“Women advance in broadcasting…”. Female work in Buenos Aires broadcasting during the 1930s

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to shift our gaze from the place that women artists occupied on the radio, to recover and analyze the non-artistic female occupations that were also part of the world of work on Buenos Aires radio stations during the 1930s. To do this, we focus mainly on the career of the speaker Tita Armengol. Based on the analysis of a series of interviews published in the radio magazines La Canción Moderna, Radiolandia and Antena that featured her throughout the decade, it is proposed to address her work experiences and the construction of her public image, both her own and the one that was configured by magazines. We can affirm that the very experimental, poorly defined, and uncertain conditions of the broadcasting in its development process were taken advantage of by Tita Armengol and other women, at the same time that they had an impact on the professionalization of the positions they occupied, as the medium itself did it too. The counterpoint with the trajectories of other women radio workers in that same period allows us to analyze another range of positions and career paths that women in the radio did during that time.