Crystal sets and scarf-pin radios: gender, technology and the construction of American radio listening in the 1920s

Abstract

The transformation of radio in the 1920s from amateur wireless into broadcasting reopened questions of the gender of radio, just as the suffrage movement had succeeded with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Wireless had been an overwhelmingly male hobby. But radio manufacturers and broadcasters made explicit efforts to feminize radio, moving it from a masculine technical sphere to a domestic sphere. The domestication of radio has been documented in the USA and elsewhere. Before they were successful, however, there was a period in the mid-1920s when various discourses explored radio's gender. This article focuses on this previously unexamined moment of exploration. The discourses can be read in the several radio magazines which sprouted in the early 1920s with the birth of broadcasting. They included not only feminists, but also male mainstream writers, advertisers and cartoonists who `played' with gender categories in this period. Among these diverse voices are representations of gender sameness and of difference. Assertions of sameness challenged male hegemony of technology. Representations of difference were more diverse. Some reduce men's use from mastering technology to playing with toys. Others linked women's use to their domestic roles. The confusing mix of discourses on gender was characteristic of the unsettled terms of living in 1920s America. This case illustrates one aspect of the process through which feminism was reabsorbed into American culture in the 1920s while not threatening the fundamental gender categories.