Your Show of Shows’ Lucille Kallen served as the writers’ room’s typist and scribe, leveraging a stereotypically feminine role into one of creative authority Caesar’s Hour’s Selma Diamond exaggerated her role as the resident tomboy-spinster, a schtick she parlayed into a solo comedy career. Many women had to navigate these thorny postwar gender tropes to solidify their place in the field. According to one reporter profiling the pair, “It cheaper to hire them permanently-or until they get married, at any rate.” Lois Balk and Carol Honig were two such Barnard graduates on the writing staff of The Steve Allen Show. Most shows were sponsored by single companies shilling household products, like Carnation condensed milk or Alcoa aluminum foil, so women writers were overwhelmingly white, middle-class, college-educated proxies for the housewives at home. Networks and sponsors often hired woman writers to speak directly to female viewer-consumers. But even though women writers forged many key genres of primetime postwar television, including the situation comedy, the comedy-variety program, and the anthology drama, their collective efforts have been largely ignored in histories of television’s first Golden Age. In no moment of television history was women writers’ participation more central-and more subsequently overlooked-than in the medium’s beginnings. These women were not exceptions to the masculine rule but comprised an essential, if outnumbered, creative contingent of early television. While doing research for my book, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, forthcoming 2022), I discovered scores of such women writing for television in the 1950s, some wielding great industry power and circulating as public personalities to boot. But a quiet, domestic life is not in the cards for Sylvie-nor did Lucille Ball or Lucy’s female staff writer, Madelyn Pugh, choose it for themselves. This slapstick sequence presents the figure of the working woman as impossible, even unsustainable.

She works in her father’s record shop but dreams of a career in television, transfixed by the chocolate assembly line scene from I Love Lucy. In the 2020 film, Sylvie’s Love, Sylvie is young, Black and living in 1960s Harlem. “A testament to the versatility of women like Madelyn Pugh and Sylvie Parker, women television professionals who persevered in the face of an ever-changing industry machinery.” (CBS Television and Peg Lynch) “ I Love Lucy’s assembly line sequence is transformed from the mockery of working women to something more empowering,” writes Berke.

When women invented television