HERSTORY: Lucille Ball
Apr 11, 2025 @ 7pm
Our third HERSTORY: Women You Should Know, is Lucille Ball.
Basic shape is stenciled for you. Paint along and we can chat about the scenes that made us cry laughing...like Vitameatavegamin!
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American actress, comedian, producer, and studio executive. She was recognized by Time in 2020 as one of the most influential women of the 20th century for her work in all four of these areas.
With I Love Lucy (1951), she and Desi promoted the 3-camera technique now the standard in filming sitcoms using 35mm film (the earliest known example of the 3-camera technique is the first Russian feature film, "Defence of Sevastopol" in 1911). Desi syndicated I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball was the first woman to own her own studio as the head of Desilu Productions.
While Lucille Ball wasn't a self-proclaimed feminist activist, her character Lucy Ricardo, through the show subtly explored themes of domesticity and women's aspirations, potentially contributing to the rise of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s. Case in point, CBS insisted that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several religious figures, the network allowed the pregnancy story line, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant" (Arnaz garnered laughs when he deliberately mispronounced it as "spectin'"). The episode's official title is "Lucy Is Enceinte", borrowing the French word for pregnant; however, episode titles never appeared on-screen.
The episode aired on the evening of January 19, 1953, with 44 million viewers watching Lucy Ricardo welcome little Ricky, while in real life Ball delivered her second child, Desi Jr., that same day in Los Angeles. The birth made the cover of the first issue of TV Guide for the week of April 3–9, 1953.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Ball
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