Earlier this fall, I challenged students in my college History of Broadcasting course. I asked them to find elderly residents in the GTA to talk about their memories of what is known as “the golden age of radio.” Not surprisingly, some of them went to seniors’ residences to find their sources. Others called on grandparents who had grown up in the 1930s and ’40s to recall the radio broadcasts that shaped their childhood. What I didn’t expect was a history lesson back from my own students. One group played a recording of their interview with an immigrant woman who was 90 years old.
“When I was a girl of 17 in Afghanistan,” the woman on the recording said, “I was never allowed to listen to the radio. It was something only men could hear.”