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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2016
An unusual kind of community existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters in the American Mid-west – known as radio homemakers – and their listeners, one that depended on mutual trust. Radio homemakers established this trust via the concept of “visiting,” where the broadcasters used the familiar notion of informal social interaction to establish an ostensibly intimate relationship with their audience. Through playing with their listeners' understanding of visiting, radio homemakers made public the professionalization of domestic work that emerged from the Progressive Era's home economics movement. Because their shows primarily addressed domesticity, radio homemakers linked the conventions of domestic work to modernity through the technology of radio, drawing attention to women's frequently invisible household work.
1 Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
2 Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, with Anne Machong (New York: Penguin, 1989). Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981).
3 Sarah Stage, “Home Economics: What's in a Name?”, in Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–14, 1.
4 Janet Galligani Casey, A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.
5 Erika, Janik, “Good Morning Homemakers!”, Wisconsin Magazine of History, 64, 1 (2006), 4–15 Google Scholar, 6.
6 Smethers, J. Steven and Jolliffe, Lee, “Homemaking Programs,” Journalism History, 24, 4 (1998–99), 138–48, 139Google Scholar. Smethers and Joliffe cite articles such as the one in a 1979 edition of the Journal of Popular Culture by Morleen Getz Rouse and broader historical sources such as Radio's Golden Years: The Encyclopedia of Radio Programs, 1930 to 1960 by Vincent Terrace.
7 Smulyan, Susan, “Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: A latchkey to Every Home,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 13, 3 (1993), 299–314 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Other scholars such as Richard Butsch make similar observations.
9 Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 200.
10 Ibid., 201.
12 Bob Doll, Sparks out of the Plowed Ground: The History of America's Small Town Radio Stations (West Palm Beach: Streamline Press, 1996), 5.
13 Robert Birkby, KMA Radio: The First Sixty Years (Shenandoah, IA: May Broadcasting Company, 1985), 32.
14 Stage, “Home Economics,” 3.
15 Billie Oakley, interview with Robert Birkby, 4 Jan. 1982, tape recording, Iowa Women's Archives, Evelyn Birkby Collection.
16 Birkby, KMA Radio, 20, 29.
17 Smethers and Jolliffe, “Homemaking Programs,” 2. As an indication of listeners' isolation, one subscriber to Kitchen Klatter magazine, an offshoot of a radio show of the same name, had a mailing address of Route 1, Carroll, Iowa.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Indeed, the shows were so successful that they generated thousands of letters from listeners and resulted in a number of spin-off products such as newsletters and kitchen accessories.
20 Smulyan, “Radio Advertising,” 8.
21 Smethers and Jolliffe, 2.
22 Evelyn Birkby, Neighboring on the Air: Cooking with the KMA Radio Homemakers (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1991), 20.
23 Smethers and Jolliffe, 7.
24 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 42.
25 Smethers and Jolliffe, 5.
26 “Visit,” Oxford English Dictionary.
27 See discussions on the following websites: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1500551 and www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=6649. In particular, participants in the latter discussion recognize the regional nature of the use of “to visit with.”
28 MacLennan, Anne, “Women, Radio Broadcasting and the Depression: A ‘Captive’ Audience from Household Hints to Story Time and Serials,” Women's Studies, 37 (2008), 617 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Ibid., 619.
30 Ibid., 631, 621.
31 Ibid, 620.
32 Quoted in Smethers and Jolliffe, 6.
33 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 98.
34 Ibid., 69.
35 The technology to record radio shows did not exist until after World War II. Consequently there are no recordings of early radio homemaker shows. Even after 1945, few recordings of shows were made as the technology was in its infancy and expensive. Birkby's 1950 show is one of the few for which a complete recording exists.
36 Up a Country Lane, KMA Radio, Shenandoah, IA, 15 May 1950.
37 Ibid.
38 Marilyn Maxwell, “After 25 Years, Folksy Broadcaster Remembered,” Fort Collins Triangle Review, 14 Dec. 1983.
39 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 42.
40 Kitchen Klatter, KMA Radio, Shenandoah, IA, 1946.
41 Leanna Driftmier, “Letter from Leanna,” Kitchen Klatter, Oct. 1950, 2.
42 Ibid., Nov. 1950, 2.
43 The tone of Young's introductory letters resembles that of Leanna Driftmier's letters in Kitchen Klatter as if letters of this kind fit some kind of genre convention.
44 Jessie Young, Jessie's Homemaker Radio … Visits, March 1951, 2.
45 Oakley interview with Birkby.
46 Ibid.
47 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 97.
48 Oakley interview with Birkby.
49 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 91.
50 Lucile Driftmier Verness, The Story of an American Family (Shenandoah, IA: Driftmier Publishing Co., 1950).
51 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 97.
52 Ibid. To resolve the problem presented by such a volume of correspondence, Driftmier began publishing Kitchen Klatter Magazine, which “at its peak had a subscription list of nearly ninety thousand.” Ibid., 97.
53 Ibid., 119.
54 Ibid., 118.
55 Smethers and Jolliffe, “Homemaking Programs,” 2.
56 Patterson, Laura, “From Courtship to Kitchen: Radical Domesticity in Twentieth-Century Southern Women's Fiction,” Women's Studies, 32 (2003), 907–36, 910CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Ibid.
58 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 4.
59 Janet Floyd, “Coming Out of the Kitchen: Texts, Contexts and Debates,” Cultural Geographies, 11 (Jan. 2004), 61–73, 62.
60 Ibid.
61 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 66.
62 Ibid., 71.
63 Ibid., 85.
64 Ibid. 85.
65 Ibid., 133, 235.
66 Allen, Thomas, “Clockwork Nation: Modern Time, Moral Perfectionism and American Identity in Catherine Beecher and Henry Thoreau,” Journal of American Studies, 39 (2005), 65–86, 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Smulyan, “Radio Advertising,” 5.
68 Allen, 69.
69 Smulyan, 5.
70 Evelyn Birkby, interview with Jenny Gooddell, May 2010, KYFR Radio.
71 Ibid.
72 Stern, Jane, “Neighboring,” New Yorker, 67, 8 (1991), 78–92, 80Google Scholar.
73 Smethers and Joliffe, “Homemaking Programs,” 6.
74 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 201.
75 Verness, The Story of an American Family, 44.
76 Janet Galligani Casey, “Agrarian Landscapes, the Depression, and Women's Progressive Fiction,” in Casey, ed., The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 96–117, 97.
77 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 216.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 217.
80 Casey, “Agrarian Landscapes,” 96.
81 Ibid., 99.
82 Ibid., 97.
83 This emphasis on work contrasts with conventional advertising of radios that depicts families gathered around the radio doing nothing but listening.
84 Sarah Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” in Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 17–33, 19. For further discussion of the home economics movement see Megan J. Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
85 Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” 22.
86 Ibid., 28.
87 Ibid., 29.
88 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 59.
89 Stage, “Home Economics: What's in a Name?”, 9.
90 Casey, “Agrarian Landscapes,” 98.
91 Ibid.
92 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 92.
93 Ibid., 107.
94 Catherine Beecher quoted in Allen, “Clockwork Nation,” 76.
95 Allen, 77.
96 Birkby, Neighboring on the Air, 256.