Girlhoods in the Golden Age of U.S. Radio: Music, Shared Popular Culture, and Memory

Abstract

Memory and storytelling can provide valuable tools for media scholars aiming to better understand popular media audiences from a historical perspective. Girls' stories are particularly important because they have been absent from most official recorded history and archived documents. In this study, we interview 30 U.S. women born 1918–1948 in order to uncover their girlhood experiences with mid-20th Century media. Their narratives reveal 1) a shared experience of radio listening; 2) an emphasis on the “experience” of using media artifacts rather than on the content; and 3) the appeal of music and dance as a girlhood pastimes.

Notes

We would like to thank the thirty women who so graciously and candidly shared their stories with us.

¹One of the women in this category was actually born in 1918.

²We recognize that our use of snowball sampling may have contributed to our study's lack of racial diversity, as we are all ourselves Caucasian. While we hoped the council on aging would help us locate women of color, the respondents from that source were all Caucasian, as well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon R. Mazzarella

Sharon R. Mazzarella (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993) is Professor and Director of the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University. Her research focuses on youth culture and mass media, specifically in the field of girls' studies.

Rebecca C. Hains

Rebecca C. Hains (Ph.D., Temple University, 2007) is an associate professor of communications at Salem State University. The author of Growing Up With Girl Power (2012), her research focuses on girls' media culture.

Shayla Thiel-Stern

Shayla Thiel-Stern (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2004) is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Her interests include adolescent girls, digital media, and identity.