Homes Both Sides of the Microphone: the wireless and domestic space in inter-war Britain

Abstract

The paper will explore a neglected area of women's history, namely the entry of ‘the wireless’ into the domestic space of the home in the 1920s and 1930s. The domestic, as much a discursive as a physical space, had been emotionally and symbolically constructed as a place of mundane belonging for women. However, the introduction of the radio changed women's experiences of domesticity, offering education and reducing isolation. This article suggests that as women in the 1920s and 1930s enjoyed the cultural space of broadcasting—listening to travel programmes, explanations of political issues, comedy, plays and popular music—the porous and fluid boundaries between the domestic and public worlds were further underlined. This new domestic, and hence gendered, medium offered a novel, paradoxical, and unsettling cultural space. The reception of the wireless in the home, and the creation of a perceived ‘female listener’ and her concerns, influenced the nature of broadcasting by ‘domesticating the airwaves’. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) frequently utilised a language related to domesticity when discussing and, at times presenting, itself and its broadcasters. However, as the article will demonstrate, the relationship between the cultural space that broadcasting inhabited and the domestic spaces in which it was consumed was dynamic and contested.