What do women want? Radio's gendered domestication

This chapter examines accounts of the arrival of radio in everyday life during the 1920s and 30s through a gendered lens. In this period, women’s movements challenged existing understandings of the home as self-enclosed space, and by extension, women’s role as self-evidently situated within it. The chapter focuses on the liminal stage of first encounters with radio technologies--when the exact nature of radio’s connection to everyday life was still being negotiated. During this phase, the highly valent meanings of radio as a gendered technology and cultural form were most visible, and most contested. Ideas about radio at this time reveal important and enduring frames in the domestication of media technologies, ranging from dreams of technological ‘fixes’ for everyday problems to cultural anxieties over changed gender relations. In this aspect, the chapter draws on Nancy Baym’s analysis of early domestication of the internet in utopian, dystopian and quotidian frames, which in turn draws on earlier work by Haddon, Morley and Silverstone. The chapter provides evidence of women’s active role in radio’s domestication. These women saw the far-reaching implications of media technologies for disrupting long-held boundaries between public and private life, as they revealed a new set of ‘intimate geographies’.