General information

Call No.:

300-1-8:1/45

Part of series

HU OSA 300-1-8 Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: General Records: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Public Affairs Photographic Files

Located at

Archival photo box #1 / No. 45

Digital ver. identifier

HU OSA 300-1-8_001-045

Legacy ID

rfe_workflow_045

Date

1970

Level

Item

Primary Type

Still image

Language

English

Notes

The black and white prints of RFE/RL were donated to OSA by the Hoover Institute, California in year 2015. The images are duplicates of those held at Hoover. The originals, and most probably the negatives are with the donor as well. OSA only received the paper prints with captions, and digitized the entire collection in year 2018.

Content

Form/Genre

Photograph

Contents Summary

Busy news room with seven men and one woman working in office clothes. There are work stations along the walls, with typewriters. In the middle of the room there are two aisles of telex machines with long papers hanging out of them, a cart, a wooden box stacked with pages, and a basket underneath it with rolls of paper. Lots of pages pinned up on the walls. On the far wall there is a world map and a clock reading 5 minutes to 4. Cf. HU OSA 300-1-8/1:35, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/36, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/46,HU OSA 300-1-8:1/47, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/48, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/49, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/50, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/51, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/52, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/55, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/65, HU OSA 300-1-8:1/66.
ORIGINAL CAPTION: n.a.

RESEARCH BASED DESCRIPTION:
In her PhD dissertation, Susan Haas writes that similarly to other Western news organizations, RFE was almost entirely male, even as late as in the 1980s. Moreover, women were typically typists, and very few made to editor. The general atmosphere is remembered by a one-time employee of RFE: “[Another] New Zealander we had was a lovely, lovely gal, good and competent. But the thing was, she wore miniskirts, and when I was in my office next to the newsroom, I would always know when she reached over to get a piece of copy. All the typewriters stopped. That’s how I knew that she was active in the newsroom. She stayed six to eight months. She was moving her way through Europe. When the typewriters went silent, I used to say to myself, ‘Christ, she’s in there!’
Going through the first 50 or so Rolodex cards carrying the photo of and some basic information on RFE employees (names A to C), such as date of hiring and job/position, one finds that out of 54 persons a mere 12 were women, though with quite varying ranks.
However, the way RFE is (re)presented in this photo and the rest of the series, the radio seems to have been a pure macho world where only men do important things worth photographing: in the first 50 images of Box 1 (housing 125 photos), there are as few as 9 women in contrast to 107 men. These women, but for one, are unimportant tiny figures in the background. All 116 are white. It is the 70th photo (HU OSA 300-1-8:1/70) where the first (and only) black man appears – incidentally, the other person in the picture is a woman.

Context

Associated Names

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Copyright holder)

Associated Places

Munich

Subject / Coverage

Spatial Coverage

Munich

Germany

Collection Specific Tags

clock, Cold War, man, map, news room, paper, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, telex, typewriter, woman