Student Rowan Howard Williams, Prof. Elihu Katz pen book chapter

Doctoral student Rowan Howard Williams has co-authored a book chapter, with Annenberg’s Elihu Katz, Ph.D., Distinguished Trustee Professor of Communication, in the book Hunting High and Low, a “festschrift” (a volume of academic of articles) on Norwegian media scholar Jostein Gripsrud published by the Scandinavian Academic Press. Titled “Did Television Empower Women? The introduction and the changing status of women in the 1950s,” an abstract follows:

 

This article examines the possibility that the introduction of television may have played a role in women’s empowerment. Focusing primarily on the historical context of the postwar USA, this paper takes as its starting point the temporal coincidence of the very rapid uptake of television in the late 1940s and 1950s, followed in the 1960s by the women’s liberation movement and increasing social status for women. We draw from a wide range of literature, in three broad areas: the technological features of television, in particular its equalizing mode of address; the domestic and social context to which it was introduced; and the subversive and counter-hegemonic content that was available on early television.