You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime uses archival research, textual analysis, and industrial and cultural studies frameworks to re-evaluate women’s representation in post-World War II American radio and television crime dramas. It complicates popular and scholarly understandings that postwar broadcasters simply responded to audience desires by marginalizing women across their schedules and removing recurring female characters from crime dramas altogether. Rather, the three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that dominated the broadcast industry’s transition from radio to television joined conservative religious and anti-communist groups to silence public debate over women’s roles. While late-1940s network radio programming incorporated varied opinions about postwar women’s desire and potential to expand their influence in the workplace and politics, postwar television naturalized a vision of passive housewives embracing husbands’ patriarchal authority. Women who chose to fight crime challenged this authority by claiming the right to enforce the law and judge their fellow citizens.
This dissertation is organized into two parts: The first explores the industrial and cultural discourses that set the stage for postwar restrictions on women in crime. Network executives and anti-communist conservatives did not see each other as natural allies, but they mobilized complementary gender discourses emphasizing women as passive consumers rather than public actors. Archival industry research shows network executives ignored evidence female audiences liked crime programming, especially series featuring active, sympathetic women. Instead, executives and vocal conservatives framed such women as a sexualized threat to men, children, and themselves. Networks tolerated crime-curious women on radio and early television, when they struggled to retain and build a female audience. However, by the mid-1950s, executives feared such women would undermine their commercial emphasis on domestic consumption and attract regulation or censorship. Part two explores three major types of crime-curious women who appeared on postwar radio and television programming. Investigative wives and detectives’ secretaries investigated crimes with male husbands or employers. Female detectives, however, directly challenged men’s control over criminal justice, the most overt sign of patriarchal social power. All three types gave female audiences a powerful model of feminine agency within patriarchal society. They also established representational norms that endure in modern crime dramas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/39903 |
| Date | 18 March 2020 |
| Creators | Martin, Catherine Eloise |
| Contributors | Jaramillo, Deborah, Rzepka, Charles |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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