear Factory then I’d go into Norman’s office and say, I don’t get this, why didn’t you buy this? And then I’d give him a pitch but use my words, not theirs. And the next thing you know, my office would be filled with flowers” from the grateful writer.118 Carter not only acted internally within Tandem to get stories to air but also worked with the networks to overcome their resistance to controversial stories. She remembers “Maude’s Dilemma,” a two-part episode of Maude in which Maude gets an abortion, as the content that created the most objections from Program Practices, the networks’ in-house censors. To overcome these objections, Carter constructed pragmatic arguments about the realities of abortion and the economics that made Lear’s desires worth heeding. Carter describes her meetings with CBS about the episode as follows: My mission was to tell the truth. Abortions are taking place all over the country. I got statistics on that, as well as I could. And then I would go to the network, and say to Program Practices, “Norman has asked me to come.” I had to use Norman’s name, because they’re making a freaking fortune off his shows. They have to pay attention to what he wants. And he wants to do this because it’s part of his policy to do things that are real in society.119 Carter’s efforts paid off. CBS aired the episode in November 1972 and rebroadcast it on August 17, 1973. Merely persuading the network to air the program was reason enough to celebrate, but the real feminist impact of “Maude’s Dilemma” made Carter’s victory particularly significant. Written during Supreme Court deliberations on the Roe v. Wade ruling, the episodes were intentionally crafted to persuade audiences to support legalized abortion. The coauthors of the episodes, Susan Harris and Irma Kalish, turned to newspaper articles about women’s abortions to ground the story in the real-world concerns of reproductive rights.120 The goal of writing such material was, in Harris’s perspective, to “have a point of view” and to use television “to raise audience consciousness.”121 According to Kathryn Montgomery, “Maude’s Dilemma” played a vital role in making the 1972–73 television season a “critical test year for determining just how far entertainment television could venture into controversial territory.”122 Carter maintained her political investments throughout her career at Tandem and was named Entertainment Woman of the Year by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1975.123 She was often frank in her assessment of the industry’s and Tandem’s shortcomings in employment practices and awareness of marginalized groups. When the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized an episode of Mary Hartman for being “libelous to Jews and questionable in taste,” Carter arranged for screenings of the objectionable episode and a face-to-face meeting with the organization.124 Carter represented her actions in the press as an earnest desire to engage and understand the political stakes that drove the protest and to incorporate these concerns into the company’s ethos and education. With this motivation, she strove to create immediate and intimate connections with political activists.125 In Working in the Lear Factory 109 response to the ADL, Carter forewent “third party” interventions and arrangements because, as she explained it, “We wanted to hear it in person. We do better shows when we’re smarter.”126 At a 1976 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference panel concerning race and television, Carter’s talk was the one that “attracted most of the interest.”127 When challenged as to Tandem’s lack of equitable employment practices for Black workers, Carter did little to refute the claim or to defend the rationale behind such practices. She admitted that the television industry was one that had “practiced de facto segregation for a number of years.”128 When asked if she thought the industry was improving, Carter responded, “When I’m not in total despair the answer is different than when I’m tired. It’s a subtle blend of yes and no.”129 Carter’s forthright appraisal of television’s imperfect political evolution did not harm her career at Tandem. Less than a year after her comments at the NAB conference, Carter was promoted from vice president of public affairs to vice president of creative affairs at Tandem.130 Her promotion, which came on the heels of her critical and public assessment at the conference, supports the notion that Lear genuinely valued Carter’s political views and critical awareness and saw them as qualities that enriched his company. ALL THAT GLITTERS AS MARY HARTMAN, REDUX Mary Hartman paved the way for greater experimentation at Tandem and offered women who worked there greater opportunities and visibility. All That Glitters, the next show Tandem produced after Mary Hartman, represented a world where gender roles were inverted: women were the executives at multinational corporations and men were their secretaries; women were wage earners and men were househusbands; and women were confident, driven, and unemotional, while men were sexualized, taken for granted, and unfulfilled. In the initial planning meeting for the program, Lear described it as a “kind of Executive Suite, except everything is turned 180-degrees around in terms of male-female, men and women, malefemale relationships.”131 Lear based the original sketch for the women characters on men who worked in the television industry: “There’s a cool and calculating, utterly brilliant Lew Wasserman-type, and the jokey, rotarian Bob Wood-type, and suave, smooth-talking (these are all women) lothario kind of Grant Tinkertype.”132 The satirical soap opera style and programming strategies for the show promised, much like Mary Hartman, to disrupt traditions of “appropriate” content and programming schedules. A Variety headline, “Frontloaded with Sexual Titters, ‘Glitters’ Could Bother Carson,”? emphasizes both the industrial and ideological implications of such disruptions.133 Additionally, the show helped women solidify or elevate their status at Tandem. From producing Mary Hartman, Viva Knight moved to the producer role on All That Glitters, and Stephanie Sills was named executive producer.134 Virginia Carter, whose “special interest and responsibilities” 110 Working in the Lear Factory included Glitters, rounded out Lear’s “top three lieutenants” for the program.135 Ann Marcus wrote its initial scripts. The success of Mary Hartman and the ways Lear sold it informed Tandem’s approach to marketing Glitters. A full-page ad in Variety signaled Tandem’s independence as a production company with “exclusive distribution” of the program.136 According to this promotion, “Norman Lear and 40 stations made television history” with the premiere of All That Glitters. Sold to stations at “big prices,” All That Glitters benefited from the “success of Lear’s ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’ ” and amplified its formula for bypassing networks.137 On the heels of Mary Hartman, Lear’s success was so great that he did not even shoot a pilot, which forced television stations to buy Glitters “sight unseen,” as many, particularly in top markets, did.138 The reported asking price for the show was $35,000 a week for five shows a week, a deal that was comparable to the asking price for the then-established hit Mary Hartman, which cost $38,000 a week at that time.139 The novel, controversial content of both Glitters and Mary Hartman created unprecedented competition for late-night television. Because of family-friendly viewing hours, many stations carried Mary Hartman at 11:00 p.m. to avoid viewer complaints.140 This placed Mary Hartman against the late-night news. When these same stations picked up Glitters, they frequently scheduled it directly following Mary Hartman, which then put it in competition with The Tonight Show, which threatened to create “a lot of trouble for Carson.”141 Glitters promised to build on the success of Mary Hartman and cement the challenges it posed to the staid traditions of the networks. Conventional wisdom suggested that the show would thrive. The program registered with elevision insiders and enjoyed a “fast start” in ratings in competitive markets.142 After an annual meeting of the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), a “five-day sales bazaar conducted by 192 distributors,” All That Glitters was among the 113 new syndicated shows that “survived” this “first acid test.”143 More than merely surviving, it ranked as one of the twenty-one shows in this pool that were “particularly far along in terms of station and/or sponsor interest.”144 Initial reviews were positive, with predictions that the show would “come on strong” and “could become more controversial than ‘MH2.’ ”145 Another early review described Glitters as “ratings gold,” with a target audience of “enthusiastic fans” composed of “young married women who liked the dominant women/inferior men theme.”146 Even in its largely negative assessment, Time granted that the show was Lear’s attempt to “take on his biggest subject: sexual habits and stereotypes.”147 Although all signs pointed to the show’s potential, Glitters was canceled after only thirteen weeks on the air. While Lear’s shows had dealt with issues of sexuality and gender before, Glitters was the first to place them at the show’s center and to use gender role reversal to do so, which likely had much to do with its demise. The show’s basic premise involves female executives who run a successful global corporation and men who work as secretaries and serve as women’s sexual playthings. Men are Working in the Lear Factory 111 sexualized, men are cuckolded, men sit at home worrying that their wives no longer take an interest in them, and men gain weight and worry about it. Virginia Carter remembers that the planning of the show, which was a “whole lot of fun,” involved figuring out how to create positions of power for women: “It couldn’t be somebody who played football and got all that money, but it had to be something. We had to work out what these women would be in order to have the power positions. And they would pinch their male secretaries’ butts and things like that.” Lear received hate mail written about Glitters, something Carter attributes to the show’s “role reversal.” “It was just so fascinating to see how the public reacted to that,” said Carter. “We couldn’t keep it on the air because it was so unpopular.”148 “Macho male types will be up against the wall,” predicted Variety in its review of Glitters. Regarded as “the tv football wife’s revenge,” the show’s efforts to appeal to a “young female demographic” and “large homosexual following via the male secretaries” did little to appeal to heteronormative male viewers.149 The New York preview bore out this prediction. Of the male critics present, all but one left after the first two episodes and none was present after the third episode, leaving only women in the audience. At its Washington, D.C., gala premiere held at the Kennedy Center, the show was presented to the audience of “glittery people,” where “it became apparent that 90 percent of the laughter came from women.”150 In spite of his argument that the gender politics of the show had nothing to do with its cancellation, Time television critic Gerald Clarke spent a significant amount of his column detailing “the wearying jokes” that relied upon gender role reversals and the sexualization of men in the workplace. “The Globatron secretaries are sleek young men,” wrote Clarke, “and their female bosses can’t take their eyes away from the male derrière, packed into tight pants, as it passes out the door.”151 The show’s overt sexual humor and the novelty of representing objectified men on television dominated reviews of Glitters and overshadowed the meaningful gender insights the show offered audiences. At the Washington, D.C., premiere of the show, a male audience member remarked, “I was traumatized” and described how “uncomfortable” he was, to which Lear replied, “That’s terrific.”152 The same “traumatized” male viewer also demonstrated signs of conversion from unthinking patriarchal privilege, a hoped-for by-product of the show. He asked his female companion, “Is that the way we really are?,” and she responded, “Absolutely.”153 Writer Nora Ephron attended the screening and was “knocked out” at the way that women claimed power for themselves and disregarded others if they impeded their striving for success, particularly in their abilities to “click off” men in the middle of their conversation.154 While the show was by no means universally received by feminists as an unequivocal good, it did warrant some serious consideration as an effective tool for feminist ends. As Lee Novick, vice-chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus, noted, the show, though troubling in its portrayal of women replicating masculinist behaviors once they obtained power, also held potential as a “consciousness-raising vehicle for men.”155 118 Working in the Lear Factory on pilots for All in the Family and Sanford and Son. In his 2014 autobiography, Lear describes Rees as the “first of a series of women who provided the glue that held things together in the most hectic of times and situations.” In the acknowledgements of the book, Lear asserts, “I’ve never worked on a production where women weren’t ‘the glue that held things together’ ” and names multiple women who worked in creative and executive roles.181 While Tandem seemed like a haven for women to express their talents and their feminist politics and Lear a champion of women television workers, the company’s investments in progressive gender politics were complicated. Notably, Tandem did not employ women consistently across its productions. In her history of the Screenwriters Guild, Miranda Banks complicates the claims of her interview subjects about their progressive gender politics, Lear included, with statistical data and analysis. According to the WGA’s “Women’s Committee Statistics Report” of November 7, 1974, for “teleplays” written by women that year, Tandem employed women for 4 out of 69 episodes of All in the Family, Fox’s M*A*S*H employed women to write 1 out of 38 episodes, and CBS/Freeman employed women for .5 (half of a writing team) of 133 episodes of Hawaii 5–0.182 MTM made the strongest showing, employing women to write 50 percent of its Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes (25 out of 50).183 These statistics reflect the realities of underemployment for women writers and indicate that women, when employed, were more likely to write for programs that featured women and/or feminist sentiment centrally. For instance, women at Tandem wrote 11 out of 37 episodes of Maude but 0 out of 49 for Sanford and Son.184 While writing afforded women some inroads into television, depending on subject material, other jobs remained out of reach. Even at companies like Tandem where programming brought women into the writers’ room and Lear credited women as the “glue” that held a production together, a woman employed on a Tandem show, according to Banks, typically “was not leading it on set or in post-production.”185 As for television’s executive ranks, by the early 1980s the situation for women showed some promising changes. In 1981, Variety published “Women Are on the Rise in Television’s Executive Suites,” which included its own survey findings that women occupied “respectable status in the executive and production ranks in tv.” Tandem was one of the companies Variety named to support its claim, since, at the time of the survey, the women working at Tandem included Virginia Carter (vice president of creative affairs), Kelly Smith (vice president of business affairs), Pam Fond (assistant treasurer and director of tax), Fern Field (director of development and producer), Frances McConnell (director of public affairs), Molly DeHetre (director of business affairs), and Barbara Bragliatti (vice president of media affairs).186 The placement of women in the business side of Tandem suggests that the broader company workplace, rather than only its production ranks, afforded a means by which the company addressed employment disparities and utilized women’s skills to forward their own business interests. As the case of Working in the Lear Factory 119 women working at network headquarters discussed in chapter 1 demonstrates, as impressive as executive job titles are, the conditions of those jobs and the day-to- day functioning of the workplace warrant examination to understand more fully what women’s gains in television meant. To claim that Tandem affected wide-sweeping changes for women working in television or that, by the early 1980s, feminism had converted the entire television industry to enlightened, equitable employment and production practices would be an overstatement. For many women, the realities of working in the television industry in the 1980s and beyond meant continued inequality in pay, occupational status, and employment. Working at Tandem, however, did provide the women who worked there opportunities for feminist expression and for placement in its ranks, even if they did not have conventional credentialing. Their previous employment as secretaries, writers for soap operas, and workers in unrelated industries proved less of a barrier and more of an asset to Tandem, as did their feminist perspectives. More expansively, the state of women’s employment in television during the 1970s, as illustrated by the responses of the FCC and AWRT and addressed at Tandem, moved multiple organizations and figures in the industry closer to feminist awareness and action. Variety’s hopeful headline of 1981 suggests the notinconsequential outcomes of these actions. 120 4 Television’s “Serious Sisters” Experiments in Public and Regional Television for Women When WBZ-TV, a local television station in Boston, produced and aired Yes, We Can on January 18, 1974, it proved an unprecedented televisual event. The program was dedicated to concerns of area women; was conceptualized and produced by women; and featured an all-woman cast of interviewers, interviewees, and talent. Preceded the previous night by a one-hour prime-time special, the Yes, We Can Entertainment Special, which showcased celebrity performances, Yes, We Can ran for a total of sixteen hours on a single day. Except for WBZ’s Eyewitness News, the station aired no other programming that day. The program hybridized live performance with homemaking advice and domestic issues and infused it with feminist debate and government hearings on institutionalized sexism.1 Yes, We Can was an experiment meant to address the fundamental shortcomings of television for women. First and most obviously, the sheer number of broadcast hours given over to Yes, We Can challenged traditional programming schedules, in which content that explicitly addressed women viewers was restricted to undervalued daytime time slots. Second, producers reimagined issues of interest to women beyond domestic labors and associated consumerist practices. Third, women played key roles in production as show hosts, interviewers, and participants. Fourth, the production drew together multiple and unlikely collaborators in state government, commercial television, civic institutions, businesses, and community groups to support, plan, and execute the program. Finally, the show expanded generic conventions of daytime television for women, which in its inception in the 1950s included “homemaking shows, shopping shows . . . and popular programs the broadcast industry broadly categorized as ‘audience participation shows.’ ”2 While Yes, We Can was a one-of-a-kind television event, it shared common ground with other feminist-oriented programs designed for women in the 1970s. Television’s “Serious Sisters” 121 These programs challenged prevailing understandings of television for women by reconceptualizing audience, production conventions, scheduling, format, and content. They featured women in front the camera as hosts, interviewees, talent, and expert guests while behind the camera women worked in significant numbers as producers, writers, researchers, editors, and camera operators. In Her Own Right (WGBH, 1970), Everywoman (WTOP, 1972–78), and Woman Alive! (KERA, 1974; WNET, 1975–77) aired in prime-time hours and envisioned women’s viewership outside daytime schedules.3 Women were regarded as active participants by In Her Own Right (WGBH, 1970) and Woman ‘75 (WBZ, 1975), which solicited and integrated input from at-home viewers. Except for a “sprinkling of men” in the production ranks, For Women Today (WBZ, 1970–72), Everywoman, Woman Alive!, and Tomorrow’s Woman (unaired pilot, 1972) employed women in the majority of the programs’ production team as producers, contributing editors, and directors.4 As this sampling of programs suggests, regional and public television productions led the way in revising women’s television during the 1970s. In 1972, Broadcasting noted that the “serious sisters” of women’s television that were emerging early in the decade were “done locally or syndicated.”5 Without network television’s inhibiting commercial imperatives and cultural traditions, local, syndicated, and public television enjoyed relative freedom to innovate. Woman Alive! producer Joan Shigekawa clarified the importance of alternatives to commercial television and the appeals of public television for feminist workers. She noted that although many of the women who worked on Woman Alive! had careers in commercial television, they made a “financial sacrifice” to work for public television.6 They were motivated to convey stories of “joyful changes” women across the country were creating that were not of interest to commercial television, even as advertisers spent millions of dollars “trying to reach these women.”7 Commercial television’s neglect and misunderstanding of women—both as workers who wanted to create different types of television for women and as viewers who would tune into such television—were, to Shigekawa, “their loss, and public television’s gain.”8 As Shigekawa and others like her migrated from commercial television, they brought with them innovative ideas and a hope that television could better meet the needs of women viewers. Their vision for regional and public programs, evinced by this chapter’s exploration of In Her Own Right, Woman Alive!, and Yes, We Can, offered creative and varied solutions for the problems of women’s television. All three programs, according to their respective production strategies, addressed long-standing, sexist ideas about television for women by redefining genre formulas, viewers’ needs and interests, and the role of women behind and in front of the camera. The interventions of these “serious sisters” prompted an unprecedented period of growth and creativity in what Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, and Helen Wood describe as “television for women.”9 In their scholarship on the matter, Moseley, Wheatley, and Wood call for an expansion of the framework of “women’s television” and analysis beyond genres assumed to be aimed at women. 122 Television’s “Serious Sisters” The resulting, more expansive scope of television for women, versus women’s television, creates a new canon for feminist analysis. Representative of television’s redress to the failings of women’s television, the productions included in this chapter—In Her Own Right, Woman Alive!, and Yes, We Can—expand the boundaries of women’s television and engage the concerns of “television for women” identified by Moseley, Wheatley, and Wood. Although they address women viewers, these programs fall outside typical genres, such as soap operas, game shows, and homemaking shows, that have served as the foci for foundational feminist scholarship on women’s television.10 They also reorient analysis from “visible emphasis upon fictional programming over factual programming” in feminist television studies to informational, educational, and news programming.11 Additionally, these productions foreground and value “feminine competencies” in both production and reception that depart from restrictive conventions and commercialized traditions. Finally, and perhaps most radically, these programs employ feminist production strategies to create progressive content and to address both avowed feminists and viewers who were curious about feminism. This last point offers a qualification to the “television for women” paradigm. Rather than thinking only of “television about or by women,” Moseley, Wheatley, and Wood argue that women have had investments and found pleasure in texts that were not made by and were not about women. This argument broadens and complicates what texts should count as appropriate objects of study for feminist analyses of women and television. Yet as useful a corrective as the “by or for women” paradigm is, it also potentially sidelines programming of value to women that features television productions by and for women. To consider how programs like In Her Own Right, Woman Alive!, and Yes, We Can deepen and diversify the study of women’s television as television for women, this chapter purposefully engages “slippage” between production, content, and audience, with women engaged in all three domains.12 It does so not out of theoretical carelessness or strict canonical rules, against which Moseley, Wheatley, and Wood rightfully caution, but rather because these programs imagine the women’s roles as on-screen authorities, at-home viewers, and behind-the-scenes workers as both central to the production and interdependent within production strategies. To explore the potentials of television for women in an age of US women’s liberation, this chapter turns to short-lived, modestly funded, and regional television programs that involved women as subjects, audiences, and producers differently and with progressive political intentions. REDEFINING TELEVISION FOR WOMEN IN THE 1970S Television that targets women has long been the object of cultural disregard and disdain, yet women viewers figured centrally in profitability for the television industry from its beginnings. As early as 1948, Variety reported that daytime Television’s “Serious Sisters” 123 television offered networks “their first opportunity to break even.”13 In her work on women viewers and daytime programming of the 1950s, Marsha F. Cassidy finds that, in spite of the “curious assortment of programs calculated to attract the female spectator,” “women spectators served as the industry’s polestar” during television’s early years.14 Although initially uncertain about how to best appeal to women, the industry quickly cemented a basic formula that privileged commercial viability and cost-effectiveness over quality and innovation. In 1954, NBC’s vice president of TV sales reported that advertisers were increasingly aware of the “economy and efficiency of daytime television” and the “unequalled opportunity to demonstrate products to the housewife without having to pay the premium rates of evening time.”15 By the beginning of the year, top-rated daytime programming was confined to soap operas (Search for Tomorrow [CBS, 1951–82; NBC, 1982–86] and Guiding Light [CBS, 1952–2009]) and game shows with male hosts (Strike It Rich [CBS, 1951–58], The Big Pay-Off [NBC, 1951–53; CBS, 1953–59], and On Your Account [NBC, 1953–54; CBS, 1955–56]), thereby further establishing the links between low-cost programming for women and effective commercialized outreach, a focus on domesticity, and male-helmed productions.16 Since television’s early days, formulas for women’s television were so entrenched that substantive reformulations were nearly impossible, even with evidence that women viewers might not desire what television imagined them to want. This meant that, on the whole, women’s programming was mired in traditions of men acting as authorities in feminized television genres intended for women viewers. Much as it did in the 1950s, daytime programming of the 1970s assumed that confident yet nonthreatening male talent appealed to women. Even with the visibility of the women’s movement, commercial network programs persisted in featuring “charm boys,” male hosts who “communicated a commanding but amiable deportment on air.”17 By 1972, the daytime talk show Dinah’s Place (NBC, 1970–74) was the only network television program on air to feature a woman, Dinah Shore, as host.18 Network television’s drive for profit defined a successful program by commercial appeals and nationwide outreach, both of which the industry defined in sexist terms. Raysa Bonow, executive producer for WBZ’s daytime television show For Women Today, commented on this situation in 1972. According to Bonow, the lack of women working in television was a result of conditions in commercial television that “indoctrinated” viewers “into only seeing men in authoritative roles” and were “determined by men who really believe that women are not a saleable item.”19 This want of “salability” meant that, in spite of their desirability as a consumer market and in spite of the profitability of women’s television, women were not viable as a part of the product. Instead, the industry’s stubborn commitment to the idea that women lacked “salability” limited women’s roles in production and held back gender-equitable hiring. Concerns of salability extended to program content. Profitability depended upon ratings that produced “least objectionable programming,” a staple of American 124 Television’s “Serious Sisters” commercial television.20 By the start of the 1970s, the industry was aware of the need to speak to women in different fashion, but it was reluctant to do so with explicitly political content, lest it alienate viewers. As Barbara Walters found in her experience hosting syndicated talk show Not for Women Only (1971–76), frank feminist expression could not happen on commercial television because of assumptions that it “ ‘would not draw a national response’ ” and would therefore compromise the foremost priority of mass audience capture.21 Although least objectionable programming impeded significant and fast-acting changes to the traditions of television for women, some progressive movement started to happen by the early 1970s. Television’s address to women was shifting, albeit in constricted dayparts and channels. A 1972 Broadcasting report noted that despite the continued prominence of “diapers-and-recipes types of programming,” daytime game shows, and soap operas, television for women was expanding to include “serious sisters” in regional, syndicated, and public television. These innovative programs sidelined domestic issues of childcare and cooking in favor of “new program forms” with “a greater air of sophistication and intellectuality than their predecessors.” Broadcasting correlated these improvements in programming for women to the television industry’s growing awareness of the “ ‘woman of the 70’s’ ” whose outlook was influenced by feminist politics.22 While feminist influence on television had measurable effects on television for women, these effects played out primarily—and with few exceptions—in local and public television rather than in commercial television. While the limitations of network television are obvious, it is important to note that characterizing public, local, and syndicated television productions as an unproblematic feminist haven is inaccurate. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) launched an internal investigation in 1975 and found “pervasive underrepresentation of women, both in employment and in program content.”23 According to the CPB report, fewer than 30 percent of public television jobs were filled by women; in children’s programs, 69 percent of characters were male; in public affairs, news, and panel programs, 85 percent of participants with speaking roles were men.24 Local productions failed to deliver on their promise of representing community interests and tried to minimize the impact of advocacy groups on equal air time given to concerns of women and minorities. Faced with threats to FCC license renewals, stations often subverted the system by meeting demands for improved and wider-ranging programming through low-cost programming. Instead of carrying out a thorough overhaul of programming practices, stations often provided underrepresented groups only with “access to cheaply produced public affairs programs scheduled in the late-night and early-morning slots.”25 Even productions helmed by women with feminist aims were not immune from the commercialized and commodifying influence of television, according to some feminist activists. Yes, We Can, for example, was disrupted by representatives from thirty-eight organizations who protested WBZ’s cultivation of women’s liberation Television’s “Serious Sisters” 125 “to make a media-thing for commercial uses” and its inclusion of corporations at the women’s fair.26 Even with the limitations of public and local television, there were genuine opportunities for enlightened change in both arenas. As the 1970s progressed, public television demonstrated measurable improvement in employment. An internal investigation instituted in 1976 and congressional action in 1977 threatened cuts in federal funding to the Center for Public Broadcasting if employment of women and minorities did not improve by 1980; this measure resulted in improved hiring practices. In January 1977, public television reported a 10.1 percent gain in employment for women in public television from the previous year.27 As for local commercial television, it made improvements throughout the 1970s with regard to women television viewers and workers, “particularly on local schedules.”28 A 1977 New York Times article, “Programming for Women—Time for Reevaluation,” noted that local programming, in spite of its “relatively low-keyed and unthreatening” tenor, was “often surprisingly successful” in its politically progressive articulation of women’s issues.29 Despite its marginalization within the larger television landscape and its lack of financial support, the politically conscious, community-oriented local television that emerged in the late 1960s and into the 1970s mattered. It was both innovative in its production and meaningful in its reception. In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner argues for the value of local public affairs programs such as New York’s Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant (WNEW, 1968–71) and Boston’s Say Brother (WGBH, 1968–97), which were experimental local television made by Black media workers for Black viewers. Heitner’s multifaceted production history involving oral histories of production staff, viewer feedback, reviews in industry publications, and government findings and policies demonstrates that these programs “represented new cultural practices and legitimized activism.”30 Viewers regarded the shows as a “transformative experience” and keenly felt the importance of such programming in a white-dominated medium.31 Gayle Wald’s analysis of the public television program Soul! (WNDT, 1968–73) identifies the impact a modestly funded program could have on audiences. Wald argues that “despite competition from the three major networks and technological challenges associated with public television, which tended to broadcast on UHF channels inaccessible to all but state-of-the-art television sets, [Ellis] Haizlip’s show attracted a substantial and loyal audience.”32 Wald’s focused attention to Soul! reveals the significance of production strategies and the ways producers, creative staff, and technicians transformed television for makers and consumers. As the program’s producer, Haizlip envisioned unique content and production principles to bring expressions of Black Power to television that “explicitly blurred the boundary between producers and consumers,” built collectivity through performance, and “called on embodied memories of past performances while anticipating new feelings and states of being.”33 Public and regional broadcasting offered unique possibilities to introduce a feminist ethos to television for women. As compromised and short-lived as some 126 Television’s “Serious Sisters” of these programs were, each one discussed in this chapter exemplifies indisputably self-aware experiments in television for women. Television’s “serious sisters” shared common concerns of revising, according to feminist ideals, content, audience outreach, on-set labor practices, and the composition of production staff and crews. These shows were designed to address women viewers while correcting television’s consumerist and—in feminist producers’ minds—demeaning conceptualizations of these viewers. They redefined who their viewers were, what they needed from television, and how they would interact and influence on-screen content. They employed majority to exclusively female production teams and, in doing so, challenged the authority and marketability of male-helmed television. Finally, these programs made room for more women at all levels of production and fostered collaborative decision-making that involved all production workers. IN HER OWN RIGHT: HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN’S SHOW One of the first feminist interventions in television for women, In Her Own Right, was produced by Katharine Kinderman for Boston public television station WGBH-TV. It ran as a series in the summer of 1970 and served as a template for the “serious sisters” that followed, particularly in its public orientation, political-mindedness, and inclusion of women viewers. The station’s program order for In Her Own Right made clear that television for women should be not only “for women” but “about them as well.”34 From its first episode, “How to Make a Woman’s Show,” the producers prioritized new ways of reaching women and opening up the processes of television production to viewer intervention and understanding. The entirety of this inaugural episode tended to educating viewers about how a new type of television program for women could be made. Therefore, the program was an exercise in television literacy for audiences and in democratic opportunities for audiences to shape the program through their input. The episode included a panel meant to represent a cross section of viewers—a housewife; a high schooler; an unmarried man; and a member of a radical feminist group, Bread and Roses—who discussed what they would like to see happen on the program. Kinderman conceptualized In Her Own Right as a cooperative effort with the viewing public. The first episode solicited input from audience members about the program’s title, its content, and which guests to book. Host Karen Klein assured viewers that the production would continually be “experimenting” with elements of the program “with [their] help.” As a result, episodes addressed issues ranging from class dynamics to public and private sphere politics to women’s history. Guests included a lobbyist, members of Congress and state governments, psychologists, educators, a childcare worker and nursery school director, and small business owners. An array of women activists frequently appeared on the show: a “radical political activist” on the first episode; suffragette Florence Luscomb on an episode that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement; Television’s “Serious Sisters” 127 members of Boston-area women’s liberation groups, including the Boston Wom- en’s Health Collective and creators of Our Bodies, Ourselves, for an episode on “Women’s Liberation”; and a cab driver who was the sole female board member of the Boston Taxi Drivers Association, along with a factory worker who was the founder of the labor group Boston Women United for an episode entitled “Blue Collar Women.”35 Although In Her Own Right was a formative influence in television for women, its time on the air was short. After just seven episodes, WGBH canceled the show. Michael Rice, WGBH program director, defended the decision by claiming that the show was intentionally transitory. He regarded the program as a “summer test series, which was never intended to continue into the fall.”36 Rice also indicated that the show was dropped to make way for other news and discussion programs designed to meet the station’s public broadcasting obligations. The women who worked on the program assumed that the show would have a typical season run, so the cancellation took them by surprise. Feminist newsletter The Spokeswoman characterized the cancellation as unjust; it cited the program’s “good” ratings that “continue[d] to climb” and argued that WGBH “overlooked” the quality of the program and the work of its women.37 According to Mary Blau, a production assistant, Rice and the team met after each show, and the shows they “ ‘particularly liked’ ” were ones that Rice “ ‘liked too.’ ”38 Given the show’s promise and accounts of Rice’s positive reactions, the seemingly abrupt, unexpected cancellation raised suspicions and drew criticism. Contrary to Rice’s public statement as to why In Her Own Right was canceled, producers, production assistants, and moderators reported that Rice’s personal politics were to blame. In Her Own Right was defined by the control these women had over the show’s production and the authority they wielded on set. These qualities, in the opinion of the show’s production team, disturbed Rice so much that he canceled the program. In an interview with the Boston Globe, production staff related details from the meeting during which the show’s cancellation was announced. In this meeting, management told them that the show “had been a failure” and “didn’t have a warm atmosphere,” and Rice criticized them for their “chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.”39 Such comments suggest that the show itself was not at issue but that the workplace and production workers for the program were. The women who worked on the show countered the implication that they did not meet the needs of the public in ways that the news and discussion programs proposed to replace In Her Own Right would. They insisted that they had designed the program for “all women” and “denied any bias” that would alienate viewers.40 The Spokeswoman confirmed the show’s audience appeal, describing the show as one that “points up the wide-ranging interests of women at home.”41 Within a week of announcing the cancellation of In Her Own Right, Rice promised that the station would develop “a new show devoted to ‘contemporary women’s concerns,’ ” something that In Her Own Right production staff felt they already had accomplished.42 134 Television’s “Serious Sisters” commercial pressure that would water down content.”71 The trustworthiness of the station overtly referenced the commercial drives of the television industry and indirectly signaled the commercialization that critics felt Ms. had introduced into the women’s movement. As the two media institutions worked in tandem to ensure different modes of media acumen, KERA operated as a counterbalance to the stigma attached to Ms. and its leadership, even as the production benefited from the magazine’s expertise as a feminist enterprise. Although Ms. and cofounder Gloria Steinem’s involvement in the production of Woman Alive! provided all-important feminist credentials, their relationship to capitalism was a potential liability that required careful management. Steinem’s celebrity status in the women’s movement was perceived by some as alienating to so-called Middle American women and radical feminists alike. At best, Steinem and Ms. proved simply ineffective in connecting to some women. At worst, they functioned as corrupting forces within the women’s movement. To understand Woman Alive’s unusual decision to minimize the media-savvy resources it had in Steinem and Ms., a brief contextualization is in order. To radical feminists, Gloria Steinem’s media-friendly version of feminist politics was troubling, if not downright dangerous for the women’s movement. In 1975, Redstockings accused Steinem of connections with the CIA and intimated that her prominence in popular media coverage of feminism was tied to this relationship. Charging that Steinem had been “meteorically installed into her current position as leader of the women’s liberation movement through the efforts of the mass media” and that her past activities had been covered up, Redstockings declared Steinem a serious threat to the integrity of the movement.72 In less extreme criticism, other feminist critics understood the media’s characterization of Steinem as the singular leader of the movement to be a necessary evil. off our backs identified mainstream media as the force that had installed Steinem as the celebrity face of feminism, yet acknowledged the strategic usefulness of this position. A recognizable feminist offered women a figure to emulate and the media a compelling story to represent. In its pragmatic assessment of Steinem’s value to the movement, off our backs proclaimed, “With superstardom there is the realization of what a woman can do (NOW THERE’S A WOMAN THE PRESS CAN’T IGNORE).”73 Regardless of the concerns feminists had about Steinem’s celebrity, Steinem’s influence over a national audience was not guaranteed. Paradoxically, despite its much-vaunted media appeal, Steinem’s impact was often lost in translation for women who did not identify with Steinem precisely because of her mediated presence. The numerous state-of-feminism reports published in women’s magazines in the early 1970s reveal women’s complex reception of Steinem and help explain the lack of a unified political alliance with feminism. Women who lived in regions beyond major urban coastal regions had meaningful and valid reasons, beyond simple internalized sexism, for rejecting the tenets of feminist leadership conveyed from afar through popular media. Television’s “Serious Sisters” 135 In a 1975 article, “Women’s Lib Plays in Peoria,” Saturday Review reporter Susan Jacoby found that televised images of feminists did not always operate as a lifesaver that connected women to the movement. In their geographic isolation from centers of the women’s liberation movement, Peorian women forged their own state of feminism predicated on their own particular realities and the material conditions of day-to-day living. Just as they clipped coupons, they sought improved economic conditions in their hourly wage jobs. Just as they exchanged casserole recipes, they banded together to change conditions in their workplaces. When, for example, a local company who employed an all-female workforce to answer customer service calls failed to heed health and safety complaints, the workers took action. Wearing earphones on the job led to perpetual ear infections, but both the union and the company’s management did nothing to change these conditions for customer service workers. In response, the women organized an in-house Women’s Group to represent their interests collectively and to agitate more effectively for improved labor conditions. Feminist role models for these Peorian women came from within their community. Jacoby interviewed a young woman who had overcome her resistance to feminism through the influence of her female coworkers. The young woman recounted how she had supported a feminist union representative in a recent election once she realized the candidate was “just like us.”74 Part of being “like us” was a matter of a conventional white femininity and heteronormativity, as the union representative possessed “beautiful silvery-blonde hair” and could “get a man.”75 These qualities were ones that Gloria Steinem herself famously possessed, yet Steinem was a figure of failed identification for the Peorian women who supported their feminist union representative. Even with her heterosexual appeals and conventional beauty (down to her very own signature blonde hair), Steinem was not an agent of feminist conversion for them. If Steinem was “ ‘only a streaky mane of hair on a network television program,’ ” and “doesn’t seem like a real person,” then her appeal, for some, did not transmit across the remove of celebrity and the mediation of television.76 Given the potential liabilities Steinem brought with her to Woman Alive!, her appearances on the program were carefully managed. In a promotional interview that was published in WNET-13’s magazine for station members, Joan Shigekawa noted that Jordan, the labor organizer from North Carolina who was profiled in the pilot episode, “didn’t even know what Gloria Steinem looked like before we brought her to New York.”77 Much like the feminism of the women profiled in journalistic accounts of Middle America, Jordan’s feminism stood apart from Steinem’s influence. Jordan’s unconventional path to feminist consciousness aligned with the ways Woman Alive! wished to convey feminism: as intuitive and commonsensical, complexly expressed and experienced, and adaptable to suit the conditions of any woman’s life. Despite—or perhaps because of—Jordan’s ignorance of women’s movement leaders, she personified 136 Television’s “Serious Sisters” Woman Alive!’s mission, which, according to Shigekawa, was to illustrate “how much more powerful and appealing ‘woman alive’ and in action can be rather than in mere self-contemplation.”78 Steinem did appear in Woman Alive!’s first episode, but in ways that minimized her own celebrity persona in favor of emphasizing the collective aspects of the women’s movement. In three, relatively brief segments scattered throughout the episode, Steinem relates her own experiences with internalized sexism, expresses her racial and class solidarity with others, positions herself as but one member of a larger group, and acknowledges the effective political activism of other women. In the first segment, Steinem describes her struggles with male authority and the need for women to define themselves apart from male approval in personal and professional relationships. The show then cuts to a group discussion about a threeday conference for Black feminists in New York City. Steinem participates in the group, which includes Margaret Sloan-Hunter and Jane Galvin-Lewis, both of the National Black Feminist Organization. Sloan-Hunter and Galvin-Lewis are more central to the discussion than Steinem and provide critical assessments of feminism and racism. Sloan-Hunter and Galvin-Lewis recount the painful experience of witnessing racist media representations of Black women or the “lack of it” altogether. This long-standing marginalization shaped representations that were beginning to emerge with the women’s movement; according to Sloan-Hunter, “a lot of Black feminists were very dissatisfied with the press image of the women’s movement and their relationship to the women’s movement.” During this discussion, Steinem is sidelined in favor of Black feminists who tell their own stories. Steinem’s final appearance comes with the journalistic duty of providing a brief, contextual setup for a story of Jordan’s unionization efforts in Rock Rapids, Virginia. Steinem and Ms.’s director of special projects, Ronnie Eldridge, “were most closely involved in the production,” yet Steinem’s presence on the program was restricted.79 This may have sidestepped the controversy Steinem brought with her, yet her minimized presence had negative consequences. While Variety felt Woman Alive! was “blessed” with a lack of a host or spokesperson, the New York Times noted that the “fear of elitism” and the management of a “superstar” feminist “translates as careless production.”80 Much like Steinem’s, Ms.’s involvement in Woman Alive! was a mixed blessing. While the magazine offered professional media resources and name recognition, it was also beset by criticism and mistrust from some feminist quarters. The Lesbian Tide charged Ms. with heterosexism and “gross neglect” of lesbians as well as with “perpetuating anti-feminist attitudes and politics” of “elitism, professionalism, classism, superstardom, and dollarism.”81 Redstockings was concerned that the “creation of Ms. magazine ha[d] put Steinem in a strategic position in the women’s movement—a position from which feminist politics can be influenced, but also a position from which information can be and is being gathered on the personal and political activities of women all over the world.”82 Television’s “Serious Sisters” 137 Ms.’s ties to commercial interests also raised suspicion. Katherine Graham, president of the Washington Post company—whose holdings included the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Warner Communications—was a stockholder in the magazine. Warner’s ownership of Wonder Woman, who famously appeared on the cover of magazine’s first issue, Graham’s appearance on a 1974 cover of Ms. as “the most powerful woman in America,” and Newsweek’s supportive coverage of Steinem led Redstockings to identify Ms. as “an area in which commercial interests and politics coincide.”83 Ms.’s involvement with public television further created “confusion” about the magazine’s business and about whether Ms. was a “political Figures 17, 18 & 19. A group discussion of the first conference of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) involved Jane Galvin-Lewis (top) and Margaret Sloan-Hunter (middle) and decentered Gloria Steinem (bottom). PBS, June 19, 1974. (Schlesinger Library, Vt-30) 138 Television’s “Serious Sisters” or commercial venture.”84 This confusion, according to Redstockings, “led women to submit political information about themselves which they would not have sent a magazine publishing simply for profit” and “led women writers to expect better treatment from Ms. than from other magazines, when in fact the treatment has often been worse.”85 Amid such speculation, Woman Alive! downplayed the contributions of Ms. Although Ms. supplied the pilot episode with “information, provided contacts and debated ideas,” the program’s affiliation with Ms. merited just a single mention in a credit.86 Even though the magazine’s commercial ties threatened to discredit Woman Alive!, Ms.’s “heavy involvement,” as the New York Times noted, was “central to the program’s success.” Woman Alive! producer Joan Shigekawa credited the magazine as “the best resource center” for women’s issues and as the site of all the program’s preproduction work. In addition to its material resources, Ms. provided a template for a feminist workplace. The practice of “anti-hierarchical” relationships among workers was something Ms. adapted from the women’s movement, which Shigekawa then adopted for Woman Alive! Every woman involved in a meeting for the show could contribute, which created a “network of women constantly exchanging information.”87 The composition of Woman Alive!’s production team made a publicfacing feminist statement. Women were employed as the show’s executive producer, associate producer, writers and reporters, editor, assistant editor, field producer, film crew, title design, sounds, research, and production assistant. While their employment helped correct the industry-wide underemployment of women working in television, it did more than serve as statistical correction to gender imbalances in employment. Women working in such large numbers introduced meaningful changes to the organization and dynamics of the television workplace. “There’s nothing like it—when the producer is a woman and the decisions are made by women,” enthused Shigekawa, who noted that everyone was permitted to provide input, regardless of job title. This arrangement created an “open forum” for pitching ideas as well as “camaraderie and rapport within the crew.”88 Regardless of job title, women who worked on Woman Alive! were authorized by their gendered knowledge to contribute to a television program about and for women. Working in such an environment and on such a project alleviated the alienating effects of wage labor. As writer and associate producer Susan Lester said, “To all of us, it was not just a job, but a project integrated into our lives.” The blurred boundaries between workers’ lives and their jobs attested to both the political and personal importance of the production. Film editor Sarah Stein found that working on the program fulfilled “a real desire to finally work on something meaningful to us as women.”89 The hiring of women for the program thus not only challenged the imbalance of women working in production but also transformed the work of making television for women in front of and behind the cameras. Television’s “Serious Sisters” 139 For all the positive effects women brought to and experienced at Woman Alive!, the production team also faced uniquely gendered pressures while making the program. As a producer, Shigekawa felt obligated to refute sexist assumptions about women’s inabilities to work in television. To do so, she pushed herself to exceed expectations for a successful production. Shigekawa was compelled to finish work ahead of schedule and to come in under her $500,000 budget to prove that, despite cultural biases to the contrary, women could get work done efficiently and manage the business side of production appropriately. “We felt it was especially important for us to do so,” Shigekawa noted, “because men in television have held the myth too long that ‘women don’t know how to handle money.’ ”90 Although Shigekawa and her team successfully managed the logistical issues involved in making Woman Alive!, the realities of limited resources constrained them. Transforming women’s television required “the total concentration of creative energy,” which was impossible to sustain. But rather than mystifying the creative process and positioning herself as an artist whose artistic inspiration alone would see her through, Shigekawa emphasized the material support that focused creativity required. Creating revolutionary television required “time to think, and time to rest,” a condition that necessitated financial backing. “Money makes that possible,” Shigekawa argued. “Money buys you an extra day or two to rejuvenate, the time to confront the next creative problem with fresh eyes.”91 Without the necessary resources, Woman Alive! suffered, as did its workers. In Shigekawa’s Figure 20. Promotional photo for Woman Alive! features producer Joan Shigekawa and union organizer Crystal Lee Jordan (later known as Crystal Lee Sutton) in “a light moment.” (PBS/Schlesinger Library MC 421) 140 Television’s “Serious Sisters” assessment, the compromised vision of the ambitious production was brought about by the realities of budgets and scheduling rather than the abilities of the production team. Shigekawa used the thwarted potential of Woman Alive! and her platform as the show’s producer to illustrate the problems of television work for women. To her, problems with the show originated with the industry’s shortchanging of women. Woman Alive! was hampered by a modest budget, as expected for a public television production. As a feminist-oriented, woman-centered and woman-run program—atypical within the television industry, commercial or public—Woman Alive! faced additional issues of a male-dominated industry in which women were not afforded respect, power, or autonomy. From her experience working on Woman Alive!, Shigekawa concluded that women who wanted to work in television at any level and on any program faced additional labor that hampered their productivity and innovation. Nothing short of ending structural inequality would reform this problem. “Until women in television are totally integrated into the decision making process,” Shigekawa argued, “responsible women, at whatever level they exist, must bear the additional burden of disproving a deeply ingrained set of attitudes and prejudices held by a primarily male administration.”92 Nonetheless, she held out hope for women who persisted in these inequitable circumstances and stressful labor conditions. Women succeeded in making Woman Alive! because, according to Shigekawa, they could rely upon their “professional best” to see them through.93 Notwithstanding the difficulties Shigekawa and her crew faced in making Woman Alive!, the program proved a significant contribution to public television and to television for women. Notable as a “full-blown vid tape and film production,” Woman Alive! offered a rare exception to what Variety considered the “bleak” PBS lineup of fall 1974.94 Its quality, measured by its “true national tv production values,” set Woman Alive! apart from its public television contemporaries.95 Other assessments proved equally positive and hailed the program as, among other things, “technically flawless.”96 The cultural value of the program was validated by the inclusion of three of its episodes in the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Public Library’s 1976 series on “new social documentary film.”97 After its initial pilot episode made at Dallas–Fort Worth station KERA-TV, Woman Alive!’s production relocated to New York City’s WNET. This move marked the end of the program’s regional experimentation in production location and staffing, but its dedication to diverse stories of women across the country remained a priority. An episode from season 2 titled “A Time of Change,” for example, explored how the women’s movement “permeated the everyday lives of women throughout the United States,” even for women “who did not think of themselves as feminists in the activist sense.” Program topics for the second season included reproductive freedom and the unequal terms of sterilization for women, the ERA, the impact of the women’s liberation movement, and “Women and Television’s “Serious Sisters” 141 Work,” all of which promised to build on the program’s initial investment in telling women’s stories across regions that reflected diverse political outlooks, relationships to feminism, and identities. By the end of the season, producers guaranteed that the program would “have visited many different parts of the country” and that the ten-episode series would “present a view of women in all of their diversity.”98 On the basis of audience research conducted by the CPB’s Qualitative Research Survey, Woman Alive! expanded its half-hour format to an hourlong program in 1977, its second and final season. The program also moved from a magazine format with short segments to a single theme for an entire program. This shift allowed the program to develop a “documentary film around an investigation of a single topic,” which afforded viewers a “deeper understanding of the issues.”99 At their March 1976 meeting, the CPB earmarked up to $554,000 for continued support of the series, but with the CPB’s rejection of proposed sponsorship from Ortho Pharmaceutical, the maker of women’s contraception, the program continued to lack external funding necessary to sustain it.100 When Woman Alive! was canceled in 1977, viewers wrote in to protest the cancellation. Their letters cited the program’s consciousness-raising effect and the ongoing need for feminist media programming, particularly with the ongoing fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Just as they had throughout the series run, letters from viewers attested to the political impact and educational outreach of the program, particularly for women who might not otherwise have connection to feminist organizations and to other feminists. Some viewers understood the cancellation as symptomatic of structural problems within the television industry. As one viewer wrote in January 1976, “Please don’t cancel it because of lack of interest. Men, who run things, aren’t interested in women, as whites who run things aren’t interested in blacks, generally. But education is necessary.”101 YES, WE CAN: THE DAY WOMEN TOOK OVER TELEVISION Yes, We Can, the local Boston television production described at the top of this chapter, proved a unique experiment in television for women. Its daylong format, funding from state government and local commercial television, and volunteer efforts on the part of local women’s groups and businesses resulted in a day of television for women with connections to public outreach and civic issues and a robust reimagining of the generic parameters of women’s television. The production validated the importance of challenging typical commercial programming. It also raised concerns about who should be responsible for expressing feminist ideas on commercial television; the sources of labor, financial support, and creative input for a community-oriented but commercially operated event; and the political ramifications of translating feminism to a commercial television venue. 142 Television’s “Serious Sisters” Yes, We Can ran on WBZ from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 18, 1974, with a one-hour prime-time special that had aired the previous night. Both days’ programming blended entertainment and celebrity with viewer education and civic concerns. The prime-time special featured musical performances by Liza Minnelli, Helen Reddy, and Ann Murray, between which members of the Gover- nor’s Commission on the Status of Women previewed the next day’s events. The guests on the daylong show included high-profile feminist leaders (Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Florynce “Flo” Kennedy), authors (Phyllis Chesler, who wrote Women and Madness), and politicians (Representative Margaret Heckler), who appeared alongside entertainers and television personalities (celebrity chef Julia Child and actor and singer Kitty Carlisle) and leaders of nonprofit organizations (Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers). The program was tied to a women’s fair, which provided content for the live broadcast and operated as a public service to women in the Boston area. The fair was free and provided attendees with resources and information about “all aspects of womanhood from education, health, and child care to exercise” from local government groups, women’s organizations, and businesses. WBZ interviewed fair sponsors and attendees alike, with panel discussions and demonstrations rounding out the program. The live broadcast of January 18 concluded with portions of multiday state hearings on sex discrimination commissioned by the governor of Massachusetts. This final segment featured “televised documentation of sex discrimination” that highlighted structural inequalities facing women in the workplace, government, and society. The segment intercut taped excerpts from the January 10 hearings instigated by the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women with live on-set discussions by women experts on the matters of concern raised in the hearings. Yes, We Can originated with the formation of the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women in June 1971. The Commission was a fact-finding and advisory committee initially comprising thirty-five women whose goal was twofold: (1) to “survey and evaluate all statutes” of the state and “all governmental programs and practices” that involved the “employment, health, education and welfare” of women; and (2) to “investigate the need for new and expanded services that may be required for women as wives, mothers and workers.”102 The Commission was empowered to make recommendations to the governor based on their investigations, which they did in their annual report. These wide-ranging recommendations included abortion rights, sex education, availability of childcare, job opportunities, the ERA, state restrictions on women performing jury duty, and prison reform. Over the course of seven days throughout late 1973 and early 1974, the Commission conducted a series of hearings on sex discrimination in three of Massachusetts’s major cities.103 These hearings were intended to provide women an opportunity to consider and act on the question “What can and should be done Television’s “Serious Sisters” 143 regarding needed legislation in the above areas?” Designed to set the agenda for the Commission in the following year, the hearings and their media coverage, which included Yes, We Can, were meant to inform viewers and prompt them to political action. Broadcasting the hearings situated Yes, We Can in liberal activist principles and a public service framework, but the use of commercial television to do so complicated matters. Airing the hearings on WBZ promised greater exposure to problems facing Massachusetts women, and the Commission’s retrospective assessment of the event found that this strategy was “quite successful in arousing the interest of the people of the Commonwealth on women’s issues.”104 The event, however, was seen by some feminists as unhelpful to women. Its relationship to commercialized media watered down feminist politics that could affect real change in women’s lives and appropriated women’s talent and labor for capitalist ends. With its goal “of examining women in today’s society and television programming,” Yes, We Can was as much of a reform of women’s television as it was of anything else.105 Producers operated under the assumption that women viewers were a public underserved by commercial television. The daylong program expanded women’s television to include issues beyond those designed for the imagined consumerist-housewife-mother viewer. Yes, We Can challenged traditions of women’s television with program content debating a range of feminist issues, including financial planning, reproductive health care and abortion, and instructions on running for political office. When domestic tasks, so typically part of the consumerist cultivation of viewers of women’s television, were part of the agenda, they were redefined in accordance with feminist principles: “Ms. Fix-It” encouraged women’s self-sufficiency in appliance repair, plumbing, and electrician work; childcare concerns expanded to include adoption and foster care as well as guidance for raising a child in nonsexist fashion; and “Body Tone” included judo and karate demonstrations. Yes, We Can acknowledged numerous facets of women’s concerns and intersectional identities of gender, class, age, and race. The day started with “Programming for the Working Woman” from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. Topics included discrimination and employment, day care, “women working with women,” finance and money management, and “the plight of being poor and a woman.” The next segment, “Programming for the Woman-at-Home,” featured Elizabeth Hubbard, the current Miss Black America; Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women and a “forerunner of the black women’s liberation movement”; and various feminist authors. Topics in this segment included “examination of roles played in marriage,” pregnancy, and “the changing role of women today.”106 The 4:00–6:00 p.m. time slot, “Programming for the Younger Woman,” focused on abortion, birth control, consciousness-raising, and careers for young women. To support such a large-scale production, WBZ solicited sponsorship from area businesses (Cabinet Lumber & Supply, Inc. and Westinghouse Electronic Co.)