Everyone has watched a soap opera. Whether they did it faithfully for multiple decades, went through a phase in high school or college or when home with small children, or just on a sick day when they didn’t have the strength to lift a finger to change channels with their remote control, no one in America is unaware of programs like The Guiding Light, As the World Turns, General Hospital, All My Children or Days of Our Lives.

What very few people do know, however, is that the entire genre was invented by a women named Irna Phillips, and that, thanks to her, we have the following TV tropes that seem so obvious as to now be taken for granted:

Normalizing Single Mothers

Irna Phillips was born in 1901. At the age of 18, she found herself unmarried and pregnant. When her baby’s father refused to acknowledge paternity, Irna took him to court and, shockingly for the time, won! Her own son was stillborn, but, for the rest of her life and career, Irna would not only be sympathetic to the plight of single mothers, but she would champion them. One of her very first stories for the radio version of The Guiding Light (GL) in 1948, featured unmarried Meta Bauer first giving her child up for adoption, then going to court to win him back from his foster parents. One of her final stories for As the World Turns (ATWT) in 1973 featured Kim, another single mother who resolved to keep her baby no matter what. Irna said that she based Kim on herself, planning that Kim’s story would be what hers might have been if her son had lived. However, Procter & Gamble, ATWT’s sponsor, ended up firing Irna from the show she’d created, and the subsequent writers killed off Kim’s child. Irna died of a heart attack a few months later. (In a soapy postscript, in 1986, another set of writers penned a tale where Kim’s stillborn son was really a living daughter who’d been spirited away and raised in England, where she was now a fully grown Julianne Moore!)

Letting Fans Dictate the End of the Story

While Kim got her happy ending, poor Meta did not. Yes, she reclaimed custody of her son, Chuckie. But Chuckie’s biological father, Ted, then treacherously wed Meta so he could eventually have the boy for himself. Chuckie was sweet, sensitive and artistic. Ted didn’t like that. He forced Chuckie to take boxing lessons to keep him from being a “sissy.” Chuckie tripped over the ropes, hit his head and died. Meta blamed Ted. So she shot and killed him. When the grieving mother went on trial in 1950, Irna came up with the concept of letting listeners be the jury and decide Meta’s guilt or innocence. Over 75,000 fans sent letters and telegrams, acquitting Meta by a margin of one hundred to one. The next time you vote someone off an island or choose your “American Idol,” think of Irna Phillips!

Changing Mediums

The Guiding Light began on radio, where it was a runaway hit. But Irna thought it had the potential to be a success on television, as well. When Procter & Gamble didn’t agree, she spent her own money to produce a pilot and demonstrate how it would work. Guiding Light premiered on CBS in 1952 and remained on the air until 2009. Thanks to it, Days of Our Lives was able to transition from NBC, where it had aired since 1965, to Peacock in 2022, where it has been a streaming success ever since.

Women Led Shows

When GL transitioned from radio to television, it did so with Bertha (Bert) Bauer, played by Charita Bauer, front and center. When, in 1965, Our Private World became the only primetime show to spin off a daytime one, ATWT’s woman you love to hate, Lisa, played by Eileen Fulton, was the headliner and main draw.

Social Issues

In addition to single mothers, Irna wrote daytime’s first abortion story on Another World in 1964, as well as tackleing taboo topics like divorce, and the struggles of veterans coming home from World War II. In 1962, one of her protegees, Agnes Nixon, wrote a groundbreaking story where GL’s Bert went for her first pap smear, was diagnosed with early stage uterine cancer, and was successfully treated. Doctors from across the country reported thousands of women suddenly coming in for the screening. When asked why, they replied, “Because I saw it on Guiding Light!” In the same vein, in 1983, Nixon, who’d also created All My Children and One Life to Live, debuted her newest soap, Loving,  which featured a story of a teenage girl being raped by her father. Six months later, ABC wanted to promote their primetime movie, Something About Amelia, as the first time any network had dared tackle such a sensitive subject. They were none too pleased to learn that they’d actually already been playing the story out daily, and ordered Loving to terminate the story line. Thanks to the legacy of Irna Phillips, ABC was tackling social issues before they even knew they were doing it!

Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap-opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her May 2025 historical novel, Go On Pretending, features Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon in supporting roles during the fraught days of radio soap operas transitioning to television, with secrets, scandals, and illicit romance a-plenty! Read more at: https://www.historythroughfiction.com/go-on-pretending