Primary Source Dispatch #2: Crystal Tector on the "Radio Woman"

This week, a key source from Chapter 1, on the transition of the home economist from private scholar to public authority, and the power of "broadcast recipes"

Mar 04, 2024

As I count down to the end of my dissertation journey over the next six weeks, I’m sharing one of my favorite primary sources per chapter for your reading enjoyment, to encourage you to give it a look and consider each source’s implications. This week, a snapshot from a portion of my first chapter, on the emergence of several home economists into positions of tremendous influence in the early twentieth century, and their use of the megaphones of radio, magazines, and newspapers to advance their work.

Since radio stations began broadcasting in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the medium reshaped how Americans across the country shared the news and culture of the day. Radio profoundly impacted women’s lives, and its programs were designed with women listeners in mind. Even in its earliest years, radio offered countless cooking shows that streamed recipes, advice, and friendly guidance all over the country, functioning as what the scholar Cecelia Tichi called the “electronic hearth” that connected private homes to the world. In 1924, Ida Bailey Allen, the president and founder of the Radio Home-Makers Club, began her cooking show, the Women’s Magazine of the Air, using scripts developed from her lectures on the Chautauqua circuit. (Bailey was a frequent guest on the renowned lecture circuit, and would spend her days talking with dozens of women and each night scribbling her notes for the next day’s talks by the headlamps of her own car.) Allen’s program paralleled the creation of the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air in 1924, which offered a radio home for General Mills’ invented figurehead. The radio audience grew rapidly, from 145,000 listeners in 1923 to 1.4 million listeners in 1927, and women were an indispensable demographic in its listenership. Though most radio programs may have promoted the household as women’s rightful place, the medium also offered the rare opportunity to hear women’s interests addressed in national broadcasts.

Radio held a particular promise as an ideal pedagogical medium for learning to cook, offering clear, compelling, and approachable guidance. As journalist Crystal Tector commented in the May 1924 issue of Radio World magazine, “The growing importance of radio in home economy is proved by the avidity with which the housewife seizes upon the advantage of broadcast cooking recipes.”

The housewife nowadays sits with notebook in hand and takes down the recipes. She also gets an expert’s intimate exposition of “constructional data.” In other words, just as the home-set builder looks at his diagram, so the housewife listens intently to the oral diagram for baking a cake. Also, just as the home-set maker wants all the intimate details that come under the heading of constructional data, so does the housewife want the author’s story of her own experience in baking the cake.

As captured in Tector’s account, the radio as a pedagogical medium offered the housewife two valuable assets: the precise “diagram” (recipe) for achieving her culinary goals, and the story of the author/host’s personal experience. Taken together, the reader experienced an intimate and expert exchange of information, allowing her to become a student at the side of a trusted friend and colleague. For the women who tuned into these broadcasts, Tector recounted, time seemed to stand still, as “the housewives are so greatly fascinated by the recipes, and most of them have had such great success in following them, that they positively refuse to venture out of the house at the terrific sacrifice of missing this delightful feature.” It constituted a mutually beneficial exchange, especially for home economists seeking a new platform during the interwar period. As the scholar Susan Smulyan observed, “Broadcasters now needed instructors and female students/listeners for their newly created home classrooms.” Radio offered women a valuable resource as hosts and as listeners.

In this chapter, radio’s role in connecting home economists with ordinary women, giving them outlets as copywriters, producers, and hosts of programs centered on women’s household needs. In contrast to newspapers and magazines, radio offered an unprecedented intimacy between broadcasting personalities and American women throughout the Great Depression and well into World War II. Whether the women speaking on the radio were playing characters like Betty Crocker and Aunt Sammy, or representing themselves (as was the case with Louise Stanley, one of the women I profile in this chapter), women’s voices radiated through the airwaves with unprecedented authority and unmitigated charisma.

Our contemporary relationship to food media is no less intimate, and in many ways mirrors the parasocial dynamic established by the earliest radio hosts. Though the authorities on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube may derive funding and promotional support from their employers, their success depends at least partially on forging a personal connection with those who like, subscribe, and avidly reshare their contributions. The platforms they offer don’t have quite the same temporal hold on as the radio stars of the 1920s. Still, they create the illusion that we are cooking within a greater community and network of like-minded individuals, that our interests matter far beyond the confines of our home kitchens. As Tector notes, the author’s “story” compelled women to stay close to their radio sets and hear the context for their favorite personality’s culinary efforts. What hapless newlywed would Betty set straight with her recipe? What neighbor would require Aunt Sammy’s counsel? The narratives of why people cooked and how culinary experts could set them straight were more than just “broadcast recipes” or “constructional data”—they gave life and voice to a breadth of women’s experiences. If TikTok afforded more than 3 minutes to establish a similar kinship with its audiences, we might well see a resurgence of interest in the narratives of home cooking, rather than just quick recipe takeaways. I for one would like to be able to log in, click through, and get a glimpse of the real personalities and lives behind the content creators, if only to find the same affinity as radio listeners did in the 1930s…

I’d love to hear how you read Tector’s article, and what thoughts it generates about your contemporary food media consumption…stay tuned for next week, and a look at Julia Child’s debut on the food pedagogy scene!

French Fries and Martinis

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