Visible Storytellers: Women Narrators on 1950s Daytime Television

Abstract

During 1950s, television's daytime airwaves were filled with women's stories. Well before soap opera's plotlines pervaded daytime schedules, a variant of popular audience participation genre offered viewers a steady stream of women's personal narratives, but these stories were intermixed with elements of quiz show. (1) Within this hybrid format--called here the quiz show--women traded public recitation of their life stories for chance to win prizes. At one extreme, misery stressed pathos of women's lives, recounting struggles of female subject. Chief among these popular sob shows were Strike It Rich (1951-58), Turn to a Friend (1953), Glamour Girl (1953-54), Welcome Travelers (1955-56), and ratings blockbuster Queen for a Day (1956-64). Other versions of quiz show retained sentimental storytelling without devolving into bathos. Programs like The Big Payoff(1951-59), Stand Up and Be Counted(1956-57), and It Could Be You (1956-61 ) centered upon humor, social indecision, touching reunions, and stories of spousal gratitude. The salient feature of each of these daytime programs--and focus of this essay--is confessing female subject, woman-as-confessor-narrator. My purpose here is to detail how four of most popular 1950s quiz shows--Strike It Rich, Queen for a Day, It Could Be You, and The Big Payoff--cast voice of woman storyteller as variously outspoken and silent, inextricably caught within paradoxical frames. In each program, these frames are evident in interplay between sound and visual tracks. Multidimensional soundtracks reveal that women are endlessly prompted, interrupted, edited, summarized, and silenced; visual tracks, which further compromise women's vocality, prove that women revert to somatic expression when their voices fail. Indeed, it can be argued that this alternation between storytelling and emotive display serves to disclose latent opposition between free expression and enforced muteness at core of these programs. In this regard, a woman's quandary on quiz show is not unlike her dilemma in historical melodrama. In her book Overhearing Film Dialogue, Sarah Kozloff reminds us that women's film, driven by emotional confession and talk, evokes melodrama's paradox. Building upon earlier work of Peter Brooks and Tania Modleski, Kozloff finds in dialogue of women's films an enduring enigma. While film melodramas are verbally overexplicit, they nonetheless hinge around not said, words that cannot be spoken (242). Like stage melodrama from earlier centuries, women's film relies upon and scenarios of tears and fainting (240). On one hand, melodrama unleashes the desire to express all and to utter unspeakable (Brooks 4); on other, it dramatizes the repression of and its consequence in hysterical signs (Kozloff 244). The 1950s quiz program exposes exactly this pressure between speech and silence (Kozloff 247). Women are encouraged, indeed required, to tell their personal stories, yet their narratives are continually interrupted and reworked so as to accent hysterical gesture and woman-as-spectacle. The melodramatic impulse toward full disclosure, however truncated in its utterance, complies with television's confessional mode, a form Mimi White traces across multiple television genres of 1980s and 1990s. Significantly for White, confession mediated through television is repeatedly linked with consumer culture and social subjectivity (10). The programs under discussion here, while predating White's examples by many decades, affirm this pattern. On each show, a succession of female subjects in social distress is required to narrate a personal confession in presence of interlocutors (White 67), and winning confessions merit therapeutic rehabilitation by means of money or consumer goods. …