Drawing on the idea that gender differences are bounded to social and cultural factors (Francis & Skelton, 2001), that ‘gender’ cannot be understood as ‘being’ or as a coherent essential entity, but as ‘becoming’/‘doing’ (Butler, 1990) or as an ambivalent construction (Essed, Goldberg & Kobayashi, 2005), we would like to see gender as an educational practice and television as an educational/cultural institution (Williams: 1974) contributing to identification of women with their allocated gender. For this reason this research explores political-educational appearances of womanhood in an informal educational practice: women’s and family programmes on Belgian Television between 1954 and 1975. The focus is on how womanhood was culturally and historically interpreted and with which idea(l)s and concepts it was thought. By means of a critical exploration and analysis of these idea(l)s and concepts it is demonstrated how womanhood is historically and performatively constituted and how educational practices – as television – have an active role in this process.

From the very beginning of Belgian broadcasting the women’s programmes were classified into the ‘Department of Artistic and Educational Programmes’ of the BRTN (Belgian Radio and Television, Flemish episodes). With this classification the women’s episodes were reckoned as educational and women as to be educated apart from men. In this specific mission of women’s education women’s emancipation deserved a considerable amount of attention. This renders the BRTN’s educational mission towards women highly paradoxical. On the one hand women were categorized and victimized as a group apart from men, sharing similar educational needs, which made it possible paying attention to those needs and integrating them in the overall educational mission of Belgian Television. On the other hand the a priori categorization as apart from men segregated women as a group, focusing solely on their alleged similarities, precluding both the possibility of intracategorical differences inside the category of ‘woman’ and intercategorical similarities with the category of ‘man’. However from 1975 – as a result of restructuring interventions in the BRTN – the episodes were labelled ‘Social-Cultural Family Episodes’ and were classified inside the ‘Department of Sciences’. In this evolution producers sought to challenge the labelling of ‘women’s episodes’, opening the scope for addressing a broader public under the notion of the family, thus including men. This made me wonder what this meant for the understanding and image of both women’s emancipation and womanhood. Starting point for the analysis is the appearance of and debate regarding this concept of women’s emancipation in a series titled ‘Woman in Society’. This series was realised as a result of the UNO-year of women in 1975 and joined four successive episodes to discuss the alleged ‘women’s issue’ and related discrimination. Producer Paula Sémer refers to them as ‘thé emancipation-episodes’. The questions are asked what was the image of womanhood, what was the understanding of women’s emancipation, how were both images of womanhood and women’s emancipation interrelated inside the BRTN’s educational mission towards women, and how related these specific understandings to the earlier educational project of the women’s episodes.

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