Addressing the nation

This special issue takes its theme from the 2022 Women's History Network conference 'Addressing the Nation'.The conference was inspired by the centenary of the BBC, which was founded in October 1922.While many of the papers were linked to women and broadcasting, broader themes were also explored including women as activists, politicians, journalists, writers, singers and public figures.A wide range of places and time periods were considered.Paula McDowell, in her keynote on the ballad trade in seventeenth century England, revealed how this new medium of entertainment and song enabled women to influence political opinion, not only as distributors and performers but also as subject matter.Three hundred years later, Eugenia Charles' election as the first female Prime Minister of Dominica in 1980, was the subject of Imaobong Umoren's keynote.Umeron's focus was the national and global vision that Charles imparted in her annual Independence Day addresses.Other topics presented at the conference included the notion of 'Mrs Sovereign Citizen' in US public culture and foreign policy; anger as a mode of address in the feminist periodical Outwrite; the fight for independence by Indian suffragettes; and the Mbuya Nehanda statue in Zimbabwe as an intersection of decolonial discourse and African feminism.Broadcasting was at the heart of the conference, with a wide range of papers -some of which are included here -that addressed different aspects of women's presence on air as speakers, announcers and presenters, and behind the scenes as facilitators/producers, so giving access to the nation.There is a burgeoning historiography of women in broadcasting.In the past few years alone, this has included books by Alun Burge, Kylie Andrews, Jeannine Lloyd, Jennifer Purcell and Sarah Arnold. 1 A great many academic articles have also been published, many in Women's History Review. 2 The hundred years since the BBC was founded has witnessed huge change for women in broadcasting.Although inequalities around equal pay, glass ceilings, ageism and diversity still exist, there is now hardly a nation in the world where women do not appear before the microphone and camera in authoritative positions.This was not the case in 1922, when the BBC began.And the early BBC provides an important springboard for this special collection of articles as issues such as access to the airways, authority to speak and suitability of voice were all grappled with.Although the wireless audience was at first small, it grew exponentially and by the mid-1930s most of the population of the UK had access to radio, so the BBC was truly addressing the nation.While female entertainers were heard from the earliest days, women who gave talks, then the main form of spoken-word broadcasts, were chiefly limited to what were considered feminine or domestic issues.The programming content of the first regular series for women on the BBC, the short-lived Women's Hour, which began in May 1923, provides ample evidence of this trend. 3This restriction of employing women to craft women'sand children's -programming is apparent in early broadcasting in other countries, as Kate Lacey, Michele Hilmes, Lesley Johnson and others have shown. 4On the BBC, the early talks were produced by women using mainly female speakers and so ensured a wide range