PositiveThe Boston GlobeThough meticulous in cataloging their intersecting identities, [Armstrong] returns repeatedly to their shared gender. As a framing device, this can feel slightly at odds with very deep and detailed accounts of disparate treatment and outcomes for each of them. The question of how to think about women as a group with a shared identity is nothing new. Scott herself was inspired by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique but \'felt trapped between the civil rights movement and the nascent feminist movement.\' Armstrong finds herself in a similarly awkward position at times. Though she doesn’t always handle the juxtapositions perfectly, Armstrong successfully crafts an intersectional feminist history, one with room for four very different women in it. Armstrong succeeds in her goal of dusting off these women’s contributions and restoring them to their place in the pantheon of television giants. In prose as charming as the women she writes about, she makes her subjects feel knowable. Although we may never see some of these women’s work (television was often live and unrecorded in the early years), Armstrong makes you feel their genius and charisma, almost like you were there when they invented television.
