Actress and director Ida Lupino (1908 - 95) was just plain ahead of her time:
Although Ida Lupino was the first (and perhaps only) woman director during the early years of American television production, it is odd that she is rarely referenced as a "ground breaker" for other women entering the industry. Unlike Lucille Ball, Loretta Young, Joan Davis, and other women who were involved as producers in early television programming, Lupino had little creative control over the programs she directed. To contextualize Lupino's role as a director in relation to other women working contemporaneously as producers is not meant to suggest, however, that a critical analysis of Lupino's work is irrelevant to television history and feminist inquiry. What remains significant about Lupino as a "woman director" was her unique ability to succeed in an occupation which was (and still is) dominantly coded as "masculine." Constructed as an outsider and an anomaly, Lupino as a TV director was more often than not represented merely as a woman, her directorial skill either de-emphasized or ignored altogether in the popular press.
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