Women and Television

[Conversations developed at The Blackboard about actresses Donna Reed and Elizabeth Montgomery.]

Women migrated to television because the career opportunities were becoming greater, and the age discrimination was somewhat less. The era of female-headlined movies starring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck was passing, and the studios were not showing much interest in launching new stars of that type. So Donna Reed and Lucille Ball and Eve Arden and Elizabeth Montgomery were never the stars until they had their own TV shows, and all were over 30 when their shows began; Ball and Arden were over 40. Actresses' careers were ending at 30 in those days.

It's an interesting sociological question, why the Thirties (especially the pre-Code years) were more proto-feminist than the immediate postwar period. But they definitely were. Actresses carried films (and were expected to) in a way that became much less common after 1950. Television brought women back to the fore; Lucille Ball single-handedly had a lot to do with that.