Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is a cultural historian and journalist whose books recover the creative labor behind influential television. The complete title is When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today. The book concentrates on the formative years from 1948 to 1955 through Gertrude Berg, Irna Phillips, Hazel Scott, and Betty White. Armstrong shows how Berg helped establish the family sitcom, Phillips shaped daytime serial drama, Scott challenged restrictive portrayals of Black women, and White worked across performance, production, talk, and variety formats. Her research uses network archives, including internal NBC memoranda about White’s programs, to examine how executives discussed women’s audiences without asking women for their judgment. By placing the four careers beside one another, she makes early television history a story of authorship, business decisions, representation, and institutions that narrowed women’s authority once the medium became more profitable.