EARLY RADIO AND THE RISE OF THE RADIO HOMEMAKER

In its early days, radio technology – both the use of the radio itself and its broadcast content – was considered a masculine hobby and potential female listeners were largely ignored. Operation of temperamental radio sets was thought too complicated for women and, as reception was better at night than during the day, programming was initially scheduled only during the evening.Footnote ⁷ However, the technology rapidly improved and by 1925 radios were simpler to use, the signal was stronger, and programming had a broader appeal. Anne MacLennan suggests that the shift from the masculinized hobby of radio transmission and reception to the domestic sphere of the living room and family resulted in a corresponding shift to the feminized domestic space of both the physical location of the radio and the act of listening to the programs.Footnote ⁸ This change was recognized in programming that began scheduling shows aimed at women and children during the day.

Perhaps surprisingly, rural Mid-western farming communities enthusiastically embraced radio technology early in its development. Mary Neth, in her work on agribusiness in the first half of the twentieth century, notes how little early twentieth-century technology existed in these isolated areas: telephones, electricity, and even running water were not widely available, but “by 1940, radios were present in more than seventy percent of farm homes in all Midwestern states but Missouri.”Footnote ⁹ Neth attributes the prevalence of radio ownership to ease of operation and repairs, and while they “did not help production or reduce labor, radios … served the whole family.”Footnote ¹⁰ Consequently, many small Mid-western towns had their own privately owned radio stations with programming designed to meet the specific needs of their audience. By 1925, Shenandoah, Iowa, with a population of just over five thousand in 1920,Footnote ¹¹ had two competing radio stations: KMA and KFNF. Both stations employed women radio broadcasters from the beginning and included programming designed specifically for women. According to Bob Doll in his history of small-town radio stations, “early radio station owners were generally content to use their stations to promote their businesses” and this is certainly true of both KMA and KFNF.Footnote ¹² However, the many hours of airtime that needed to be filled meant that station owners such as Henry Field (KFNF) and Earl May (KMA) initially relied on female family members to fill the time. While the first women broadcasters were restricted to musical and homemaking content and excluded from reading the news or giving farm market prices, they broadcast from rural radio stations from the beginning.

Initially, all broadcasters on these small rural stations were untrained amateurs as the professional radio broadcaster did not yet exist. For example, two of the most popular broadcasters on the Shenandoah stations KFNF and KMA were Henry Field and Earl May respectively, the seed merchants who owned the stations. Indeed, both Field and May were so admired that in 1925 Radio Digest magazine awarded Henry Field second place in its nationwide poll of listeners to find “The World's Most Popular Radio Announcer” and the next year Earl May took first place in the competition.Footnote ¹³ The earliest radio homemakers were frequently family members – usually wives – of radio station owners and their participation on the air was an unpaid way of helping out their husbands.

However, as the medium of radio expanded and developed, the status of these early women broadcasters progressed from that of unpaid amateur to one approaching the professional. While not formally trained in either radio broadcasting or domestic science, radio homemakers assumed roles just as professional as their male counterparts. In the introduction to their collection on the home economics movement, Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti associate professionalization with male exclusivity and female exclusion: “professionalism was gendered with a vengeance, down to its language of objectivity, science, expertise, and disinterested inquiry,” with the result that women were “largely denied employment in male professions.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, radio homemakers, through their specialized knowledge of rural domesticity, infiltrated the early radio industry in a way that skewed conventional notions of professionalization. Although these early rural women broadcasters initially helped out the male station owners, they progressed rapidly from unpaid to paid employment, effectively carving out a new professional environment for female radio broadcasters. The women perceived themselves as career broadcasters, possessing the necessary skills that enabled them to advance in those careers. Radio homemaker Billie Oakley described how the homemakers expertly “paint[ed] pictures with words” and noted that their ability to connect with listeners was as important as their knowledge of running a household.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite the surprisingly extensive signal range of these rural stations – broadcasts were heard across the country – the content of the shows was specifically aimed at a rural audience. Robert Birkby points out in his history of KMA that “it was the people of the Midwest who listened, people on the farms and in the small towns of what broadcasters … call[ed] ‘Radioland’”; consequently, stations like KMA “chose programs that would satisfy the simple tastes of listeners whose lives centered around farms and small towns.”Footnote ¹⁶ As Smethers and Jolliffe note, Mid-western radio stations were not the only ones to include domestic-themed programming; however, the prevalence of the agricultural industry – more than 40 percent of all families in this region lived on farms in the 1920s – meant that local radio shows catered to the specific needs and interests of these rural women.Footnote ¹⁷ The radio homemakers often had first-hand knowledge of their listeners' lifestyles and, as Smethers and Jolliffe suggest, “identified with the plight of farmers struggling to make ends meet in the area's erratic agricultural economy.”Footnote ¹⁸ This understanding of their audience, coupled with their listeners' isolation, resulted in a large and loyal audience of rural women.Footnote ¹⁹

Small, rural radio stations were not alone in considering their women listeners; large urban radio networks, such as NBC and CBS, included daytime programming aimed at women from the mid-1920s. While the content of these shows – cooking and homecare advice – appears to be much like that of the rural radio homemaker shows, the broadcasters of the respective shows differ in key respects. Most significantly, the radio homemakers were untrained and while, to some extent, they cultivated a public persona, that persona did not essentially differ from their private one. In comparison, two of the three hosts of the network's shows were fictional and the other was a professionally trained home economist. Betty Crocker was an invention of the General Mills Corporation and Aunt Sammy was created by the US Department of Agriculture. Ida Bailey Allen, who broadcast for CBS, wrote cookbooks, taught cooking professionally, and was a trained dietician.Footnote ²⁰ These three experts didactically instructed their listeners and, in the case of Betty Crocker, promoted General Mills's products. In contrast, radio homemakers, broadcasting over small, rural stations, were intimately familiar with their audience, many of whom were personal friends. Consequently, the radio homemaker can be considered a kind of “cultural phenomenon: a local icon of the ideal woman and, simultaneously, a powerful force in shaping listeners' lives.”Footnote ²¹

Part of the success of radio homemakers can be directly attributed to their ability to talk to their audiences with what Evelyn Birkby, a radio homemaker who has been broadcasting for more than sixty years, calls “sincerity, enthusiasm, and optimism that cannot be faked,”Footnote ²² approaching their shows as if they are physically in the presence of a listener fully invested in hearing intimate information about the homemaker's family and life. The charm of radio homemakers stemmed from their ability to engage “in an affable one-sided dialogue before a microphone.”Footnote ²³ The shows were informal and unscripted; often the hosts would simply chat with whomever was visiting in between dispensing advice and giving recipes. Jessie Young was the first to broadcast her shows from her kitchen in the late 1920s. As her children walked through the kitchen, they would contribute to the broadcasts.Footnote ²⁴ Listeners would become intimately familiar with the homemakers and tune in to follow their lives as if they were soap operas. These early shows consisted of short daily broadcasts that would help fill the many hours of airtime. Smethers and Jolliffe suggest that the informal, chatty nature of these shows served more than one purpose: they “provided listeners with household management techniques, and, above all, reflected the pastoral, conservative and individualistic values that have come to typify the Midwestern region.”Footnote ²⁵

VISITING

The familiarity between broadcaster and listener depends, in part, on a mutual understanding of what it means to visit with someone, as in participating in informal discourse. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the use of “visit” meaning “talk or chat; to exchange conversation” stems from the more widely used “go to see (a person) in a friendly or sociable manner.”Footnote ²⁶ Although no scholarship exists on this particular use of the word, etymological discussions identify it with the Mid-west and the south. It is rarely used in this form in the Northeast and less frequently so in the West.Footnote ²⁷ Significantly, “to visit with” differs in essence from “to visit.” Simply to visit suggests a physical movement, a trip to see another person or place. “To visit with,” however, carries the connotation of informal chatting with one or more people whom one knows well. Thus “visiting with” is socially based, whereas simply “visiting” is location-based. This understanding of the act of visiting is central to the radio homemakers' construction of their shows and on-air personae, and subsequently to their relationship with their listeners.

Discussants on the etymology website perceive visiting with someone as an act that takes place between at least two people in person; however, a couple of respondents suggest that it is possible to visit with someone over the phone. The potential for such long-distance visiting again strengthens the deliberate construction of the shows as visits between presenter and listener. Almost every discussant suggests, though, that to visit with someone involves direct interaction with another person. Thus radio homemakers play with the concept of visiting, and such play depends upon the audience fully understanding what it means to visit with someone as well as their complicit engagement in a much more one-sided representation of visiting.

While much of the existing scholarship on radio homemakers notes the familiarity between the broadcasters and their listeners and acknowledges that this familiarity resulted in the success of radio homemaker shows, excluded from these discussions of listeners' relationship with the broadcasters is the skewed nature of that relationship. For example, in her examination of women's programming in the 1930s, Anne MacLennan focusses on the large urban centers of broadcasting and the major networks, such as NBC and CBS, “where the audiences were large and densely concentrated” rather than considering small, rural stations.Footnote ²⁸ She notes how the rise of the networks resulted in significant reduction of “independent broadcasters.”Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, the networks showed little interest “in the early production of women's programming”; such programming relied “instead on local productions.”Footnote ³⁰ MacLennan acknowledges how these locally produced shows appealed to women, suggesting that women's programming, at least initially, was a way to “simply … attempt to fill the broadcast by matching the routine of their perceived listeners.”Footnote ³¹ Significantly, considering the listeners as “perceived” rather than actual does not take into account the responses from listeners that in part shaped the content of the shows. In particular, missing from this discussion is the empathy generated by the broadcasters for their listeners' lives and vice versa. Such empathy is manifested through the notion of visiting.

In many ways, the radio homemakers, and the content of their shows, conform to widely understood conventions of visiting. Whether anecdotal or through online discussions, accounts of the notion of visiting recognize that visiting depends on a certain level of intimacy and on informal chatting. We generally visit with those whom we have known well for some time. The homemakers presume this kind of relationship with their listeners, both overtly and by implication. Reinforcing the notion of visiting with listeners, some visiting actually took place during the broadcast between the homemaker and her guests. Pearl Madsen, broadcasting on Sidney, Iowa's KICD, would conduct cooking demonstrations on her show, interacting with a live audience. She describes how “people would sample [the food] … and we would visit back and forth,” discussing and describing the food for those listening.Footnote ³² Thus the listening audience hears the kind of interaction familiar to them, encouraging them to consider themselves part of this social group.

Perhaps because the concept of visiting was so familiar to them, radio homemakers actively constructed their shows as visits with their listeners. For example, Evelyn Birkby refers to broadcasting as “the art of visiting over the air.”Footnote ³³ Many of the shows contained the word “visit” in their titles: Bernice Currier had two shows, one simply called Visit and the other A Visit with Bernice, and she wrote in a KMA Guide column that many of her listeners “seem like close personal friends.”Footnote ³⁴ The use of “seem” is telling here, as those listeners can never actually become “close personal friends.” The audience for many of the radio homemakers, though, inevitably consisted of members of the community known to the broadcaster as well as unknown listeners. Evelyn Birkby's first show, one of the few radio homemaker shows preserved on tape, acknowledged these multiple audiences.Footnote ³⁵ She opened the broadcast by referencing her friends, who she “knows will be listening,” and then talked to the unknown listeners affirming that they, too, will soon be friends, thus extending the intimacy of friendship to an unseen and unknown public.Footnote ³⁶ In this way, the listening public was drawn in to the radio homemaker's circle of familiarity. In order to create this sense of familiarity, Birkby began the show by describing the appearance and location of her home, the family farm, in some detail, then describing her family members – her husband and two children. Enhancing the sense of intimacy with her unknown listener, Birkby linked them to personal friends who she knew would be listening to her show.Footnote ³⁷ Extending an extant sense of friendship to anonymous listeners immediately established an inclusive environment, one familiar to listeners – to the extent they expected such an environment – as Birkby's show conformed to the customary format of a radio homemaker show.

Birkby's 1950 broadcast leaned on radio homemaker conventions, established in the early days of broadcasting by women such as Jessie Young and Leanna Driftmier, that depended on listeners' familiarity with the rituals of visiting. This sense of intimate friendship implied by visiting was reinforced when the homemaker shows began transmission from the broadcasters' own homes. Jessie Young, the first radio homemaker to broadcast from her home, helped establish a precedent for the informality evinced by homemaker shows that persisted for decades. Her initial presence on the air in 1925 was reading advertising copy which she ad-libbed rather than following the script, talking about the product as if she were talking to friends.Footnote ³⁸ Later, she broadcast from her kitchen, where family members “would wander in and stop to talk.”Footnote ³⁹ Listeners thus not only gained insight into the homemaker's personal life, but, just as with a personal friend, that intimacy extended to other members of the radio homemaker's family. The male announcer of Driftmier's show introduced her show by saying “It's 3:30 and it's Kitchen Klatter time on KMA. We now visit the home of Leanna Driftmier.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The idea of visiting – especially the home – is here reinforced by the announcer. The home becomes as significant as the broadcasters. The home as the site of the radio homemaker broadcasts, while not uncommon, was not ubiquitous, yet even those homemakers who broadcast from the studio employed similar tactics to those broadcasting from their homes to reinforce the sense of domesticity and affinity with their audiences.

To visit, then, suggests that the conversation topics are surface-level and focus primarily on domestic life. To a certain extent, the content of the radio shows and the offshoot newsletters met those expectations; however, mixed in with topics such as how to successfully grow African violets and updates on family members were discussions of global political events that threaten the stability of family life. For example, Leanna Driftmier's letter in the October 1950 Kitchen Klatter magazine discussed her feelings about her sons' imminent departure as they were deployed by the army during the Korean War. She described her apprehension about not knowing “what the future would hold for our boys”; although referring to her own two sons, the use of “our” included readers whose sons might also be deployed. Aligning herself with her readers, Driftmier recognized that “many mothers” were in a similar situation, some for the first time, using her own experience from the previous war to encourage and advise her readers to “keep the homefront running as smoothly as possible.”Footnote ⁴¹ hile the subject of war was far removed from the less significant topics Driftmier frequently chose for her letters, tellingly she promoted the maintenance of the conventions of domesticity as the best way for women to support both their military family members and the country itself.

Further complicating the shared understanding of visiting, Driftmier clearly distinguished between professional visiting and personal. In one newsletter, she described how, on the rainy autumn night she was writing this particular letter to her readers, all her family were gathered safely in the warm house, including her sister, who was spending the evening. However, Driftmier privileged her readers over her family by waiting to join her sister until she finished her written “visit.”Footnote ⁴² Ironically contrasting with the idyllic family photograph on the cover of this Thanksgiving edition of the newsletter, the act of visiting thus shifts from its social function to one of work, where work takes priority over family, and the intimate domesticity associated with visiting is subsumed by professionalism.

Despite this apparent tension between work and family, newsletters like Kitchen Klatter reinforced the artifice of reciprocity fostered by the shows. Although the radio homemakers encouraged their listeners to consider the broadcasts as friendly visits between friends, radio broadcasts could never fully replicate the kind of reciprocity upon which visiting conventionally depends. Rather they relied on the assumption of reciprocity encouraged by the way in which radio homemakers positioned themselves with their listeners. Yet the radio homemakers took great pains to generate the illusion of visiting. From the early days of broadcasting, radio homemakers supplemented their shows with newsletters and magazines. Jessie Young's newsletter, titled Jessie's Homemaker Radio … Visits, reinforced the shows' goal of intimacy with the listener and that the publication would replicate that intimacy. The ellipsis separates the visit from the radio while also emphasizing it. Effectively, the publication replicates the kind of reciprocity associated with visiting, but without the immediacy the word usually implies. Instead, the newsletter encouraged reciprocity through letter writing. Each edition of the newsletter began with a chatty letter from Young.Footnote ⁴³ A representative letter exhorted readers to listen to the shows and to write to her: “I want you to remember to visit daily on the radio with me and to write me as often as you can. Your letters are your return call to my visit over the air with you, so do remember to come often.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The magazines and newsletters allowed readers (who were often also listeners) to feel as if they were in a reciprocal relationship, and the published letters, patterns, and recipes from listeners contributed to the kind of intimacy suggested by the repeated use of “visit.”

In reality, the relationship between radio homemakers and their listeners was one mostly marked by inequality rather than reciprocity. Building relationships with listeners necessitated radio homemakers' willingness to expose the intimate details of their personal lives on the air – the death of a child and of a husband, the disintegration of a marriage – and they received letters from listeners (and later phone calls) sharing similar details. Homemaker Billie Oakley notes that “not every woman wants to admit to the world all the mistakes that she makes, but if you're on the air, you admit it.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way, the rural radio homemakers differed from their male colleagues whose roles included reading the news and quoting market prices, and who would not be required to divulge personal information.Footnote ⁴⁶ The homemakers also differed in this respect from their urban syndicated counterparts whose shows were scripted. Betty Crockers and Aunt Sammys across the country would read the uniform scripts, leaving little room for spontaneity and interaction with listeners. In contrast, Leanna Driftmier received over 1,700 letters from listeners in response to one recipe included in a broadcast.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, the listeners were effectively anonymous – and at times actually anonymous – and the sheer number of listeners precluded any true relationship between broadcaster and listener. The sense of intimacy and trust that the homemakers worked hard to establish meant that listeners revealed “innermost secrets” so personal that they sometimes would not sign the letters in order to preserve their anonymity. In one extreme example, Billie Oakley learned of an ongoing case of child abuse where the child was eventually killed by its abuser. Stymied by the persistent anonymity of the listener, Oakley remained helpless. Thus the unequal relationship of the listeners with the broadcasters resulted in involvement with listeners that was, in Oakley's words, “not always the sweet and light thing we'd like it to be.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Most interactions between listener and broadcaster, though, reinforced the sense of community established through the shows. Leanna Driftmier received a surprise gift shower from listeners at the urging of one of the other broadcasters: “fans mailed her hundreds of tea towels, dishcloths, table runners, and household items.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Driftmier was similarly showered with good wishes after the car accident in which she broke her back.Footnote ⁵⁰ And during World War II, Driftmier “mailed more than three thousand personal messages to fathers and mothers who lost sons in the war.”Footnote ⁵¹ Similar to the letters received by radio homemakers, the volume of correspondence precluded reciprocity, a point reinforced by Birkby (perhaps unintentionally) when she notes how “Leanna received so many letters she could not personally answer everyone.”Footnote ⁵²

Effectively, their willingness to share all aspects of their lives meant that the broadcasters' personal and professional worlds became blurred. Edith Hansen, who broadcast out of her kitchen for her “morning radio visits,” talked about her husband's death the day after he died.Footnote ⁵³ Birkby described her emotional reaction to hearing about the death of her friend's husband and then “realized [she] was not the only one who was sorrowing; other listeners who knew and loved [Hansen] were crying as well.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Here Birkby complicates the listener–broadcaster relationship. She personally knows Hansen and therefore her grief is a conventional reaction to the news. However, aligning herself with the other listeners who do not have such a connection to Hansen, despite the claim that they “knew and loved her,” suggests the lack of clear delineation between the broadcasters' professional and domestic lives.

THE DOMESTIC BECOMES PROFESSIONAL

The radio homemakers' relationship with work is not straightforward and the complex nature of their work is, in part, informed by the professionalizing of visiting and friendship. From the beginning, the shows built trust in their listeners in part so they were effective in their advertising. Smethers and Joliffe recognize that rural radio's “financial survival was dependent on its appeal among farm households” and that both radio and rural newspapers “both [reflected] and [shaped] the lifestyles, the culture, and the growth of communities of the rural Midwestern states.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The success of rural radio was directly related to effective advertising. This is particularly true for stations like KMA and KFNF, independent radio stations owned by local businessmen. The existence of these stations depended to a great extent on the success of Henry Field and Early May's respective seed companies. Therefore radio homemakers on both stations promoted products available through the catalogs of the businesses. Listeners' willingness to follow radio homemakers' endorsements depended on the establishment of trust. They established that trust through the conventions of friendship and visiting, thus turning them into work.

Consequently, radio homemakers exacerbated the long-recognized disregard of women's housework as work while at the same time making such work the focus of their shows. Laura Patterson suggests that a shift in middle-class domesticity in the twentieth century resulted in American women “enter[ing] their kitchens,” as she puts it. In other words, middle-class women became responsible for domestic chores in ways alien to their nineteenth-century counterparts.Footnote ⁵⁶ The effect of this shift, Patterson argues, is that women were faced with balancing their domestic, “kitchen,” lives with activities outside the home.Footnote ⁵⁷ In conjunction with this shift in women's engagement with domestic chores, unpaid housework has historically been devalued when compared to male employment outside the home. In her history of American housework, Susan Strasser acknowledges the perception that, generally, “the work of those who earn no money [is] without value”; indeed, such work is not even considered work, even by those who participate in it.Footnote ⁵⁸ The slippage between the personal and professional lives of the radio homemakers complicates the definition of domestic work. The content of the shows is unrelentingly domestic, yet the radio homemakers are professionals and paid for their work. The broadcast work was often located in the home, usually the kitchen, in such a way that domestic and professional work was simultaneous and symbiotic.

Long identified with what Janet Floyd calls “a zone of feminine subjection,” the kitchen frequently represents the confirmation and exclusion of female status.Footnote ⁵⁹ Radio homemakers in some way reinforce that status through the ways in which they address women's domestic work, especially kitchen work. Yet the very act of their broadcasting in the male-dominated field of radio complicates that domestic work. Rather than simply presenting kitchen work as “ceaseless routine [for] … the satisfaction of people further up the domestic, social and political hierarchy,”Footnote ⁶⁰ radio homemakers demonstrate the intrinsic value of kitchen work. Kitchen work and broadcasting work were synergistically dependent – without the domestic work, the shows would have no content.

Consequently, the broadcasters did not consider their shows hobbies or pastimes; rather they contained value for both listener and broadcaster. In fact, many radio homemakers were financially dependent on their positions with the radio stations, even though they frequently had to compete with the industry's resistance to women broadcasters. Bernice Currier “resented being paid less than men.”Footnote ⁶¹ Like Currier, Doris Murphy was a single mother (a widow) and financially dependent on her KMA salary.Footnote ⁶² She “frequently expressed gratitude that her work at KMA made it possible for her to raise and educate her son.”Footnote ⁶³ Murphy worked hard for women in broadcasting. Evelyn Birkby considers her “the strongest supporter of women in radio that KMA ever had … It took a strong woman to overcome the prejudice and indifference facing women in the broadcasting profession.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This kind of prejudice is evident in women's efforts to get on the air. Both Adella Shoemaker and Billie Oakley, popular and successful broadcasters, initially worked without pay to prove to station managers that they could do the job, and Martha Bohlsen had to “prove she could relate to housewives of the area.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By drawing attention to the importance of the work itself, radio homemakers allowed listeners to acknowledge the value of their work while still participating in the system that persistently made that work invisible.

For both listeners and broadcasters, women's work and women's time is interrelated. In his discussion of nineteenth-century morality and time, Thomas Allen recognizes “time's status as a commodity in the market.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Considering time as a commodity becomes significant in how advertisers marketed their products over the radio to women; their initial reluctance to do so was predicated on their perception that women's time was taken up with domestic work. Advertisers perceived women as being “too busy to stop work, sit down and listen.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, women rarely did stop work to listen; rather they listened while they worked. Allen suggests that “it is precisely as a commodity that time becomes usable by individuals,” and rural listeners to radio homemaker shows were keenly aware of the value of their time.Footnote ⁶⁸ Radio homemakers and their listeners frequently disrupted boundaries between work and leisure as well as boundaries between domestic and professional work. Susan Smulyan notes how several women “wrote of turning on the radio only after their housework was done and then listening only while they did their sewing.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Listeners considered the shows as entertainment, a leisure-time activity, yet frequently would continue to work while listening. Evelyn Birkby observes how women listeners “didn't stop working to listen to the radio. They would snap the beans or do the ironing or do the washing or the things they needed to do while they had the radio on.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Listeners would tell their children to “be quiet, go play over in the corner because my radio homemaker is on and I need to listen to her.”Footnote ⁷¹ Jane Sterne's New Yorker article on radio homemakers makes a similar observation. A Shenandoah resident whose mother regularly listened to the homemaker shows describes how the children were expected to “sit and be quiet” during the shows. She notes how that time belonged to her mother: “It was sacrosanct time. She ironed then. Fuel for the stove had to be gathered in advance, so there would be no disturbance. There had to be paper on hand to write down all the important advice from the homemaker.”Footnote ⁷²

Although it seems as if the listeners could not separate leisure from work, equally significantly they used the broadcast time as a means of being alone. One value of the shows, then, was that the listener was able to separate herself from other members of the household for a brief space of time marked out as being hers. The content of the shows, aimed at farm wives specifically, held little interest for other members of the household, and because she was frequently working the listener felt no associated guilt attached to such temporary separation from the family. However, the persistence of work – ironing, cooking, etc. – suggests that radio was the perfect medium for this particular audience.

While the listeners did not clearly distinguish between leisure and work, the radio homemakers also complicated long-held perceptions of women's work, blurring the distinction between domestic and professional work so that one bled into the other, particularly as many of the radio homemakers broadcast out of their homes. Because the homemakers were so popular with their listeners, radio station managers went to extraordinary lengths to keep them on the air. Wyn Speece, who broadcast on WNAX, South Dakota, for over sixty years, continued to broadcast throughout her pregnancies and while her children were young, perhaps unexpected during the late 1940s, because the station ran broadcast lines to her home.Footnote ⁷³ Florence Falk also broadcast from her home, beginning to do so just one month after becoming a radio homemaker. She was the first homemaker to “send out her programs live from a farm.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Perhaps most notable is Leanna Driftmier, who began broadcasting from her home in 1930 when a microphone was set up in her bedroom just four months after she was disabled.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus the distinction between domestic and professional work almost disappears when the radio homemaker's professional work becomes situated in the home. Indeed, in many ways both radio homemakers and the content of their shows reinforce the clearly gendered delineation of work that Janet Casey sees as entrenched in rural America: “rural life in the United States has resonated historically with both the prevalent spatial metaphors of a masculinist aesthetic imagination and the gendered ideologies of constructed space that shape the material lives of real women.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Because so many radio homemakers broadcast from their homes, often their kitchens, they effectively perpetuated such ideology while simultaneously challenging it through their participation in the male-identified profession of radio broadcaster.

The homemakers' professional work was not confined to broadcasting, either from their homes or from the studio. Their popularity turned them into celebrities with their listeners resulting in bus tours to the broadcasters' homes. Listeners regularly visited Florence Falk's farm home, arriving “as early as 6:00 am and … as late as 10:30 pm.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Falk would bake “at least twenty-five dozen cookies” for “regular tour days.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Escalating far beyond a simple social interaction, the concept so central to the broadcaster–listener relationship loses almost all sense of its social function for the broadcaster as the distinction between public and private is virtually eradicated. While the broadcasts depended upon listeners' appreciation of the concept of social visiting, these actual visits completely disrupted the intimate domesticity of visiting. Birkby comments that “none of the radio homemakers received any extra funds for the purchase of ingredients for all these cookies or for their time and fuel to prepare them. Even though it was exceptional public relations for the station, it was simply considered part of their job.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The lack of compensation for the promotional visits suggests the radio stations' inability to differentiate between domestic and professional work. However, rather than the domestic becoming professional, the professional becomes domestic.

Through becoming professional, radio homemakers promoted an explicitly conventional image of domesticity based on work associated with family and home that was directed specifically to the farming community. Both the content of the shows and the medium reinforced the absence of leisure and the centrality of work. Reading a magazine with the same content as the shows, for example, would prohibit work as it is impossible to read and iron simultaneously. In her exploration of American agrarianism during the Depression, Casey suggests that “by the late 1930s, the farmer had long been established as the virtual embodiment of the American way” and that the farmer's wife was foundational in his achieving that status.Footnote ⁸⁰ According to Casey, the roles of women on the farm were clearly delineated and virtually inviolable, their inherent domesticity perceived culturally as the norm for American women.Footnote ⁸¹ Clearly the radio homemakers do not disrupt what Casey calls “entrenched ideologies of masculinity and femininity,”Footnote ⁸² as the content of the shows focusses on women's work and not leisure,Footnote ⁸³ yet at the same time they were just as firmly situated within the professional world of the radio broadcaster.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE HOME ECONOMICS MOVEMENT

In many ways, radio homemakers appear to perpetuate the less political elements of the Progressive Era home economics movement. Initially, the home economics movement had an overtly political goal; Sarah Stage describes how the movement “helped transform domesticity into a vehicle to expand women's political power.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Ellen Richards, recognized as the founder of the home economics movement, used “the camouflage of domesticity … to advance women's education and ideas.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Extending beyond the domestic space of the home to the larger community, home economists suggested that women should “move out[wards] from the home and … participate in the social activism of progressive reform.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Richards's vision of women “carrying the values of the home into the community at large” was superseded by a shift within the movement to a focus on “professional experts” who encouraged housewives to follow their guidance in efficient home upkeep.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus the political goals of the movement were subsumed under the professionalization of domesticity. By the 1920s and 1930s, when radio homemakers were becoming increasingly popular and radios were found in many homes, the focus of home economics had shifted away from social activism to the science of home management and the roles of individual women within the home. For the most part, the content of radio homemaker shows had a similar focus, with the homemakers in the role of experts.

However, their position within the farming community enabled the radio homemakers to validate the experience of the listeners and the collective knowledge of the community in ways not possible for the urban syndicated shows. While not formally trained in domestic science, radio homemakers drew on their wealth of experience to instruct their listeners. Consequently, the shows frequently had a gently didactic nature. Bernice Currier, for example, told her listeners, “I would like to share my experiences with you listeners so you can learn easily what it took me years to find out.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The radio homemakers, then, used their personal expertise plus their firsthand knowledge of their listeners' lives to establish their authority and to connect to the listeners. Thus the trust built through casual visiting enabled these instructional elements of the show without alienating or insulting the listeners. In this way, the rural radio homemakers differed from their urban counterparts and those broadcasting from large institutions.

In particular, government-sanctioned shows such as those hosted by the fictional Aunt Sammy emphasized the dissemination of information. Enabled by the Smith Lever Act of 1914, which “provided funds … to improve the lot of farm women,” the home economics movement extended its reach to rural life,Footnote ⁸⁹ resulting in government education, such as that provided by the USDA Extension Service, on such topics as canning and child care aimed at rural women that, as Janet Casey suggests, “effectively reinforced traditional roles for women.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Many rural women, though, resented what they perceived as pointless government intervention, noting how they had been successfully feeding and clothing their families long before Extension Service workers began offering their instruction.Footnote ⁹¹ However, this kind of information coming from women such as radio homemakers was more likely to be accepted by rural listeners as the radio homemakers' own experiences, so similar to their rural audience's, gave them the kind of authenticity and authority lacking in the government programs. Aimed at an audience primarily from the immediate community, radio homemaker shows depended on recognition from that community to reinforce their authority. Leanna Driftmier, for example, was “named Iowa Mother of the Year in 1954.”Footnote ⁹² Such official recognition confers authority, making her believable and trustworthy. Promotional material for Edith Hansen's show described how Hansen “draws on her own experiences in meeting the typical homemakers' problems on the farms and towns of the Midwest.”Footnote ⁹³ The radio homemakers thus became a kind of informal extension of rural home economics programs. While they were, for the most part, untrained, relying on their own expertise for their authority, in some ways they could embrace the role of educator predicated by the Smith Lever Act. In fact, that they were part of the farming community enabled them to easily earn the trust of their listeners in ways unavailable to government-sponsored experts.

In some ways, the radio homemakers were emblematic of the failure of the home economics movement to persist in its political goals. Echoing the shift to the movement's focus on domesticity, radio homemakers unwittingly perpetuated the cultural lack of regard for women's domestic work; their willingness to establish their credibility by working without pay, baking cookies and opening their homes to fans without remuneration, and the blurred distinction between their domestic and professional lives all contributed to identifying women with their domestic lives. Indeed, they risked degrading women's domestic work further by reducing it to a form of entertainment, one that women would enjoy while, ironically, continuing to work. Women's multiple uses of their time are not unique to the twentieth century. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, women have been instructed to make the best, most efficient, use of their time, because in doing so they “promote systematic and habitual industry.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Using the language of capitalism and the capitalist marketplace to describe the function of women's roles in the home “locates the spirit of capitalism in domestic consumer culture.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus radio homemakers broadcasting – and advertising – from their homes appeared to use radio technology to perpetuate the long-standing relationship between the domestic private sphere and the public economic market. However, these women were, in fact, extraordinary. They entered a profession in its earliest days and shaped it to conform to their own lives. The domestically focussed content of the broadcasts paved the way for women's television programming in the future. At least one radio homemaker, Joni Baillon, transitioned from radio to television broadcasting in the 1960s.Footnote ⁹⁶ Thus radio homemakers are early examples of the entertainment industry's fetishizing of women's domestic work. However, unlike Martha Stewart's unattainable domestic perfection, radio homemakers aligned themselves with their listeners and endeared themselves to their audience through their folksy charm. In doing so, they drew public attention to lives of rural women in a way that conferred value on the frequently unrecognized work undertaken by such women.