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From the Curator
We are now at the final phase of our initial three-year journey to look at the work of remarkable women who have helped to shape the history of media. Our honorees have been responsible for the development of formats in news and entertainment and for innovations in programming as well as business models that are still with us today. This year we delved into fifty more exemplary lives of women who have made a difference, and, for the first time, profiled women who have changed the television and radio landscapes in other countries.
As in the previous years, we have worked closely with a steering committee of executives and academic specialists to select those women behind the scenes, past and present, who have not received the recognition they merit. Our latest honorees again encompass several generations of women in the areas of our framework: writers, directors, producers, journalists, sportscasters, and executives.
Again, we salute the visionary pioneers who imagined the very first possibilities for the media and are now largely forgotten in the history books. Executive Judith Cary Waller was present at the creation of both radio and television, helping to innovate programming for each nascent medium. As a station manager of WMAQ in Chicago and later an executive at NBC radio, she developed both entertainment (Amos ’n’ Andy) and educational (The University of Chicago Round Table) programs, helping to define the future of the airwaves. In the early fifties she helped to create the influential children’s television series Ding Dong School, which was honored with the Peabody Award.
Martha Rountree and Nancy Dickerson paved the way for women in the very masculine world of broadcast journalism. The Southern Rountree, who was once described as “a diesel engine under a lace handkerchief,” developed the Meet the Press premise, serving as the first (and still only) female host of the public affairs juggernaut. Dickerson understood the news business was “riddled with prejudice,” but managed to break down many barriers for women, becoming the first woman to report from the convention floor and the first to host a daily news program on network television.
Women’s entry into the media business was profoundly impacted by the Equal Employment Commission’s enforcement of the Civil Rights Act. Suddenly women were not on their own, struggling for jobs and advancement, but had the law on their side as they entered the workplace as a group. Meredith Vieira bluntly acknowledges the importance of the law: “You might say I was the victim of circumstances and a vagina…Women were a quota back then. The business was told it needed us.” But, women of the early seventies had to contend with all-male newsrooms. NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell remembers those daily struggles for journalistic equality: “We had to fight very hard. Sometimes I think that the younger women have no idea what it was like to be in a newsroom where you were not accepted. Or to be interviewing officials who did not want to deal with a woman reporter.” Gwen Ifill also had to contend with racism as she worked at the Boston Herald American. She still remembers encountering a group of “old white guys” who had “never seen anything like me—a college-educated black woman.”
The expanding media environment was a defining characteristic for the third era of female media professionals. Opportunities abounded to learn the craft and business of media, even if the pay was minimal. Director Beth McCarthy Miller remembers those formative days at MTV: “The beauty of being at a place like MTV is that you learn how to do a lot of different TV directing. You get paid little money, you work the most insane hours in the world, but it’s an incredible atmosphere to learn in. It’s like going to school and getting paid for it.” One of Maria Hinojosa’s first jobs was producing programs for the Latino news program Enfoque Nacional (National Focus) that had helped her to shape her own teenage sensibility: “Hearing about Latinos nationally in Texas and California and the issues—I’ll never forget it.” A few years later, Hinojosa became the host of her own cross-cultural series, Latino USA, the only national, English-language program on Hispanic issues.
This year the Paley Center recognizes the accomplishments of women from around the world. Salma Hayek walked away from a lucrative job on a Mexican telenovela to make her name in Hollywood. She was surprised how limited the thinking was in Los Angeles: “They hadn’t noticed there were thirty-eight million Latinos in the US, an important market.” She took charge of her career, forming her own production company to produce Latino projects, culminating in the adaptation of the Columbia telenovela Yo soy Betty, la Fea into the US hit Ugly Betty. Beijing-born Yang Lan rarely watched television as a child, but learned of the medium’s influence while she was a student at Columbia University in New York. Consequently, she produced a series of entertainment and news programs in China, making her China’s wealthiest self-made woman. She recognized that “China is changing so much…they want TV that deals with their lives. They want information.” Hayek and Yang, like many women before them, understand how media can impact lives and assumptions of viewers.
The She Made It initiative allows contemporary women to see their place in media as part of a continuum, building on the struggles and accomplishments of several generations of innovators. In the forties Frances Buss opened the directorial door for decades to come: Gloria Monty starting in the fifties, Nancy Malone and Lee Grant beginning in the seventies, and Beth McCarthy Miller the eighties. Way back in the thirties Mary Margaret McBride established an informal, informative intimacy with her radio listeners. Her extemporaneous, interpersonal skills paved the way for such savvy communicators as Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Suze Orman, and Martha Stewart. The Center will continue to add their programs to our growing collection, as well as host events with the women who have fostered change in the industry. We hope that their stories will inspire future generations of women to make it in media.
Ron Simon
Curator
The Paley Center for Media
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