, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.
Berke applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television, and reported the following:
Let’s call “the 99 Test” my personal assistant, because it works for me!Visit Annie Berke's website.
Page 99 of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar America falls in the middle of my third chapter. Chapter Three centers on Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs) and Peg Lynch (Ethel & Albert), two writer-performers whose shows successfully made the jump from radio to television. Berg and Lynch played housewives on-screen and spoke as accomplished career women in the fan magazines – sometimes, at least. Other times, they did the opposite: their characters, Molly Goldberg and Ethel Arbuckle, revealed themselves as shrewd operators and innovative (domestic) professionals, while Berg and Lynch posed for press photos with their families, flowery teacups in hand, inhabiting the postwar contradiction of the stay-at-home television showrunner.
How did these women insist upon their own relevance and value to a nascent television industry, and in whose voice were they best able to make the case? As we see on page 99, Gertrude Berg argued for television realism – with a mother’s touch – in an episode about sending a recording of the family dinner to her son in the army. Berg was more amenable to being confused with her character than Peg Lynch, who once proclaimed, “Ethel is more like me than I am like her.” A characteristically playful remark from Lynch, who, like Berg, used her show to mock male ego, advocate for egalitarian marriage, and slyly comment on television craft.
(For what it’s worth, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Peg’s house for lunch before her passing in 2015, and she was as funny and gracious as her on-screen persona. She even served the same “watermelon pickles” that the Arbuckles regularly enjoy!)
Their Own Best Creations looks at how women wrote across genre – comedy-variety, family serial, soap opera, anthology drama – in the first ten years of commercial television, keenly aware of how they themselves played a part in the unfolding drama of a new commercial art-form. How did these women writers circulate as public personalities in a pre-second wave feminist context? What were they able to say as themselves, and what could they only express through the characters they wrote? And who better to show that the personal is professional than Berg, Lynch, Madelyn Pugh (I Love Lucy), Joan Harrison (Alfred Hitchcock Presents), Irna Phillips (Guiding Light), and many more?
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
