NYPR Archives & Preservation
Echoes of Women’s Voices on WNYC
This piece is adapted from Le Fèvre-Berthelot, Anaïs. “Echoes of Womanhood: Listening to Women’s Voices on the Radio”. In Womanhoods and Equality in the United States: 20th–21st Century Perspectives, edited by Christen Bryson, Anne Légier, and Amélie Ribieras. Taylor & Francis, 2024, pp.15-36. It is reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot is Associate Professor of Media and American studies at Université Rennes 2 in France.
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Definitions of femininity and its evolution tend to focus on images. American womanhood in the 20th century has been embodied by a multiplicity of figures: from the suffragist and the flapper to Rosie the Riveter, the pin-up, the Civil Rights activist, the suburban housewife, and the working mom. These images encapsulate the evolutions of the place of women in American society but also the great variety of experiences that are excluded from common definitions of womanhood in the U.S. Moreover, these images were often informed by the male gaze and stripped women of their agency.
But it is important to listen to women’s voices as well. Not just metaphorically, not just to see what they have to say, but to focus on where they (can) say it, on how they say it and on how those voices may be perceived. Radio is an obvious medium to question issues related to the materiality of voices, but it also is an important part of women’s history. Radio participates in the construction of gender as a system of power because, through conventions, technological choices, definition of genres, silencing of some voices and foregrounding of others it shapes what gender sounds like and creates new possibilities for gender performances in production and reception.
To understand the lingering gender inequalities, the silencing of (some) women’s voices, and in the end how radio has reflected and contributed to the evolving definitions of femininity in the 20th century, I turned to the exceptional set of audio sources preserved by the NYPR archives and focused on some of the extracts made available online that feature women as hosts, producers, or lead interviewers. The emergence of electronic media in the mid-19th century (with the telegraph in the 1840s, the telephone in the 1870s) started a process that profoundly transformed how gender is constructed. The audio and visual mass media that developed in the 20th century (cinema, radio, television, the Internet) accompanied deep political, social and economic transformations that shaped what it meant to be a woman in the United States, by opening up new opportunities and by conveying images and voices that performed gender. The women that can be heard in the WNYC archives illustrate these changes.
Gender Trouble on the Air
The voice is an interface between the private and the public sphere and it is therefore not surprising that women’s presence on the air implied negotiations with technological and cultural norms that eventually openly challenged definitions of womanhood in the United States. While the discourses around women’s voices tend to define very strict roles for women on the air, the medium has also offered some women, from the first radio amateurs to today’s podcasters, opportunities to transgress gender norms and make their voices heard.
The emergence of radio coincided with the apex of the fight for women’s suffrage and with debates about women’s nature, identity, and role at the same time that women were entering the public sphere in numbers never seen before. Historian Donna Halper explains that radio was very welcoming for women because they were a cheap workforce and were hired to find talent to put on the air as they often had musical training and contacts and were thought to be “good at organizing.”[1] Even though women were present behind the scenes in the early days of radio, they were quickly marginalized on the air. Among the questions that the pioneers of commercial radio had to solve in the 1920s and 1930s was the place of women’s voices.
In an essay devoted to the long tradition of criticism addressed to women who dare(d) to speak in public, historian Mary Beard writes:
Many aspects of this traditional package of views about the unsuitability of women for public speaking in general—a package going back in its essentials over two millennia—still underlies some of our own assumptions about, and awkwardness with, the female voice in public.[2]
These assumptions are anchored in gender and the belief that authority cannot be feminine.
Yet, sexist oppression is all the more efficient when it anchors exclusion in nature, and in this case, in technology. The argument that women’s voices simply are incompatible with the technologies of sound transmission has been used regularly to exclude women from the air up until today. Tina Tallon points out that this argument is not completely unfounded because of regulatory limitations of bandwidth and because equipment manufacturers took lower voices as the standard to build microphones and receivers. The signal was thus often capped at 3,400 hertz, which is a problem because “the frequency ranges which characterize the consonant sounds are appreciably higher in the speech of women”[3] and, without frequencies above 5,000 hertz, intelligibility might be reduced. Tallon also explains that:
This distortion was exacerbated by a common practice incited by the erroneous belief that women spoke more softly than men: engineers automatically turned up the volume knob when a woman took her place behind the mic. Many elements of female speech already sit in a range to which we are naturally more sensitive, and the improperly tuned equipment made women’s voices sound piercing or harsh.[4]
These technological constraints (which come in part from the fact that most engineers were and are still men), lead women to modify their voices to fit expectations. Brooke Gladstone, host of “On the Media” on WNYC, recalls:
When I began work as an editor at NPR in the late ‘80s, I talked to a lot of women who were given basic training before they went on the air, and this is NPR. They were told they sounded too young; they needed to lower their voices.[5]
Even as listeners moved from AM to FM radio and then to online radio or podcasts, technological progress did not lead to much change in this area since recent technologies such as Bluetooth and compressed formats like MP3 also cause a loss in the definition of women’s voices, making them sound “thin and tinny.”[6]
Even when women do follow injunctions to lower their voices so that they would fit the technology, they may be criticized for lacking personality, or for the creaking sound that might result from the strain put on vocal folds when one tries to lower their voice—the infamous vocal fry.[7] But of course, women were not just marginalized because of the material qualities of their voices, but also because of cultural prejudice that assigned them to specific roles. In the early days of radio, men could envision women as entertainers but not as announcers. Women’s participation in the rise of the new medium can be seen as part of the negotiation of women entering the public sphere in the U.S. Women in the radio industry relied on gender stereotypes and traditional division of labor to have their voices heard: they were on the air as performers, announcers, story ladies, hosts of women’s shows focusing on homemaking, but they could not tell the news.
So, being a woman on radio has often meant negotiating gender norms. To be on the air, women had to fit gender expectations regarding their roles and focus on typically “feminine” issues, but they were expected to match vocal standards based on the average male voice and on sexist prejudices.
WNYC: Womanhood(s) of New York City
Historically, public radio has been a welcoming space for women, perhaps because of its commitment to public service for the whole community. WNYC provides a good illustration of this phenomenon and the recordings from the archives underline the role played by voice in the performance of gender. From eggplant recipes and short segments about civic life by a municipal librarian to a report on the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest, my selection echoes the major social, economic, and political transformations that shaped women’s roles in those years.
In the first half of the 20th century, women accessed the sphere of paid work, but their participation was “carefully delimited by an ideology linking that activity to their sex”: women’s paid work –whether in the textile or food industries or in white-collar jobs such as teachers, nurses or secretaries– could be seen as a continuation of their domestic care work.[8] There was no woman announcer on staff at WNYC in the pre-war years. But they were few people on staff anyway, and since the radio was owned by the City of New York, it was common for municipal employees to come on the air to address New Yorkers on programs related to their fields of expertise. Rebecca B. Rankin is the woman who appeared on the air most regularly between 1928 and 1938. Together with her staff, the woman Fiorello La Guardia later called “a human index of city affairs”[9] prepared and presented “over three hundred radio speeches.”[10] She was a librarian of the New York Municipal Reference Library and, on Wednesday, March 7, 1928 at 9:45 p.m., she gave a talk on WNYC encouraging citizens to pay a visit to the Municipal Building and praising the Municipal Reference Library as “the fact center for public official and citizen.”[11] There is no available recording of that particular talk, but it was commented on in the press and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle praised her performance, writing that her talk was “chatty, bright, understandable [and delivered] so engagingly that we almost felt like figuring out some sort of story that would require several visits to the library.”[12] Rankin’s on-air interventions were not typical of women’s contributions in those days; she did not talk about cooking or child rearing or domestic economy. Instead, in 1936, she explained proportional representation to New York voters. The educational mission of the municipal station was emphasized during the New Deal under the mayoralty of La Guardia. On the recording, Rankin’s voice sounds clear and is perfectly understandable despite being quite high-pitched. Her careful articulation and didactic tone might fit what we assume was her ethos as a public librarian. Her regular presence on the air illustrates the new opportunities opened to educated women (she graduated from the University of Michigan in 1909).[13] She was able to take part in the public debate just as the tradition of reform movements of the end of the 19th century came to meet the development of the welfare state in the 1930s. Her interventions also point to her political savvy, as she defended her institution and municipal services in general, in politically and economically complex times.
Another municipal employee spoke on the air in the 1930s. Blanche Irene Welzmiller, a former leader of the Woman’s Suffrage Party of the Bronx who was appointed as the Deputy Commissioner of Markets for NYC from 1919 to the early 1930s, appears in radio programs from 1927 onwards in short segments giving recipes and home economics advice.[14] Welzmiller’s appointment was the consequence of her activism in favor of terminal food markets in New York City and as a member of the Plenty Food League.[15] She was thus introduced in a program from 1931 as “one of our best-known club women in New York, one of the most prominent women in her profession” that would tell the listeners what to do with roast beef leftovers or share some “recipes concerning that elusive vegetable: the eggplant”[16]. While we do not get to listen to any recipe in the available excerpts, Welzmiller promotes the efforts of her administration (the Department of Public Markets) in helping listeners who “have the responsibility of feeding the family.” Welzmiller’s regular presence on the air testifies to the consequences of the Great Depression on gender: the traditionally feminine tasks of grocery shopping and cooking gained in importance as households had to make do with less and the responsibility of feeding the family relied increasingly on women. Welzmiller does not “simply” tell the listeners how to cook eggplants, but also insists on the political dimension of “food problems”. This can be seen as an example of women using traditional gender roles as stepping stones to enter the public debate. Despite the poor quality of the segments, it seems that Welzmiller’s voice is lower and softer than that of Rankin, pointing, in case that was necessary, to the great variety of women’s voices. Despite her public commitments, her delivery is less assured than that of Rankin but she also adopts a didactic posture, as if these women were in charge of educating the audience. Welzmiller was also the president of the Woman’s Press Club of New York, an organization that sponsored a morning program on WNYC that allowed its members to talk about “journalism, fiction, music and art.”[17]
This association of women on the air with their roles as civic educators is confirmed by another archive from 1931, in which Frances D. Pollack, Chairman (sic) of the Department of Vocational Guidance for the National Council of Jewish Women, talked about the importance of establishing trade schools to avoid wasting precious “human resources” at a time of crisis.[18] In 1929, Pollack traveled to Hamburg, Germany as part of a delegation to the World Conference of Jewish Women;[19] she clearly was a very active community member whose dedication to the cause of vocational training still comes through almost a century later. In the available digitized file, Pollack’s voice also could be said to belong to the lower register. Her delivery is extremely clear and assured; her tone is dynamic and engaging. Pollack’s talk mixes social and economic arguments with a “story” meant to illustrate the advantages of vocational training, proving a very convincing orator.
These three examples suggest that the women who entered public life through local activism, the fight for suffrage and the reform movements of the turn of the century quickly learned how to use the new medium to further their work and to amplify their participation in the public sphere. This was true whether women were speaking on or listening to the radio. In 1925, Carrie Chapman Catt who, after playing a central role in the suffrage movement as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Society and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, continued to be very active in the public debate as a peace activist, gave a broadcast address on WEAF.[20] This led women to gather for “radio teas” to listen to the feminist leader’s speech and then talk about “county problems with regard to local tickets.”[21] One year earlier, the New York Times noted that radio supported women’s interest in politics:
In recognition of the growing interest of women in politics, WGY is introducing a series of non-partisan talks on its afternoon programs. The value of suffrage and the importance of exercising the privilege of voting are discussed by women. These talks reach the housewife at home and they have brought many expressions of appreciation from the listeners.[22]
This function was confirmed by Genevieve Earle, the first woman elected to the city council of New York City in 1937, who later commented on the broadcasting of council sessions over WNYC:
The women of the city had people in their homes for coffee at two o’clock on Tuesdays. They’d bring their knitting and their sewing, and spend the afternoons in each other’s houses, listening to the radio.[23]
The radio did not only empower women by giving them access to the air and amplifying their voices, but played a role in the creation of a public sphere in which women could be active participants. This blurring of the frontier between the domestic and the public is key to the role radio played as a technology that challenged gender norms. In this case –but this is true also of Eleanor Roosevelt’s broadcasts discussed below– radio provided women access to a public platform that allowed them to reach a wide audience, and to literally have their voices heard in the public debate. But even when women were “only” listening to the radio, the medium represented a window onto the public sphere because of the way it easily found its place in women’s everyday lives: reading the papers or having conversation with neighbors about public issues generally required devoting time that many women did not have, whereas radio could often be listened to as women accomplished their domestic or paid work. Radio teas and coffees of the pre-war era illustrate how the radio participated in the transformation of the public and private spheres by letting one enter the other and vice versa. This transformation accompanied the evolutions of womanhood by associating it with a more active participation in public debates.
It is likely that three factors contributed to the regular presence of women on WNYC, including to talk about issues that were not necessarily “feminine,” in the station’s first decades. First, WNYC started to broadcast before the industry was structured, at a time when women may have had more opportunities to suggest programs before men realized the full potential of the medium. Second, the municipal station did not have a budget for programming, so municipal employees represented “free” content. Women were present in the municipal administration, especially from the 1930s onward, as Fiorello La Guardia rewarded women for their support of his campaign by appointing some in his administration.[24] One of them was Frances Foley Gannon who became deputy markets commissioner. Elisabeth Israels Perry writes that, “Gannon’s morning radio “food service” reports were so popular with women that, when Bronx president James Lyons moved to eliminate her post from the budget, city women mounted a huge protest.”[25] In 1939, La Guardia appointed Gannon to serve as a consultant for food and marketing to advise the station’s newly appointed board.[26] Finally, WNYC’s mission was civic and public service, an area that women had invested in for decades, as illustrated by Welzmiller’s example. Overall, women’s activism in reform movements and for suffrage certainly participated in creating opportunities for women to speak on WNYC and become voices of the city.
Conclusion
Even with this limited foray into digitized archives, listening to one of the oldest radio stations in the U.S. confirms that women’s voices were present on the air from the very beginnings of radio and that history writing has marginalized radio women. In the WNYC archives, we can hear women in the 1930s talk about politics, about theater, walks in the park, roast beef and eggplants. Recordings, transcripts, and reviews show that some women were producers, hosts, and guests on radio programs early on. The small number of women in the archives suggests however, that they may have been exceptions. They also generally were white, educated women, who had some training in public speaking—either through their education or their activism, or both. Women were often assigned specific roles: they were experts on domestic issues, or their voices embodied the stereotypical figure of the teacher or the librarian. Yet, it appears that in the narrow spaces of freedom that they carved for themselves, they sometimes tried to convey their singular voices and to stand for causes they held dear. Another conclusion that can be drawn from this sample is that many women were silenced, in the industry and in the archives. Even though it seems that WNYC was more welcoming to a diversity of voices than commercial stations probably were, there is little trace of African American women or immigrant women on the air. In the first half of the 20th century, the radio allowed some women to perform their citizenship; the voices that can be heard on WNYC can sound like an echo of the relations of the power that shaped New York at the time.
What also emerges if we pay attention to the materiality of the voices that we have access to today, is that technical constraints and sexist discourses shaped the voices of radio women. It seems that, on WNYC, those voices were more acceptable if they belonged to a register that was lower than the median pitch for American women. None of the voices in the excerpts available online have a really distinctive character: there is no very high-pitched voice, nor is any of those voices extremely deep; they have no characteristic timbre, no strong accent (not even a New York one). These low, soft voices suggest that the multiple identities of the individual women were silenced. It seems as if to be heard, women had to get rid of what made their voices unique and thus guarantee that there would be no gender trouble on the air.
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[1] Halper, Invisible Stars, 8.
[2] Mary Beard, “The Public Voice of Women,” London Review of Books, March 20, 2014, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women, last accessed May 20, 2023.
[3] John Steinberg, “Understanding Women,” Bells Laboratories Record, January 1927, 153–54.
[4] Tina Tallon, “A Century of ‘Shrill’: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices.
[5] “How Radio Makes Female Voices Sound Shrill,” On the Media, WNYC Studios, accessed May 13, 2022, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/how-radio-female-voices-sound-shrill-on-the-media.
[6] Tallon, “A Century of ‘Shrill.’”
[7] Bryn Taylor, Karen Wheeler-Hegland, and Kenneth J. Logan, “Impact of Vocal Fry and Speaker Gender on Listener Perceptions of Speaker Personal Attributes,” Journal of Voice, November 16, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.09.018.
[8] Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression,” Review of Radical Political Economics 8, no. 1 (April 1, 1976): 76, https://doi.org/10.1177/048661347600800107.
[9] Elisabeth Israels Perry, After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York, Illustrated edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 194.
[10] Barry W. Seaver, “Rebecca Browning Rankin Uses Radio to Promote the Municipal Reference Library of the City of New York and the Civic Education of Its Citizens,” Libraries and Culture 36, no. 2 (2001): 279.
[11] Rebecca B. Rankin, “A Fact Center for Municipal Information,” Special Libraries, 1928 19, no. 3 (March 1, 1928): 66–68.
[12] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 March 1928 quoted in Seaver, “Rebecca Browning Rankin Uses Radio to Promote the Municipal Reference Library of the City of New York and the Civic Education of Its Citizens,” 293.
[13] Barry W. Seaver, “Rankin, Rebecca Browning (1887-1965),” in Dictionary of American Library Biography: Second Supplement, ed. Donald G. Davis (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003), 180.
[14] “Today on the Radio,” The New York Times, October 12, 1927.
[15] Jacalyn Kalin, “Biographical Sketch of Blanche (Mrs. Louis Reed) Welzmiller,” Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, accessed May 16, 2022, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1010596301.
[16] Blanche Irene Welzmiller, 11:20 A. M. - Roast Beef Leftovers (WNYC, 1931), id: 73690, WNYC archives, https://www.wnyc.org/story/1120-a-m-roast-beef-leftovers/ and Blanche Irene Welzmiller, Eggplant Recipes, The 1931 Files WNYC New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News (WNYC, 1931), id: 73646, WNYC archives, https://www.wnyc.org/story/1931-files/.
[17] “Radio For Women Writers,” The New York Times, February 24, 1929.
[18] Frances D. Pollack, “The 1931 Files,” WNYC, 11:45 AM [Vocational Guidance - Mrs. Frances D. Pollack],” WNYC, December 2, 1931, https://www.wnyc.org/story/1931-files/.
[19] “Jewish Women to Meet,” The New York Times, May 5, 1929.
[20] Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996), p.181.
[21] “‘Radio Teas’ for Mrs. Catt,” The New York Times, August 27, 1925.
[22] “Radio Enlists Interest of Women In Politics,” The New York Times, October 5, 1924.
[23] Cited in Israels Perry, After the Vote, 223.
[24] Israels Perry, After the Vote, 184.
[25] Israels Perry, After the Vote, 185.
[26] “Program Of WNYC To Be Enlarged,” The New York Times, May 11, 1939.