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Show TUNE IN TOMORROW Soap Operas Benefit Society Relax, ladies. Don't feel guilty about listening to the great and grievous trials of "John's Other Schmoe" every day at 11:15 a. m., brought to you through the courtesy of Philbottom's Ossified Sheep Dip. The news is now out that soap operas, as presented interminably on the radio, actually might do you some downright good. An anthropologist, Prof. W. Lloyd Warner, and a psychologist Dr. William E. Henry, tuned in on a daytime radio serial over a long I period and arrived at the ponderous solution that soap operas are "of I considerable value to our society." The two scholars, consultants for a research organization which directed di-rected the study for Columbia Broadcasting system, based their report on a detailed analysis of the serialized drama, "Big Sister." Women being the chief listeners, it is they who derive the greatest benefits from these daytime dirges by having their egos bolstered and their spirits strengthened by hearing hear-ing stories of fictional women going through problems and experiences that parallel their own, the scientists scien-tists pointed out. "The basic and primary theme is that good and noble women who are wives and mothers are invincible within their own arena of life, the American family," said the report. "Men, who are superordinate elsewhere, are subordinate and dependent de-pendent (in the story) on the wis dom of the wife. This primary theme always triumphs over the second theme which runs counter to it that family ties can be broken and a woman's security threatened chiefly by the loss of the husband to other women, and, quite secondarily seconda-rily and obliquely, by death." Moreover, the social scientists said, the program, among other things, provides its women listeners with "moral beliefs, values and techniques for solving emotional and interpersonal problems and makes them feel they are learning while they listen." In brief, the report added up to a clear-cut spiritual and moral victory vic-tory of the soap opera over its hardened hard-ened and blase critics. |