Confronted with popular media that offers feminized appeals to women on the basis of their socially enforced gender roles, feminist scholars thread a delicate needle: how should we treat these compromised, hegemonic texts while doing justice to women’s agency? One way to think about this, Annie Berke suggests in Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television, is in terms of the women writers responsible for hegemonic texts. With a focus on women scriptwriters in the 1940s and 1950s, Berke makes a “link between production culture and cultural production” by showing how they wrote scripts to fashion their own lives, even as they advised audiences differently (43). Part of the burgeoning field of feminist media scholarship that focuses on production contexts and self-reflexive archival methods, Their Own Best Creations restores women’s agency to this critical moment of postwar television production.1
The informality of the early television industry, not yet defined as exclusively men’s work, provided room for women to work, even as the job of the television writer became idealized as a male creative antidote to the conformity of postwar culture. Berke describes the conditions of television writing work in this period: the cramped smoky writer’s room, the jockeying for power within a production, and the quasi-celebrity that the television writer garnered in the popular press. The book’s central conceit, developed in Chapter 1, is that women writers’ scripts were conduits for expressing their authors’ complex ideas about, and resistance to, postwar femininity. With case studies ranging from comedienne Imogene Coca and writer Lucille Kallen on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, to the women writers on the anthology drama Alfred Hitchcock Presents, produced by Joan Harrison, Berke reads scripts (or taped programs where extant) through and against the professional lives of their writers. This allows her to frame and highlight ambivalence about social roles on the programs she studies, complicating our commonplace assumptions about this era as rigidly enforcing domesticity for white middle-class women.
For instance, in one chapter Berke considers Gertrude Berg and Peg Lynch, two well-remembered writers of ethnic family sitcoms, and frames them as stay-at-home “showrunners” (to use the modern term) for The Goldbergs and Ethel and Albert. These figures embodied the contradictions that would be central to the appeal of modern lifestyle experts such as Ina Garten, in that they were career women modeling idealized homemaking in their media output. Yet unlike lifestyle experts, they did not efface their careers to do this; instead, they insisted on the necessity of women’s sensibilities in masculinized work like television writing. Both Berg and Lynch were public figures, known for their writing and framed in terms of what Brooke Erin Duffy calls the “romance of work.”2 Their appearances on Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person and magazine features cultivated an image of a feminine laborer who drew on her domestic and familial sensibilities to craft intimate television.
Perhaps the most famous figure in Their Own Best Creations is the soap opera writer Irna Phillips, the subject of Chapter 4, in which Berke lays out the discussion of midcentury debates about the genre. Although the denigration of women’s culture by elite commentators may be familiar to the reader, Berke provides fresh historical research that makes this debate feel vital again. (The chapter would be useful as a reading to undergraduates for clarifying the feminization of mass culture.) Phillips intervened in these discourses by making what she believed to be “good” soaps: “centering her own process, credentials, and persona in these conversations” (121). There is also a section on the understudied Chicago School of Television, which makes the case that although stylistically unlike its other shows, These Are My Children belongs to this School because of its local production and “commitment to producing television realism on a budget” (133).
Beyond the familiar role of the writer, Berke also devotes one chapter to the under-analyzed story editor in television (and film, as the job category originated in the Hollywood studio system). Although editors’ labor was usually an invisible support system for more highly visible male auteurs, Berke elevates their status within canonical understandings of postwar creative industries: “what they shared was the responsibility of managing scripts and, through their curatorial and writerly authority, determining the form and content of postwar television” (160). As in other places in this book, this chapter is reflexive about its archive: “Too many of these women story editors’ careers are only revealed in their brushes with network power, or, when historians are lucky, in obituaries” (159-60). Here, as in a few other places, Berke supplements archival excavation with textual analysis, as the romantic lead Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is one of the few story editors represented in media. This analysis, interwoven with discussions of specific women story editors, helps explain how story editors were framed and treated in their time.
Their Own Best Creations enriches the field of television studies, which has too often reproduced the industry’s masculine bias in its choice of objects. Berke’s discussion of Berg and Lynch, for instance, is offered as a gendered counterpoint to Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” (NBC, 1953), “a teleplay typically held up as exemplary television craft but [which] has a secondary purpose of endorsing male television authorship” (91). The focus on white figures is a possible limitation of the book. Aware that Black invisibility dogged the television industry and now dogs the archives to this day, Berke carefully foregrounds the degree to which whiteness shapes these writers’ opportunities. But there is also a way in which, when we as authors reproduce the archive’s whiteness, we reinscribe that history as being white. The strength of this work thus lies in Berke’s reflexivity about the fragmentary, contingent nature of archives and how that inevitably shaped her work in them. She offers the poignant example of one writer, Lois Balk, who was mis-archived as Louis. “Here, we see the double threat of loss: that the woman writer’s contributions might be lost through sheer bureaucratic error, and, even if found, be misrecognized. The result is that the archive of women writers is sometimes more wide than it is deep” (47). When dominant epistemological regimes routinely leave out (or misrecognize) women’s work, she suggests, we must reorient toward different kinds of archives such as memoirs and oral histories—and perhaps ultimately do different kinds of work altogether to make sense of the thin materials that are preserved.
It is fundamentally an auteurist impulse to read these women’s scripts as evidence of their own lives and identities. Given the criticisms of authorship theory—that there is no way to know with certainty the degree to which a text “expresses” the authentic self of a creator—I wondered: is it willful to read so much of their creators into them? What, if anything, did audiences interpret about these women writers from their scripts? At times, when the evidence is strong, as in the section on Joan Harrison’s documented involvement in shaping the flavor of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, there is a beautiful harmony to how the woman at work and the work itself align. At other times, when the archive is more fragmentary, Berke engages in the kind of willful reconstruction that women must, when there is nothing else to go on.
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Endnotes
- See Courtney Brannon Donoghue, The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023); Jennifer Susanne Clark, Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024); Kate Fortmueller, Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021); Maya Montañez Smukler, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018).
- Brooke Erin Duffy, “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2016): 441-457.
Maureen E. Ryan