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Drawing on manuscripts and transcripts of BBC programme output, and material from the Radio Times, and the BBC's The Listener magazine, this article analyses radio talks and programmes that focused on Sweden in the immediate years after the Second World War when the Swedish model was widely popularised abroad. The article argues that BBC output entangled domestic politics and transnational ideas around post-war reconstruction and welfare. Sweden was used as a lens through which a modern welfare state could be visualised and justified. This was however Utopia in two senses since the image of Sweden presented was in itself a highly idealised representation.

This article investigates BBC radio's Woman's Hour in the post-war period. It explores Woman's Hour's focus and insistence on educating women listeners about their role as citizens, and the tensions this caused particularly between broadcasters and different groups of women. The article documents the programme's development of public and outward looking items, such as the reporting and covering of current affairs, public debates and national politics, women's party political conferences, and further introducing women MP's to the microphone. This gave the programme a public and arguably political dimension. The article thus places Woman's Hour within the broader historiography of the women's movement in this period, and illuminates the changing role and expectation of women, particularly the middle-class housewife.

Women have historically played a significant role in shaping media output, both as producers or contributors to media production, and as members of an audience. Women have also produced their own alternative and feminist media, as part of specific campaigns or communities struggling for equality, citizenship and a political voice, as part of the wider women's movement. Women's contribution to – or use of mass media has in the last decade or so received a growing attention from the academic scholarship with studies emerging from a range of disciplines such as film, media and communication, history, media history and women's/feminist history (Badenoch, 2007; Bell, 2010; Bingham, 2004; Chambers et al., 2004; Delap and DiCenzo, 2008; Forster, 2010; Lacey, 1996; Mitchell, 2000; Ross and Byerly, 2004, 2006; Tusan, 2005). Furthermore, recent conferences dedicated, for instance to the historical role and contribution of women to film production, and feminist alternative media in the 1970s respectively, suggest that historical research on these subjects is gaining further momentum.1 The outlook is positive; however, there is still much scope and need to advance and underline the study of women's or feminist media history.

Dr Maria DiCenzo is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada).1 Her research focuses on feminist media history, particularly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's print media and social movements, as well as twentieth-century British political theatre. DiCenzo has published widely on the late Victorian and Edwardian feminist periodical press, and she has also provided thoughtful and provocative commentary on the development of feminist media history and its relations to the broader field of media history. Her latest book, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), co-authored with Dr Lucy Delap (St Catharine's College, Cambridge, UK) and Dr Leila Ryan (McMaster University, Canada), further considers the methodological and disciplinary debates currently shaping feminist media history. Through several case studies the book also highlights and builds on the complexity of early feminist media: its representation and debate of a range of feminist discourses and tactics for the emancipation of women; and, further, how these publications engaged with wider public issues and consequently the general press, therefore adding to our broader understanding of press history. As such, the book is a valuable attempt to address new directions and ways of breaking away from the marginalization or 'separation' of feminist (and women's) media history. Hence, the book works as a good starting point for further engagement and discussion about the field.

Within much of the existing literature the idea of modernity and the modern has often focused on the public world associated with masculinity and politics, while the private sphere of the home has symbolised a gendered feminine space not linked with modernity. The influence of feminist writings in the 1960s and 1970s have for a long time cast a shadow on the domestic as something negative and oppressive, a place that has to be rejected by women in their quest to become modern. Women's relationship to modernity has therefore been left in the periphery as something that can not be found in their private lives. In The Parlour and The Suburb. Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity, Judy Giles challenges these ideas and demonstrates that the home and the domestic can be seen as something positive, giving women in the first part of the twentieth century a sense and experience of modernity.

Scholarship has long demonstrated how a focus on women's roles can reveal vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory, and participatory media narratives. This article asks: What happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as "media history"? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? The work derives from research on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) as read from the correspondence of founder Wilhelmina (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), and builds on IAWRT's example to develop methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, absorbing insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age.

This book is about forms of media that have reflected or increased consciousness of - a sense of place or a regional identity. From landscape painting in the Romantic era to newspaper coverage of devolution, the chapters explore, through contextualized case studies, the aesthetics of a wide range of local, regional and grassroots forms of media.