Gender Discourses and Representational Practices in Gold Coast Newspapers

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century the Gold Coast press played host to a heterogeneity of voices composed of male publishers and editors, female editors and columnists, journalists, and correspondents, as well as male and female readers. These voices complemented and competed with each other, interacting within newspaper texts to produce a rich variety of ongoing discourses. This paper examines some of these multivalent discourses and explores how Gold Coast journalism constructed and negotiated gender during this period. The interrogation of newspaper discourses aims at informing our understanding of the dominant gender issues in the Gold Coast and at establishing how female contributors in particular inscribed and demythologised conventional notions of femininity in the press during the colonial era.