The 1970 feminist anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women's Liberation Movement includes a series of five personal testimonies of professional women. In "Women and Television," Sheila Smith Hobson writes about her experience as a black woman in the not-so-glamorous television industry.
Trying to Get a Female Foot in the Door
From her days as a student in New York University's communications program, Sheila Smith Hobson faced the realization that television was a male-dominated industry. As one of four "girls" in the program, she was not taught how to survive in the high-pressure TV industry as a woman. In fact, she writes, professors in the 1960s were more likely to eye the "girls" suspiciously or encourage them to drop out, get married or perhaps just become editorial assistants.
Finding a job was also difficult. "Women and Television" describes her difficulty finding employment in New York and the bitterness that came with work experience. "In television," Sheila Smith Hobson writes, "the golden ladder to success is the heaped-up bodies and spirits and integrities of other people." In both school and work, she had repeatedly encountered the so-called double burden of being a woman and being black.
Television Without Representation
The "Women and Television" essay offers a sharp critique of the fact that most women in the business were "typing, fetching, and making coffee, delivery girl, office girl, and sexpot all rolled into one. The fellows never had it so good." It also criticizes the lack of black-oriented shows and the effort to make black women on television look like white women, with the fairest possible complexions and straight hair. Sheila Smith Hobson urges readers to look closely at their TV screens, which they will find "conspicuously empty of 'soul' shows," except for Diahann Carroll and Bill Cosby.
"Women and Television" has a tone of frustration with an industry that could be doing much more: "The point is that the general level of all women on television is low. And I really think it is meant to be that way (by the industry). Smart, personable women turn people off." (See Sisterhood Is Powerful, p. 81.)
The television industry brings in millions of dollars, attracting audiences but failing to represent large segments of those audiences, according to Sheila Smith Hobson. Furthermore, she adds, the industry will continue this way as long as women who work in television and women who watch television complacently accept what is offered.
More on This Issue: Mollie Gregory offers a comprehensive look at the experience of women gaining power in television and film during the 1970s in her book Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood.