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.
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