1951 ▷
Lucille Ball
Comedic genius
Lucille Ball spent decades drifting between stage, screen
and radio before she found her niche. But TV made her a
star, perhaps because she so passionately defended her
vision for the first great sitcom, I Love Lucy. CBS initially
declined to cast Ball’s husband Desi Arnaz as the foil
to her daffy housewife, fearing the marriage of a white
woman and a Cuban-born man would alienate viewers.
So the couple self- financed a pilot too good to refuse. In
the second season, an expecting Ball helped destroy a
taboo that framed pregnancy as salacious proof that a
woman had been sexually active, with a story line about
the birth of Little Ricky.
Working in a medium that reflected and helped shape
the postwar U.S. family, the show offered an image of
domestic life that was more progressive, but also just
funnier, than the sanitized world of Ozzie and Harriet.
Ball wielded even more power behind the camera. After
splitting with Arnaz, she took over Desilu, the production
company that launched Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.
Three decades after her death, Hollywood’s most
power ful women—from Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Reese
Witherspoon—walk a path she cleared. —Judy Berman
◁ 1952 PERSON OF THE YEAR
Queen Elizabeth II
Symbol of power
When TIME named Queen Elizabeth II the Woman of
the Year in 1952, it was not for her gender but for what
she symbolized. The 26-year-old acceding to the throne,
editors wrote, was a “fresh young blossom” whose citizens
hoped she would be an “omen of a great future.” In fact,
Elizabeth became Queen just as the dissolution of the
British Empire sped up, with the loss of Egypt, Sudan and
Ghana in the early years of her reign.
Almost seven decades later, she oversees an island
nation reduced to a bit player on the world stage. Yet at
the age of 93, her soft power is undimmed; she draws
both great leaders and throngs of tourists to her state, and
personifies British endurance untainted by politics. She
has steered her family through scandal successfully enough
that the next generation is poised to carry the crown
forward. Unlike her heirs, however, she remains virtually
unknowable, having never allowed the media access to
her private thoughts or opinions. In her utter rejection
of a public persona, she is best understood, still, as a
symbol: no longer the potent florescence of youth, but a
hard-worn tree in whose limbs and roots can be traced the
archaeology of an era. —Dan StewartSMITH: MARGARET CHASE SMITH LIBRARY; BALL: EVERETT; ELIZABETH II: DOROTHY WILDING—CAMERA PRESS/R EDUX^55