When Women Invented Television

Pop Literacy

We all know Betty White from her years on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls. But decades before she was making us laugh in primetime, White was hosting a daytime TV talk show that saw her improvising more than five hours of programming every day. Yep, she’s not only one of our most beloved funny ladies, she’s also a TV pioneer. She is one of the superstars from the era When Women Invented Television, as Pop Literacy co-host Jennifer Keishin Armstrong chronicles in her fantastic new book of the same name.

From White and Gertrude Berg, the radio star who brought her long-running radio comedy The Goldbergs to television, to Hazel Scott, the singer and piano player who was also the first Black entertainer to host a national variety TV show, and Irna Phillips, another radio alum, who created the television soap opera, there’s a lineup of women who truly set up the future of TV. This week, Jennifer shares not only the fascinating details of how these extraordinary women shaped the medium that helps shape our culture more than ever, but the sad forces that prevented most of them from being the household names they should be. Until now, that is, thanks to When Women Invented Television.

Resource links:

• When Women Invented Television
• Here We Go Again by Betty White
• The Betty White Show
• Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC by Karen Chilton
• Hazel Scott at the piano
• Irna Phillips's The Guiding Light, 1953
• Something on My Own, a Gertrude Berg biography by Glenn D. Smith Jr.
• Gertrude Berg's The Goldbergs, 1954