Birds on the wire - Troping teenage girlhood through telephony in mid-twentieth-century US media culture

This article explores the symbolic relationship of the telephone and teenage girls in mid-twentieth-century U.S. media culture, focusing in particular on the trope Of the girl on the phone and its use as a signifier of modern American girlhood. Unpacking this trope's broader social significance, I relate its development to the construction of the telephone as a gendered medium and the emergence of new form of female subjectivity associated with teenage girls. Though teenagers were hailed as America's future Promise during World War II, teenage girls were Often represented during this period as resisting the roles and behaviors associated domesticity, thus posing a threat to both traditional ideologies of identity and the dominant social order of the nation. As a result, considerable anxiety developed in relation to teenage girls, especially after the war when the U.S. was attempting to reconstitute itself through domestic containment strategies. Since the telephone has long symbolized both social progress and social disruption, it worked well as a signifier of modern girlhood during this period, simultaneously representing teenage girls' liberation from the domestic sphere while also suggesting a method for their containment within it. Used by virtually every media and entertainment industry during the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s, the trope of the girl on the phone sensitized the American public to a new form of female subjectivity while at the same time helping to mediate the threat it posed to adult heterosexual patriarchy. Analyzing closely transformations in the trope of the girl on the phone as used in several films and television series from this period, I point to significant shifts in the containment strategies used by the media industries in relation to teenage girls.