Invisible Stars

The early years of American broadcasting seem to be an exclusively white male preserve, but broadcast historian Donna Halper documents the countless contributions made by women in this field since its earliest days. This artful social history considers our culture's expectations of women and how those expectations changed throughout the twentieth century, how the advent of television changed the landscape of employment opportunities for women in broadcasting, and how both television and radio communicate about gender roles. Invisible Stars brings the stories of key people like Bertha Brainard (one of the first women on the air in New York -- and the first woman executive at NBC), Dorothy Thompson (the first woman in radio to make the cover of Time), influential talk show host Mary Margaret McBride, and many others to their proper prominence.