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This essay analyzes the competing feminist and misogynists messages projected by the United Automobile Workers' radio program, Eye Opener, to explore the constraints that limited efforts to promote gender equity with the UAW in the fifties. In a time when gender relations were in flux, Eye Opener, for a brief time tried to include appeals to both labor feminists and males anxious about the new worlds that encroached into the work and home. Through an analysis of the program's scripts and listeners' responses, it offers insights into the contradictions facing a post-war labor movement concerned with both broadening its horizons while shoring up its members.

Corporate interests have dominated American radio since the late 1920s, using a commercialized medium to sell business products and ideology. For several decades, organized labor challenged business control of the radio. Unable to compete with business in other areas of the mass media, radio, with its potential for reaching a large audience, held promise for a labor movement hoping to contest business domination of political discourse. This article explores the relationship between organized labor and radio broadcasting from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. During the early part of this period, unions engaged in a fierce struggle for access to radio and began challenging the coverage of labor in the mass media. In the post-Second World War era, organized labor launched an aggressive campaign to utilize radio to promote a working-class political perspective. By the early 1950s, labor's voice was more widely heard on the airwaves than ever before. Organized labor offered at least a modest check on corporate America's command of the mass media.