I really tripped on this part of women’s history in television that I didn’t know much about, and it turned out neither did anyone else. It’s the only time you can’t see everything that was made.
For a while I’ve been obsessed with that 1940s or ’50s time in television, because you can’t see a lot of it.
When I was researching the Mary Tyler Moore Show book, I ran into the first inklings of this book. How did your your time spent as a journalist for Entertainment Weekly and the books you’ve written on television history like Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything and Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think Live & Love inform When Women Invented Television? Bitch spoke with Armstrong about the foundation of her work, the way politics shaped early television, and reviving the legacies of the extraordinary women whose work continues to inform television as we know it today. These women paved their own way despite dealing with misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and paranoid Cold War–induced sanctions, only to have those accomplishments largely paved over. Scott wasn’t the only woman whose achievements have been dumped: Beyond her, When Women Invented Television follows the lives and careers of three other notable women from the earliest era of television: Gertrude Berg, Irna Phillips, and Betty White. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s newest book, When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today, concludes with this unforgettable story, zeroing in on how little effort was made to preserve the contributions of the pioneering women of television.
And just like that, the memory of Scott’s historic television career was drowned, leaving us without any viewable record of her history-making, shining years as a television star.
After acquiring the company DuMont, the story goes that ABC filled three semitrucks with DuMont’s archive of kinescopes and two-inch videotapes, brought them to the Bay, and unloaded them into the water. It’s rumored that the recordings of jazz musician Hazel Scott’s 1950s variety show-a first of its kind on television for a Black American-were dumped in the Upper New York Bay. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today (Photo credit: A.
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