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Soap Operas

Soap operas are often referred to as a “women's genre.” The term soap operas is used to describe daytime radio and television dramas because of their advertising sponsors, which marketed detergents and other household products to homebound female listeners and viewers. The genre's marketing strategies reinforce the notion that women are soap operas' primary audience, which is based on patriarchal stereotypes (hypothetical male ideals) about what constitutes appropriate female behavior. The gender roles presented in soap operas are shaped by these perceptions. Patriarchal assumptions about women's desire for dialogue, fantasy, romance, and intimacy influenced the way soap operas evolved.

Women and Early Radio Serials

Daytime soap operas became a successful form of daytime radio entertainment in the early 1930s, following the success of evening serials airing at the time. Painted Dreams (1930–43), written by radio actress Irna Phillips, is considered the first American soap opera. It featured Irish-American widow Mother Moynihan running a boardinghouse and raising a large family. The daytime serial introduced many of the structural conventions for which soap operas are known today, including the serial narrative and open-ended cliff-hanger endings. Its themes, including domestic life, family, personal relationships, and morality, created the foundation for the modern daytime drama.

Advertising copywriters Frank and Anne Hummert developed a plot-driven assembly-line approach to writing and producing serial dramas that is still followed today. Their sensationalist romantic adventures and fantasy stories incorporated such themes as deceit, jealousy, infidelity, and murder. Their stories appealed to America's desire to mentally escape the difficulties of the Great Depression while conveying traditional American ideals: working hard, saving money, prioritizing family life, and punishing bad behavior. Stable female characters living in the Midwest mostly articulated these values. Hummert radio serials such as Ma Perkins (1933–60) and Young Widder Brown (1938–56) featured heroines who were wives, mothers, and widows struggling to take care of their families. They also cared for their injured or diseased husbands and sons if and when they returned from the war. Most of the Hummert plots also attempted to bridge the gap between the wealthy and the aspiring middle class in their mythic story worlds. Soap operas like Stella Dallas (1937–55) and Our Gal Sunday (1934–59) feature poor or orphaned young heroines who successfully marry above their station and maintain happy, stable lives.

Daytime Television Dramas

Radio soap operas aired until 1960. By this time, most major daytime advertising sponsors had stopped backing dramatic radio programming in favor of television shows. The DuMont network produced and aired television adaptations of the radio soap operas Big Sister (1936–52) and Aunt Jenny's True Life Stories (1937–56) in 1944. In 1946, DuMont created the short-lived daytime drama Faraway Hill (October–December 1946), in which techniques such as the offscreen voice (a narration that verbally articulates a character's thoughts) were developed to allow housewives to continue to tune in to the drama without having to stop their domestic activities to watch it unfold. Early successful long-term television soap operas such as Search for Tomorrow (1951–86) and Irna Phillips's adaptation of the radio serial The Guiding Light (1937–2009) assimilated these techniques while adapting the traditional female radio heroine to television.

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