‘Since when are we, mothers who raise their kids themselves, dopes?’ Debates on women’s emancipation in Belgian educational television programmes for women (1954–1975)

This research explores political–educational debates regarding the concept of women’s emancipation in women and family programmes on Belgian television between 1954 and 1975. From the very beginning, the women’s episodes were regarded as explicitly educational. The episodes were created to increase women’s participation by means of their emancipation, but simultaneously continued to underline women’s segregation from men. Therefore, we want to reveal the paradoxical effects of this emancipatory educational project for women. This paper takes as its starting point the debate about the concept of women’s emancipation in the episode ‘From home economics to state home economics’ in 1964, in which the emancipatory notion was used explicitly for the first time in the women’s episodes. The highly debated status of this concept in viewers’ letters to producer Paula Sémer is intriguing. Women’s emancipation had very different meanings based on the viewers’ various cultural and ideological backgrounds and their positioning in discourse. Consequently, the letters reveal a highly ideological tension and therefore deepen our understanding of women’s emancipation as a normative, political and historically constituted concept. This helps to understand how different (political) actors have used this episode and concept to establish, maintain and traverse borders separating not only men from women but also emancipated from non-emancipated women. In spite of the emancipatory project, limits were established by ‘closing’ womanhood in terms of a proposed ideal of ‘emancipated womanhood’, linking women’s individuality to the collective and the state and simultaneously gendering the notion of citizenship.