Scholarship has long demonstrated how a focus on women's roles can reveal vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory, and participatory media narratives. This article asks: What happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as “media history”? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? The work derives from research on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) as read from the correspondence of founder Wilhelmina (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), and builds on IAWRT's example to develop methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, absorbing insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age.

The emergence of commercial television advertising impacted women working as copywriters and artists in the creative departments of London ad agencies. Looking at the period 1955 to 1968, this paper discusses whether the observed fall in the proportion of women in creative departments was on par with a broader national “problem” of fewer and fewer women in professional occupations, or whether women in this sector were particularly hard hit. The research concludes that women copywriters and artists did not benefit from the advent of commercial television advertising. Their careers were limited by disparaging attitudes held by the younger generation, and changes in processes and creative skills required by the new medium. It also illustrates, however, that new opportunities for women did open up in television advertising production, in both advertising agencies and the wider production industry.

This essay presents a media history of outdoor advertising that focuses on the material dimensions of controversial paper posters proliferating in cities across the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Poster historians tend to describe these controversies as a matter of content and placement only. But the gendered cultural baggage associated with paper also informed debates about the public display of posters. I track the shifting status of paper across the nineteenth century from a scarce resource primarily associated with male public culture to an overproduced nuisance that littered city streets. Through close readings of debates about posters, their effects, and the litter they produced, I argue that paper posters, as much as the cinema and other media, helped to transform public spaces in ways that allowed women unprecedented access to such spaces. By lending their likenesses to advertising posters, by taking charge of cleaning up paper litter in their communities, and by weighing in on debates about the morality and deleterious effects of certain posters, women found, in paper, a vehicle through which to launch interventions into public life at a time when they were still denied the vote.