ABSTRACT
Discourses on the materiality of women’s voices in the U.S. are shaped by gender and participate in the exclusion or marginalization of those voices, literally and metaphorically. For this reason this chapter argues that it is important to listen to women’s voices. Not just metaphorically, not just to see what they have to say, but to focus on where they say it, how they say it and how those voices were and are perceived. This can be done thanks to newly available radio station archives. Throughout the 20th century, the debates around the presence of women’s voices on the air raised two main points of inquiry: the characteristics of women’s voices and their reception as well as women’s legitimacy in covering certain topics. While the discourses around women’s voices tend to define very strict roles for women on the air, the medium has also offered some women, from the first radio amateurs to today’s podcasters, the possibility to transgress gender norms and make their voices heard.
