Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001)
ISSN: 1530-5686
GENDER DISCOURSES AND REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES IN GOLD COAST NEWSPAPERS
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Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 GENDER DISCOURSES AND REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES IN GOLD COAST NEWSPAPERS |
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Audrey Gadzekpo
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.
Much of the gendered discourses found in Gold Coast newspapers came from women’s columns because undoubtedly these spaces were the primary locus of the feminisation of discourse. Female newspaper columnists writing under pseudonyms such as Marjorie Mensah in the Times of West Africa (1931-1935) and Gloria in the Gold Coast Times (1936-1940) were particularly successful in publicly articulating their view points on various subjects in national newspapers. However, while discussions in this paper centre largely on texts found in the feminised spaces they controlled, other gendered discourses, which illustrate how gender identities and notions were constructed and challenged within the margins of newspaper texts, will also be examined. This corpus of textual discourses must be conceived of not as individual social statements in themselves, but as a function of the wider dominant social discourses on gender during the period under review. Thus they are both localised and globalised, personal and general, and reflect the opinions and positions promoted by group interests as well as personal knowledge and feelings about specific processes, events and situations.
Edward Said (1984) maintains that discourses are not innocent of the conditions of their social production and the context in which they are meant to be read. According to Said there is,
a connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events. The realities of power and authority – as well as the resistances offered by men, women and social movements to institutions, authorities and orthodoxies – are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit their attention (Said, 1984:5).
In examining the processes responsible for producing newspaper discourses we must also keep in mind the conditions of the production of newspaper texts in the early Gold Coast press. The open productive process of Gold Coast newspapers throughout much of the period allowed the consumers of the text to contribute to the production of the text alongside the staff of newspapers – publishers, editors, journalists, correspondents, columnists etc. Still the conditions of newspaper textual production were, and are, such that there are always unwritten rules of engagement as well as exclusions and prohibitions inscribed in discourse. Solicited or unsolicited letters, opinions and contributions are ultimately subject to editorial control, enabling newspapers to marginalise or completely silence from discussions what they may consider to be “unacceptable” voices.
For this reason it is important that the dominant discourses that form the basis of our discussions be regarded as largely reflecting the ideology, biases, preoccupations and agenda of mainly the educated elite who were both the producers and the consumers of the text. The elitist nationalist and masculinist (Bryce, 1997) gatekeepers of the Gold Coast press undoubtedly sustained, legitimated and managed their group interests and relationships of power and dominance (van Dijk, 1998) by excluding, marginalising, and at times vilifying certain voices they considered at variance with their interests and aspirations.
The politics of exclusion was applied to issues of gender as well. Just as publishers and editors of newspapers patrolled the gates of their pages to protect the hegemonic interests of their overall social group, editors of and contributors to women’s columns acted as gatekeepers of the female world and adjudicated over social change. Women columnists set the agenda, policed the bounds of their columns and the boundaries of their discourse by highlighting certain concerns. They also exerted power over their readers by conferring status on some issues and recommending certain feminine interests, by validating certain feminine experiences, advocating a particular course of action, asserting women’s intellectual capabilities and potential equality, and recommending ways that they could achieve prescribed aims and goals.
Aside from authorial subjectivity it is reasonable to assume that the discourses found in Gold Coast newspapers have been influenced by other factors and are embedded in the context of colonialism, sexual politics and shifting class/group interests. Colonialism meant that the small but powerful elite group who engaged with newspapers straddled two worlds (the traditional and the modern) and operated in a society that was in a state of flux, where values and mores, roles and capabilities were constantly being defined and redefined. While the educated elite may have bought into western culture, they were never alienated from their traditional roots. Thus the various actors in the press transmitted and prescribed both old and new codes of conduct, and social norms and practices, which were derived from their hybridised cultural experience.1
The cross-cultural influences on the press are mirrored in newspaper discourses throughout the entire period of Gold Coast history. Discourses in the early period of colonisation (last quarter of nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century) were mostly produced by a small group of early educated indigenous males from coastal families who had a double heritage that was traditional African and Anglo-Saxon. These men were the founders of Gold Coast nationalism and at the same time the upholders of Victorian mores and lifestyles on the Gold Coast colony.
By the 1920s and 1930s the ranks of the educated elite had been diluted beyond a small group of privileged families that had been pre-eminent in the early period. This was mostly due to the educational policies of Governor Gordon Guggisberg in the 1920s that had led to an expansion in education and opened up opportunities for thousands of ambitious Africans to obtain an education and to achieve elite status. After the Second World War, enrolment in schools increased further leading to more change in the composition of the Gold Coast elite and a modest alteration in the character of the press. As a group the “new” elite that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s were not as liable to have schooled abroad as the old elite and were not as anglophile as the elite of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. They were a mixture of professionals, government bureaucrats and a lower middle class of school teachers, clerks, and store keepers (Degraft Johnson, 1966). Together with the remaining members of the old elite who were still dominant in the press they re- articulated and reshaped discourses on the ever changing political, social and economic situation in the Gold Coast until the dawn of independence.
Gold Coast newspaper discourses reflect an ideological instability that underscores simultaneously the enthusiastic acceptance of change and its positive impacts on lifestyles, and, the loss of traditional values and the corruptive nature of modernity. Collectively the discourses on gender manifest recurring themes that were modified, changed or remained the same as ideas and positions shifted. Some of the more dominant and recurring discourses were on fashion, style, beautification, social change and modernity, domesticity, femininity and women’s sphere, morality and changing values, marriage, education, women’s self-improvement and edification, economic change, self- empowerment and politics.
In the following, I examine three of the dominant discourses – education, marriage and economic change. The distinctions between the dominant discourses identified here are not as rigid as their categorisation may suggest, for many discourses inhabit interlocking scapes. But their broad categorisation helps in analysing them within the context of the specific discursive frame implied by their titles.
Elitism was predicated on acquiring a western education, upgrading literacy skills in order to improve employment opportunities and to achieve social status. It was entirely logical therefore newspapers would lead the crusade on education and initiate debate on the quality and type of education available in the Gold Coast. Discourses on education in general and girls education in particular were thus a recurring theme in newspapers throughout the entire colonial period with columnists, correspondents, editors and readers alike contributing to a range of discourses on the subject. There was general anxiety about mis- education of Africans. Marjorie Mensah, a pseudonymous columnist in the Times of West Africa, for example, suggests Africans “ought to be able to become educated in every sense of the word without necessarily losing the national touch and becoming just Euro- Africans”(Women’s Corner, Times of West Africa, May 5, 1934).
Running parallel to the concerns about the quality of education on the colony was angst about the nature and purpose of girls education in particular. In the beginning period the preoccupation with girls education was linked with morality and with preserving and preparing women for cultured domesticity. An article in the Western Echo (February 20, 1886) notes with shock that daughters were being permitted to go out at night without protection and left at the mercy of “prowling wolves in the shape of men.” Fearing they would be led to “houses of ill-repute” if the problem is not addressed, the writer advocates education and scholarships for girls and advises parents to train their daughters to be courteous, well-attired for breakfast and dinner, and to encourage in them “freeness of manner” so they can “converse with freedom before strangers” (ibid.).
Cancoanid, the arbiter of the first women’s column found in a Gold Coast Newspaper (1885-1887) also contributes to the discourse on women’s education and edification by relentlessly advocating literary and social clubs in several of his columns. An example of this is one in which he argues the following position:
True it is that we look to you for the bringing about of the social ties by the means of which we have already spoken, but say, is that all that we may rightly ask of you? May we not be erring by presuming you to be incapable of naught else but the getting up of parties? Do we not damn you to the lowest possible stage of the platform where on you stand? Say, should you not with your various advantages prove yourselves superior to those who were before you in a direction other than the being experts in the rules of Domestic Economy? Must it be so? Would you be so thought of and spoken of and treated? We think not. What then, let it be imagined, is the question that you now ask and to this we would reply that the enlightened nineteenth century calls upon you, in language the most bewitching for a more exalted and grander work; and that work is the cultivation of your intellects - each making here the repository of true culture, whence will flow at proper seasons refined thought exalted feeling and ennobling sentiment. These in my opinion, if not the main, partially characterise the true lady...Your friends in Sierra Leone have already seen the necessity for this, and the way by which the evil is partly remedied is by the institution of literary clubs for their mutual improvement” (Women’s Column, Western Echo, December 30, 1885).
In the nineteenth to early twentieth century especially, newspapers advocated that education be directed at preparing girls towards a cultured companionate marriage that would make them good intelligent mothers and wives that could benefit the nation. Those writing in this period largely endorsed the notion that a woman’s role in life was as helpmate to man. Ideally therefore a wife was to possess a sufficiently cultivated mind to be able to enter into agreeable and intelligent conversation with her husband so that he will find pleasure in being at home. But a wife was not to be so well educated as to have a mind and opinions of her own. As the ultimate aim was to make her a better and more agreeable wife for her husband and an intelligent mother for her children, her education was to be geared towards a superficial cultivation, primarily of the arts, and not towards turning her into an expert (See Charvet, 1982:14).
The views of Samuel Henry Brew, a prominent nationalist figure in the late 1800s to early 1900s, on the subject are illustrative of how the Gold Coast elite subscribed to these notions at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a paper titled “female education and its bearing upon the improvement of the race,” Brew complains that unlike Sierra Leone and Lagos that could boast of female institutions of higher education such as Annie Walsh and Girls High School there was no “proper training of our girls” because people think it a waste of money to educate girls. “Leave woman out of the question,” Brew asserts, “and you place an insuperable difficulty in the way of the improvement and refinement of the race” (Gold Coast Aborigine, May 21, 1898). He develops his thesis by pointing out that just as all professions - doctors, lawyers, parson, etc. – require preparation, those who are to perform the important function of motherhood should receive the training necessary for their proper performance (ibid.).
The education Brew was advocating was to be holistic, encompassing the physical, moral and intellectual aspects of women. Ideally the kind of education, according to Brew, was one that could give her “a sound mind in a sound body make her capable of discussing moral, religious, social, literary and scientific subjects and thus save her from idle gossiping and a lot of useless and unprofitable talk” (ibid.).
After the first quarter of the twentieth century the shape of the discourse on girls education, changed slightly but did not transcend the domestic realm. The benefits of education were still linked with women’s domestic roles but instead of a cultured domesticity that emphasized the development of a woman’s mind for companionate marriage, education was to be geared towards preparing women for the drudgery of home life.
An exemplar instance of this is this excerpt from a lengthy editorial published in the Gold Coast Independent. The editorial succinctly captures the reservations about girls’ education and the various positions that were taken on the desired direction of female education in the first few decades of the twentieth century when, along with educational expansion, there were increasing calls for educational facilities to accommodate the growing number of girls seeking formal education:
Opinions still remain as to the value of European education for African girls in general. There are those who still stoutly maintain that, judging from past results, the education of the African girls on European lines has not been productive of any beneficial results; they hold that the adoption of European dress and other ideas of white womanhood have not brought in their trail any appreciable change for the better; that on the contrary, they have led to the abandonment of a good deal that was useful to the preservation of the race and afforded freedom of action, which has not been conducive to good morals and good living. It is further argued that the present system of educating the African girl makes her useless for domestic service and consequently makes her a mere cipher in household management. These allegations to mention only a few, are serious and grave enough to warrant doubts and fears as to our future progress as a race, if we are to depend upon the haphazard methods, which have produced the results that have been seized upon to condemn what in itself is a harmless, necessary equipment in the battle of civilised living. It does appear that these pessimists in the matter of female education – for we cannot style them otherwise – are mistaking the unreal for the real. Hitherto, it has to be admitted that female education in this colony, and probably throughout West Africa, has been carried on in haphazardly fashion without any adaptation to our environments and immediate needs and consequently to no purpose. The mere learning of the three Rs, in the case of girls, who in the past, have not had the opportunity of making any use of the simple elementary education afforded them in the Day Schools, greatly contributed to the disparaging view which has been attached to female education generally. What appears to aggravate the situation and to make matters worse, is the aversions of domestic service of those of our girls who have undergone this process of training. Curiously enough the Gold Coast has its tradition which can best disperse these misunderstandings. We have been in touch with European civilization for over four hundred years, and our outlook and traditions have been modified to a large extent by this contact, compared to the other sister colonies. When it is pointed out, that in the olden days only a limited class of the population got any education at all, and that this class was sufficiently well-to-do and amply supplied with servants, so as not to have any necessity for engaging in domestic work, it will be seen how this slur on the educated girl of the present time has arisen. We would go no further, but merely state that considering the changes both in time and experience, it were necessary on the part of all educational bodies to insist that domestic happiness and utility are not to be despised, and that self-help is the best help after all (Gold Coast Independent, July 17, 1926).
Judging from the above article there appears to have been concern around this period that there ought to be a change in direction of the educational curriculum to reflect the needs of the “diluted” educated elite group. As the writer argued education was no longer the preserve of only a few well-to-do families who could afford servants and did not worry whether or not their daughters had learned anything beyond the “three Rs.” With increasing access to education for children of less privileged families it was clear that there had to be a reform in the curriculum to accommodate the realities of family life in which the woman had to possess more than just an intelligent and cultured mind. The new literate class of men needed women who could still perform domestic chores at home.
This point is implied in Marjorie Mensah’s criticism that education for women is “far too classical, literary and impractical to be of any real benefit to us in general” (Ladies Corner, West Africa Times, and June 24, 1931). Noting debates in “inter-colonial newspapers” on the subject of education, Marjorie advocates a utilitarian education that offered subjects such as domestic science and domestic economy, hygiene, hints on midwifery, and childcare. She argues that people want a return to a concentration on handicrafts and insists that what is needed is education that will turn girls to be useful in community” (ibid.). According to Marjorie because girls’ training is for leisure, luxury and ease too many girls idle about just waiting for matrimony. But, when a girl eventually achieves this goal, her husband realises his “young wife knows comparatively nothing about housekeeping, she cannot cook, has a very indifferent notion about needlework has never darned a pair of socks.”(ibid.).
The pitch for more domestic education was contained in several discourses in the Gold Coast Independent especially, which continually point out that girls education ought to be different from boys. In its review of the educational report of 1927-1928 the Gold Coast Independent notes with satisfaction the progress being made in teaching girls cooking and laundry work in girls’ secondary schools (Gold Coast Independent, January 26, 1929). The paper also writes an editorial endorsing a reader’s letter that said girls needed to be trained in “domestics” and insists that being “a lady is not about reading and writing” (Gold Coast Independent, March 14, 1938). The editorial claims that the mis-education of girls was a problem in Accra, especially, because unlike in Central Province where educated girls are not ashamed to soil their hands in the kitchen or sweep the house, educated girls in Accra are not interested in household chores. According to the paper many marriages have failed because mis-educated girls are ignorant of domestic duties, and thus it advocates a revision of the curriculum of female education to give more room for housewifery, laundry and cooking (ibid.).
Newspaper debates promoting a more sex-directed education that could better prepare girls for their domestic roles were echoed in discourses outside the press. Charlotte Quarshie- Idun’s public lecture to the Young People’s Literary Club on 11th April, 1933, for example, was prefaced by the explanation that the title, “domestic training: a necessity in the education of the African girl,” was chosen because as an African she felt that the progress of the race depended not only on mental education but also on the domestic training she receives as part of her education both at home and in school (Gold Coast Independence, April 29, 1933). The lecture concluded by reinforcing the domestic rationale behind education: “The object of every woman is to please her husband and in order to please him, she must be found not wanting in her domestic training” (ibid.).
There is also evidence of extra-textual efforts at augmenting formal education with vocational education. An advertisement on Mrs. Dalrymple Hayfron’s hostel in Cape Coast (See Gold Coast Times, Feb. 9, 1937), and reports on the founding of a girls hostel in Kumasi by Nancy Tsiboe and Fanny Marncell with an emphasis on domestic training, (Ashanti Pioneer, October 12 & 14, 1946) illustrate efforts by elite women to provide suitable education for domestic life.
Towards the end of the 1930s alternative, more progressive discourses on female education that went beyond preparing them for domestic life began to appear and were hosted even in some of the same newspapers that continued to advocate that education be geared towards improving upon girl’s domestic skills. The Gold Coast Independent, for example, continued to espouse the domestic purpose throughout the 1930s but on occasion changed its tune as it did in an editorial in which it concedes that education brings about gender parity. Titled “the new woman” the editorial notes the achievement of suffrage campaigners and predicts the trend would seep to the colony. The paper however laments that women have lagged behind men in education, a situation he considered undesirable for more than just altruistic reasons:
We wish on our part that they were not because for one thing it would help our circulation considerably, but this is a state of affairs which will not for long remain as it is. Women in West Africa do not as yet, by a long way, play the part they should - most of our men readers will say that they play quite a sufficiently important part - but we are quite sure that there is no getting away from the fact that quite a lot of us will live to see our women taking a far more active part in the affairs of the Gold Coast. This is dependent on the quality of education they receive. Even though West African women are born traders, they can’t all be ... After better education they can take their place in affairs of their country and will be able to break records, like first woman to fly to Europe from Africa (Gold Coast Independent, August 23, 1930).
By the 1940s and 1950s similar articles on the need for women’s parity in education to enable her fulfil a larger role in public affairs began to appear. A columnist called Georgina in the Ashanti Pioneer points out the inequality in education and argues that everyone stands to benefit from women’s education (Ashanti Pioneer, October 18, 1941), while Akosuah Dzatsui in the Accra Evening News argues that with new awakening women ought to be given the right education (Accra Evening News, August 1, 1950).
Daily Graphic women’s columnists in the 1950s went one step further in driving the point that education improved women’s chances in the workforce. Dede Barkey, for example, noted that hundreds of girls were getting an education that would qualify them for “men’s work” (Daily Graphic, October 18, 1951), while Victoria Zwennes advocated more women ought to be given a chance at higher education (Daily Graphic, October 16, 1953). Asking whether “home is still a woman’s place,” Joyce, the African Morning Post columnist, questions the future of housewives as more women went into trade and the professions and argues that with education women’s sphere is no longer a purely domestic one (African Morning Post, November 4, 1952).
The centrality of marriage in Gold Coast traditional society and specifically Christian matrimony in elite culture made it imperative to enhance educated women’s prospects at contracting a good marriage by addressing any perceived lapses. As some of the discourses have already demonstrated this strong connection between education and a successful modern marriage was constantly being reinforced, especially in the late nineteenth century when invariably discourses on education were embedded in discourses on marriage and domesticity. Several marriage debates juxtaposed literate girls with their illiterate counterparts by suggesting education may have handicapped the former and made her less prepared for her domestic role; more reason for well-meaning elite men and women to agonise about the “right” education for their female children. In the early part of the period a reader’s letter, for example, complains that in mission schools girls “don’t learn those things that will help domestic life” and that it was the reason “cloth girls,” who were not afraid of hard work, were preferred to “frock girls” (Gold Coast Leader, April 7, 1906).
Such letters were robustly countered, as it was important for the elite to debunk misconceptions that prevented traditionalists, afraid of exposing their daughters to the vagaries of an alien culture, from educating their daughters. Thus as late as the early 1930s a Gold Coast Times article responding to allegations by a reader of the Gold Coast Leader that there had been no bride from the convent schools in five years, was refuted with statistics on the marital status of ex-students. The article argued that girls had received superior education in Cape Coast convent schools dating back to 1909, and training colleges dating to 1927 and that during that period more than 300 girls had passed through, of whom 28 per cent could be accounted for as lawfully married, and six as divorced through no fault of the girls (Gold Coast Times, July 25, 1931).
Textual evidence suggests that despite the reservations about educated women, and at a time when more women were obtaining an education, their value in the marriage market was higher than that of their uneducated sisters. A report on the recommendations from a marriage and funeral expenses reduction committee which was constituted in 1953 by Nana Kojo Mbra V, the chief of Cape Coast, to regulate the escalating cost of marriage in his area, notes that the committee had revised the fee for a “fresh educated maiden” from the going rate of €42 to a proposed rate of €40 with a Bible and a ring. For a “fresh uneducated maiden” the fee was substantially lower – €16. 4s, down from the going rate of €29.3s. (Ashanti Pioneer, March 4, 1953). Perhaps this was part of the motivating factor behind a home set up by Nancy Tsiboe and Rosemond Mancell in the 1950s to, as noted by a Sunday Mirror article, train young girls who were about to marry “in the intricate art of house-keeping” (Sunday Mirror, January 10, 1954).
An important element in the narratives on marriage throughout the entire period was whether educated men ought to marry uneducated women in the first place (Gold Coast Express, September 1, 1897, Gold Coast Independent, August 31, 1929, October, 11, 1930, April 8, 1933, African Morning Post, May 19, 1938, Daily Graphic, October 23, 1951). In reality, because Gold Coast society was never constructed along rigid class lines, such marriages were commonplace. But newspaper discourses constructed them as problematic.
Before the turn of the nineteenth century the Gold Coast Express columnist “Eurasia” complains that female education is lamentably and shamefully neglected because colonial authorities reason that because “girls can’t be clerks education is not necessary.” According to the columnist there were only 50 girls to 500 boys in Weslyan schools, and the implication of this he says is that “ nine-tenths of these boys must marry illiterate girls, and have children growing up in complete ignorance” (Gold Coast Express, September 1, 1897). The same line of argument continued well into the next century. An August 31, 1929 report in the Gold Coast Independent on a discussion held at the Regnal League notes that it had been observed that when women are not educated at the level of men, there can be no happiness in marriage.
Writing almost a decade later Gloria paints an even more apocalyptic picture of an illiterate woman “fortunate” enough to marry an educated man and to live in a monogamous home:
Only in very exceptional cases can such a wife instinctively fill her place as homemaker. She cannot be a companion or real help mate of her husband whose ideas may be infinitely higher than hers may and whose outlook on life may be broad and comprehensive. Naturally by force of circumstances the husband may regard his wife as inferior to him and her finest instincts may be mercilessly crushed beneath the heel of domestic tyranny. She may have been valued as a cook or drudge but she is only a manial (sic). As a mother, she has harder problems to solve. Her children may be educated and have invariably imbibed notions that are quite foreign to her way of thinking; and as she may not see eye to eye with them she concludes they are rebellious and regards with suspicion the changes that are being brought by the new day. To the young people she is the ‘conservative old grandmother’. She consequently recedes to the background. Her influence on the home is shaken forever (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, and March 13, 1937).
Elite women’s position on marriage between uneducated women and men did not shift even in the more egalitarian and populist atmosphere of the 1950s. Dede Barkey, a contributor to the Women’s Page in the Daily Graphic strengthened an argument she was making for women to be encouraged in sports by drawing comparisons with education and marriage (Daily Graphic, October 23, 1951). According to Barkey because women’s education was neglected, “today there are thousands of men looking for literate women to marry without success, and they have been obliged to marry illiterate girls” (ibid.).
The rationale behind educated men marrying educated women can be linked to the notion of companionate marriage alluded to by Gloria’s quote regarding the plight of an illiterate woman cited earlier on. Companionate marriage was an important subtext to marriage discourses before the turn of the nineteenth century, and was an ideology newspapers continued to espouse through to the 1940s. So, for example, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Sam Ghandor criticises African women for failing in their duties as helpmates and compares them unfavourably with English and “Mahommadan” ladies who love, obey and comfort their work-worn men (Western Echo, October 17-31, 1887).
Likewise other articles and letters propounded the theory that education was primarily to equip women with the intellect to converse with their husbands (Gold Coast Independent, May 30, 1930) whose lot it was to undertake the “hazardous, perilous” task of earning a living (Gold Coast Independent, Oct. 11, 1930).
Deriving authority from the word of God as usual, during the same period, the columnist Gloria outlines the roles of a dutiful wife, observing that many marriages fail because partners fail to realise their separate duties (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, December 26, 1936). Wives, she said, sometimes create an inferiority complex and miss their duty and instead of being helpmates become a hindrance (ibid.). She recommends that a dutiful wife be tactful, have untiring energy, unfailing interest, unflagging enthusiasm, be respectful, graceful and filled with humility (ibid.). A dutiful wife, Gloria instructs, is one who inspires and advises, soothes not dabbles in her husband’s affairs, doesn’t encourage wrongdoing and use of improper language, and saves her husband from noise, confusion and irregularity in the home (ibid.).
Similarly, an article “to the girls of the Gold Coast” by Djifanu Kwadzo, a newspaper contributor, set out elite men’s expectations of “lawfully married wives” by asserting that there can be “no truer service women can render to a country than to building up a happy home”( Gold Coast Independent, July 5, 1930). He suggests that a good wife is one who is never disappointed because though she may be lonely when her husband goes off on business, she must enrich her thoughts with how to make life pleasant so that when he comes back home worried and tired, she can make him feel better (ibid.). According to Djifanu Kwadzo, as his better half, a wife “nervens her husband, infuses into him cheerfulness and teaches him patience and devotedness” through her house management (ibid.).
Such fixed notions of gender duties and responsibilities in marriage continued to dominate textual and extra-textual discourses on marriage in the second half of the twentieth century as well. The Ashanti Pioneer, for example, published the full text of a talk given by Nancy Tsiboe to the Student’s Christian Movement on the “duties of a housewife” in which she notes that it is a full-time job requiring keeping a household budget, running, knowledge of nutrition and food values, keeping hygienic surroundings, as well as reading, volunteering in society and above all, taking an interest in your husband’s work (Ashanti Pioneer, June 22, 1955).
These views obviously idealised and promoted the Victorian family at the expense of the African family structure that was non-nuclear, pragmatic about the role of a wife and which was often polygamous. Polygamy was a particularly divisive issue between elite men and women and was a subject on which the sub-textual messages on marriage differed markedly between the two sexes. Generally, both elite males and females subscribed to the Western ideal of marriage in which contractually a wife promises to be submissive, subject and obedient to her husband in exchange for an undertaking of affection, fidelity and care from him (See Charvet, 1982: 11). But as with other social changes that impinged on traditional norms and lifestyles some aspects of Western matrimony, such as the radically different requirement of monogamy, was at variance with the culture of polygamy which was practised even by elite males much to the chagrin of elite women. Elite women preferred monogamy because they considered that it gave them security in marriage.
The marriage question became a key issue after the passage of the Marriage Ordinance of sought to regulate the contracting of marriages.2 It must have been an issue the educated elite was confused about even at the turn of the nineteenth century for while in many ways they imitated a Victorian lifestyle, many still opposed this piece of legislation that reinforced Victorian-style family life. The Gold Coast News (April 25, 1885) describes it as a pretentious document that attempts to make people moral by legislation, while the Gold Coast Aborigine (Feb. 12, 1898) calls a ruling by the Wesleyan Church requiring its followers to adhere to the ordinance, as “supererogatory.”
Rather than change its position the response of the Church was to pressure converts who were already customarily married to choose one of their wives and to go through some form of religious marriage ceremony. This was a solution that was considered largely unworkable because of its social implications and resulted in serial assaults on the Church by newspapers. The Gold Coast Chronicle, for example, editorialised that attempts to accommodate the requirements of the new form of marriage had “degenerated into a hybrid sort of marriage” (Gold Coast Chronicle, July 9, 1896).
The marriage issue continued as a recurring theme for many decades after the passage of the legislation, probably because churches kept insisting holy matrimony was the only valid form of marriage. Christian marriage being a strong marker of elitism the middle classes (including the lower middle-class) which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s also continued to feel the pressure to contract marriages under the Ordinance even if, as indicated by the discussions in Chapter two,3 they were unable to do so. Consequently the marriage question, in particular the debate over polygamy, remains an unresolved issue and even today it continues to recur in textual discourses on relationships.
Articles debating forms of marriage found in newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s mirrored those found before the turn of the century in which male elite had repeatedly argued the position that monogamy was a cultural, rather than a religious or legal issue (Gold Coast Aborigine, Feb. 12, 1898, Gold Coast Independent, Sept 17, 1932, Gold Coast Spectator February 19, 1938) and an “improbable institution for Africans” (Gold Coast Spectator, February 19, 1938). In 1886 newspaper contributors point out that sections of the Ordinance such as Section 41, which dealt with married women’s property, was at variance with customary law and practice. The Western Echo, for example, argues that it would be wrong and near impossible to divide up communally held property or pass on a woman’s family property woman to her husband (Western Echo, January 30, 1886):
The natives have a saying that a woman marries to bring money into her family from her husband but not to take her family’s to her husband (ibid.).
Accusing the Church of “denationalising” converts because it had ruled it would only recognize the Christian rite of passage, the Gold Coast Aborigine also argues that the Christian rite of passage was a European convention that had nothing to do with religion. “We will not admit you into our church unless you marry as the English do?” the paper questioned (Gold Coast Aborigine, Feb. 12, 1898).
Three decades later, an opinion in the Gold Coast Independent echoes similar sentiments by describing monogamy as “a purely European custom which must not be foisted upon us for under its influence the progress of fornication which is an abomination to the land can not be arrested” (Gold Coast Independent, Sept 17, 1932). As argued by the Gold Coast Times (May 18, 1940) the Church had to live with the fact that a great proportion of new converts were already polygamously married.
Stating a commonly held notion that polygamy takes care of “surplus” women in society and prevents immorality, an opinion piece authored by Ahmed Kwajo argues that war and widowhood had brought on a shortage of men in the Gold Coast, a situation exacerbated by the churches’ stand on monogamy which meant men with several wives had to divorce all but one (Gold Coast Independent, February 21, 1925).
Such women though marriageable become untimely widows who have to seek help from any sort of men who can keep them. Many are now prostitutes, others are married to heathens” (ibid.).
He continues his argument that polygamy is necessary by giving the following reasons:
The number of women in every town is almost three times the number of men. To avoid or decrease prostitution and bastardy. It is not very difficult to maintain more than one wife and children. Polygamy is not a sin - it is a remedy and has it uses and abuses (Gold Coast Independent, February 21, 1925).
Discourses advanced other utilitarian reasons for polygamy. An article by Esson Kojo in the Gold Coast Independent argues:
How the idea of ‘hatred to the other wife’ is associated with a man who has married two women to help him on his farms in order to satisfy their hunger with fruits thereof, strikes the writer with wonder; is ascribing a canine character to the African.The occupation of the African mainly agricultural and the preparation of his dinner which consists of pounding fufu,4 require two women. It is when we shall have reached the acumen of Western Civilization will polygamous tendency automatically create (Gold Coast Independent, Sept 17, 1932).
Articles in the influential African Morning Post column, the “Quiet Half Hour,” advanced equally pro-polygamy views. One such column article, for example, argues that monogamy had failed because of the high percentage of female births in the country; the labour needs of society, and the lack of social institutions to support fatherless children. The article charges that monogamy was an attempt by imperialists to depopulate Africa just as the slave trade had done (Quiet Half Hour, African Morning Post, January 13, 1939).
Elite women engaged with the discourses on the subject very differently, advancing oppositional views that telegraphed their preference for monogamy. The columnist Gloria, for example, asks “Which is more suitable for the African woman - marriage according to the native, or the English form?” And while she leaves her readers to decide for themselves she notes, in relation to native marriage, disadvantages such as the fact that the “wife rarely resides in the same home with her husband, but only carries food to him daily and ministers to his desires,” and the fact that “the husband can contract other marriages, can divorce the wife on the ground of adultery, but the wife cannot enforce divorce or discontinue marriage on the ground of her husband’s adultery or on his marrying more wives, though she has a right to the protection of her husband” (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, January 30, 1937 ).
In another column titled “Women and Polygamy” Gloria sketches the history of polygamy from biblical times, noting the fact that there was no polygamy in the Garden of Eden or on Noah’s Ark, but that Abraham and Solomon were polygamous (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, November 27, 1937). She argues that civilization stopped the practice in the fifth century even though it continues to be endemic in Africa and that even “Mohamedans”5 are changing (ibid.). Refuting the claim advanced mostly by male writers that that there are more women than men, Gloria argues that polygamy “develops a dreadful sexual passion,” ruins families, is expensive, and destroys male strength. For women, polygamy is a barrier against progress. It lowers her position, “for marriage is bound to be viewed in its sensual aspects and woman is held as a creature without a soul and is regarded as a toy to play with or as an inferior to be despised” (ibid.). She concedes that some women accept it because each extra wife means a division of heavy work in the house and field, but counters such advantages by asserting that it breeds domestic quarrels. Finally, and in keeping with her commitment to promoting Christian morality, she points out that polygamy is incompatible with high moral ideals and Christianity (ibid.).
Marjorie Mensah similarly adopts a pro-monogamy stance, arguing that the world had passed from a “polygamic” state to a “monogamic” one and that women had not got anything out of the native form of marriage (Ladies’ Corner, West African Times, June 11, 1931).
In another article in which she asserts women have “shown great aptitude” in the home and “marked great progress in this sphere compared with 50 years ago,” Marjorie again lashes out at polygamy, noting that “it only remains for certain atrophied features of our marriage institutions to be brought in line with our undoubted social advance to make the home the castle and fortress of a man and woman devoted to one another for the good of themselves and their children” (Women’s Corner, Times of West Africa May 22, 1931).
Attempts to construct a wall between spheres in conformity with Western patriarchal culture proved unsustainable in the Gold Coast. Marriage discourses may have prescribed that ideally the husband play the role of breadwinner, and the wife support his role by being an uncomplaining, long suffering homemaker, but judging from the discourse on economic change and empowerment, the reality was very different from the ideal. Firstly, the notion of a gentlewoman who did not work was untenable in a society with hardly any gentry to speak of. Few educated Gold Coasters were born into positions of privilege and many were first generation literate or at best second generation. Secondly, women have always worked in the Gold Coast and the emerging modern economy necessitated that even elite women find “suitable” occupations. Thus much of the discourses in the Gold Coast press, even before the turn of the nineteenth century when Victorian domestic ideology was quite dominant, was preoccupied with women’s eroding economic status. And while in later periods in the second quarter of the twentieth century economic discourse dwelled on women in the formal labour market, the discourses of women’s economic displacement resulting from shifts in the colonial economy continued to be articulated.
Discourses in the late nineteenth century capture the beginnings of the threat to women’s livelihoods in urban areas. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, for example, the Gold Coast Aborigine reported on a meeting between Governor Hodgson and principal women of Cape Coast town at which the women complained about being unemployed and barred, because of an ordinance, from breeding domestic animals for income (Gold Coast Aborigine, December 17, 1898). According to the newspaper Hodgson gave the women a dash of o2 each and suggested they could find work as carriers (ibid.).
Especially from the first quarter of the twentieth century newspaper articles and readers letters capture a very important period in which women were increasingly negotiating their independence from the rural community and situating themselves in the urban economy. Discourses during this period also focused on the crises in women’s economic circumstances as a result of competition from non-indigenous merchant houses and multinational trading firms. The Gold Coast Independent published a letter in which the writer accuses Syrians6 of outstripping and eliminating prosperous women traders (Oct. 5,1929) and one complaining that the United African Company (U.A.C)7 was exploiting women traders and moving into their turf by selling such items as stinking fish,8 vegetables, and kenkey9 which had been the preserve of local women (Gold Coast Independent, December 27, 1930).
Marjorie Mensah also picked up on the issue, noting for example, how poor market women in the stalls of Selwyn market in Accra had to compete with well- established firms (Women’s Corner, January 5, 1933) and how women traders had lost the conspicuous position they once held when they controlled the greater portion of trade (Women’s Corner, February 23, 1935). She echoes prevailing sociological claims that the Ghanaian market woman had economic clout, by observing, “large families who are possessing wealth today owed that wealth to a keen trader in the family - a woman who knew a deal, could make one and show a profit” (Women’s Corner, February 23, 1935). The African Morning Post similarly bemoans the fact that trading firms had contributed to the plight of women traders, noting also that in the old days about 94% of women traders were well to do, able to look after their children and educate them (Our quiet half hour, African Morning Post, March 8, 1938). While it is debatable whether a large percentage of women (94% as claimed by the African Morning Post) were so financially well-off, these articles nonetheless illustrate anxieties about the shrinking of women’s economic opportunities and the downward shift in women’s socio- economic status from the 1920s on.
Gloria introduces another element to the debate on the crisis in the labour market by underscoring the fact that the economic order had thrown men out of work and that women, of necessity, had to earn a living (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, April 17, 1937). A reader’s letter in the Gold Coast Independent also contributes to the discourse on the crisis by linking migration, crime, and unemployment with illegal economic activity such as prostitution. According to the letter these were the factors responsible for the “inoculation of the spirit of prostitution into our women” (Gold Coast Independent, January 11, 1930). In a similar vein another social commentator explains that Gold Coast women sell themselves into prostitution because of a need to fend for themselves, either because they are not married or disappointed because of broken promises of marriage, and blames the fact that girls who leave school have limited job opportunities and no capital for petty trading (Gold Coast Independent, May 15, 1943).
An important co-existing subtext to the discourse on the loss of women’s traditional economic independence, is the discourse on career opportunities or the lack thereof for educated Gold Coast woman. Newspaper texts illustrate the fact that like their uneducated sisters elite women were also negotiating their own economic survival in the colonial job market and felt disadvantaged and discriminated against. As an article quoted earlier on arguing the need for education had implied the colonial government did not generally consider women for jobs in the civil service. In the nineteenth century especially, the only real job opening for educated women was in the teaching field, where they were discriminated against in pay. Under the colonial system Africans were generally paid less than Europeans and females less than males. So in terms of the pay scale the African woman ranked at the bottom. One of the earliest indications of disparity in pay in the civil and public sector comes from a reader’s letter published before the turn of the nineteenth century querying why an African colonial schoolmistress was being paid €72 instead of the going rate of €100 per anum (Western Echo, May 31, 1886).
In the twentieth century and with the expansion in education and a growth in the labour market new opportunities were opened up for Africans to find employment in the bureaucratic service or to pursue professional careers. Newspapers reflected this by reporting on women’s entry into the formal job sector and by advocating for even more opportunities for women to gain economic independence.
In 1931, for example, a Marjorie Mensah column on career options for women complains that aside from the post office, telephone exchange, print office, and perhaps work as a counter clerk, there were few other job openings for women (Ladies Corner,West Africa Times, April 15, 1931). Marjorie contends,
I would like to see our girls filling some of the posts of the men also. I think it is about time that some institutions were established for the purpose of teaching such subjects that would enable candidates to qualify, be they women or men” (ibid.).
Two years later she is even more adamant about the “square deal” women are being given. She complains that the only opportunities given to women are work at the telephone exchange where they are paid €4 to €8 per month; work as hospital nurses with three months probation and no pay, or as shop assistants either with the U.A.C. or any other concern (Women’s Corner, Times of West Africa, November 6, 1933).10 She asks,
What is there for a woman of ambition to do? We can’t afford programs of exclusion here. We are too few to shut a part of that few out. A woman in overalls looks better than a man and can do a better turn of work (ibid.)
Marjorie predicts that a day will come when women will be mechanics, book-keepers and store managers and argues that considering the fact that women are the target customers of stores they ought to be given a chance to manage (ibid.).
Also writing around the same time Gloria argues in one of her columns that while 20 years ago women were bound by home, and careers for women were unknown, there is frank and open discussion of women’s careers in the twentieth century. Gloria says it is debatable whether women wanted careers or whether women out of necessity were seeking careers. Still, she notes among the avenues available to women teaching, hospital work such as nursing and midwifery, telephony and dressmaking (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, November 28, 1936). Even as she concedes that women had career options Gloria had not completely shed some of her earlier Victorian notions on women’s spheres. Therefore she ponders in a column a year later, “marriage and career which is preferred by the average young woman.” She argues that marriage is indispensable to the Gold Coast woman because it is her destiny in life and maintains that career can not take the place of marriage. But, she points out work can save a young woman with no means from starvation or from losing her moral beauty, especially if parents die and leave her nothing and notes that some married women adopt career if their bread-winner husbands are unable. She also observes that a career helps to raise the social status of some women, although at the expense of marriage (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, January 16, 1937).
Then again a few years later as though accepting the inevitability of women pursuing careers Gloria remarks that whether or not a woman was married it was highly desirable that she should be able to take her place in the ranks of women workers should there ever arise the need for her to do so. Vocations considered most suited to women and included in Gloria’s expanded list of careers opportunities were: medicine, dental surgery, domestic science, arts and crafts, architecture, law and journalism (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, February 17, 1940 and February 24, 1940).
The female journalist, a rare breed in Gloria’s time, was promoted as a powerful symbol of empowerment and women’s columns, starting from Marjorie Mensah and Eva Sarbah in the West Africa Times, Gloria in the Gold Coast Times and Akosua Dzatsui in the Accra Evening News sought to boost the ranks of women writers by touting journalism as a viable option for women. Gloria dedicated a column to recruiting women into her profession, noting that although qualifications are necessary to make a journalist, a “facile pen and good powers of description are indispensable, and it is useless for a woman who has not the gift of writing to embark upon the career.” (Women’s Corner, Gold Coast Times, February 17, 1940).
A year later writing in the Ashanti Pioneer the columnist Georgina notes that women are beginning to gain parity with men but bemoans the fact that in printing establishments “we seem not to be fully represented” (Ashanti Pioneer, The Man and Woman of It, October 31, 1941). Encouraging women to take up jobs in all aspects of the newspaper business the crux of Georgina’s reasoning resonates even today:
In the printing establishment women can become type distributors, newspaper distributors, proof-readers, leader writers, columnist and editresses and in fact there are many jobs that can be easily done by women. A woman free-lancer is in fact a valuable asset to the community. By filling such a position we will be in a position to give vent to our sentiments and temper the masculine tone of the local papers with our feelings. We can stand against any treatment being meted out to us by the opposite sex by making it known. Apart from the opportunities of speaking out our minds as a labourer is worthy of his salt we will earn our daily bread for our maintenance. That the advantage of self-expression and the intellectual achievement afforded by printing establishments is invaluable can not be gainsaid (ibid).
A decade later Akosua Dzatsui would make an even more forceful pitch for women entering into journalism by providing examples of women excelling in the profession and asserting that:
Women of Ghana it is a fifty fifty world, men have been running it for centuries and they have been doing it very badly, and we must help them whether they like it or not. We are the mothers of men and they have no more intelligence or sense than ourselves so enter Journalism and play your part in this new brave Ghana of ours (Women’s Column, Accra Evening News, May 2, 1951).
Women’s inroads into jobs traditionally considered the preserve of men continued to be actively promoted in Gold Coast newspapers with the clamour for improvements in women’s economic and employment situations increasing as the drive towards independence was accelerated.
Acknowledging the role women have played in benevolent societies, Edith Wuver argues that as the country moves towards independence women had new roles to play:
The time of regarding women below the standard of men is long past. many responsible posts held by women of other countries are practically unheard of in ours. Lecturers of big universities consist of women who cover all subjects just as well as men. Many leading magazines are edited by women and even in the army women rise to the same rank as men”. What holds us back? (A Page for Women, Daily Graphic, June 11, 1955).
In keeping with the general rebellious mood of the country during the 1950s gender inequality in employment was consistently challenged by elite women. Describing herself as a worker who has worked for long years, and looked after children, Akosua Dzatsui suggests in the Accra Evening News that women organise under the CPP to demand more employment opportunities (Women’s Column, October 30, & 31,1950). An article by “Miss Ghana” in the same paper a few years later complains about the restrictions placed on women in the civil service and the fact that they are banned from being pregnant for a number of years and dismissed if they contravene the ban (Accra Evening News, June 21, 1954). Another by Dede Barkey announced simply that “women want to work equally as men” (Daily Graphic, October 18, 1951), while Diana Korsah, in an appropriately titled feature “women in a changing Gold Coast,” laid out what women wanted at the dawn of independence: “We talk of equal partnership in the home; and would like equality of opportunity in work and politics” (Daily Graphic, November 20, 1951).
The pressure on the public service to provide jobs for women in the dying days of colonialism is underscored by Naki Payne who notes that about 100 literate and illiterate women crowd the offices of the labour department each day wanting to be registered as unemployed (Daily Graphic, September 25, 1951). According to Naki, these women hoped to find jobs as kenkey makers, cooks, pantry-maids, and seamstresses. The writer argues that women have forsaken other jobs such as trading in kenkey, vegetables, dry-fish and other petty business to look for waged jobs, and claims that on average 70 women were being registered daily, but that only two educated girls had been able to secure positions in nursing training school, and as telephonist (ibid.).
It is clear from these discourses that in the 1950s more and more women were becoming wage earners and professionals. Aside from the examples cited above the Accra Evening News provides a telling example in a report on the female acting secretary of the Gold Coast Government Hospital Worker’s Union, Sarah Abakah, who, according to the report, had notified the director of medical services that her 35,000 strong union of workers would take action if a dispute over wages was not settled (Accra Evening News, February 6, 1953).
It was this restive mood which greeted the Lidbury Commission report, a long awaited report setting out reforms in the civil and public service. Women were clearly disappointed by Lidbury. A newspaper critique of the report protested that apart from nurses, telephonists, etc. there were few jobs open to women and that while women were not barred from the civil service, there was no encouragement being given them (African Morning Post, Sept 20, & 21, 1951). Women took exception, particularly to sections of the report, which stipulated that women could only be appointed to established posts in the civil service with prior approval of the chief establishment officer; would be required to resign from the service on marriage and could have only one maternity leave (Daily Graphic, June 9, 1952).
Another commentator on the Lidbury report notes that some communities might be debating women entering the workforce, but the Gold Coast has made up its mind, women are in places and would increase their numbers in the workforce. The article argues that it was false to suggest women would displace men in the workforce and notes that there was a declared policy of some government departments, confirmed by Lidbury, to target women for certain jobs such as nursing, the telephone exchange and typing jobs (Daily Graphic October, 12, 195).
The Daily Graphic was particularly committed to encouraging women to take up non-traditional careers and constantly provided role models of women engaged in careers other than those prescribed for women by the Lidbury report and government departments. For example it published a profile on a Mrs. Victoria Meerz, a former Miss Ashanti Region who was the first woman in Ashanti to obtain a driving licence and the first woman in Ashanti to travel on an aeroplane. Mrs. Meerz is described as the director of Kyem Timber Company in Suame. She had started a wooden bowl business and was shipping fruit bowls to the U.S. and the U.K. (A Page for Women, Daily Graphic, November 2, 1951). The paper also notes that the first Ashanti Girl to Read Law, was a Juliana Sally Osei, who was the seventh daughter of a Mr. C.E. Osei, M.L.A. (July 10, 1951); that Veronica Agatha Martinson, daughter of the venerable Archdeacon, had won honours in her science degree at Durham University (July 24, 1951). And that aged 21, Akua Asaabea Ayisi was preparing to study journalism in the U.K. (August 31, 1951).
The Graphic did not limit itself to profiling only women in white- collar jobs or businesses. It also included, for example, a photo caption of the Asantehemaa, Nana Ama Serwa Nyarko, describing her as Queen Mother of Ashanti and head of all the women of Ashanti and explaining that most of the arbitration involving women which are taken to the Asantehene’s court are referred to her for settlement (October 4, 1950).
As was the case with other debates on such subjects as education, domesticity and marriage, the discussions on women’s expanding roles went beyond the newspapers into lecture halls and literary clubs. “Is home still the woman’s place?” queried one such debate held at the British Council that pitted a United States Information Service official and Lily Baeta, a local elite woman, against the wife of the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Communication, and Mr. L.A. Adu, the Commissioner for Africanisation (African Morning Post, November 4, 1952).
Official response to the increased demands for women’s equity in the public service can be inferred from a notice carried in the Daily Graphic suggesting the government might have adopted an affirmative action policy. The notice said at least one woman was required to serve on the 11-member vernacular board (Daily Graphic, September 12, 1952). In the same year the Daily Graphic also carried a front-page story on women’s enlistment in the police force for the first time in Gold Coast history. Significantly the article notes that “three of the 12 girls enlisted as recruits for the corps of police women may be appointed N.C.Os11 (Daily Graphic, September 2, 1952) and that one will be a woman sergeant, two others women corporals. The article also suggests that the colonial government may have started reviewing some of its discriminatory workplace practices by observing that the 12 girls will have the same scales of salary and conditions of work as their male counterparts, go through the same course of training and opportunities to rise to any rank (ibid.).
This paper has attempted to illustrate the role played by newspaper discourses in reformulating and affirming gender relations in the Gold Coast and underscored how newspaper articles provide a reliable normative account of the social structure, ideology and views of the Gold Coast elite in the colonial period. I have also demonstrated the gendered representational practices of print culture that captured prevailing attitudes and shifting notions about gender during this period.
Quiet obviously the discourses were varied and at times contradictory during this 75-year span of print history. But the discursive berth provided by newspapers allowed for competing and conflicting discourses of the feminine and the feminist to co-exist quite comfortably in the same space and on many occasions within the consciousness of the same writer. Newspaper discourses show various attempts at enclosing women in the private sphere in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and challenge from women when social realities demanded the construction of a new and more assertive Gold Coast woman in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Newspapers that at first preached a certain exclusionary domestic ideal for women and hosted discourses that sought to confine women to a domestic sphere, consciously and unconsciously began to define a more egalitarian concept of gender relations in which alternate, more progressive discourses on gender were accommodated. Especially in the 1950s many of the discourses, particularly those generated from women columnists, demonstrate an assertiveness that suggests women’s resistance to being constructed by dominant males. The collective force of readers, contributors and writers of women’s columns proclaiming women’s capabilities produced discourses which opened up imaginative possibilities for a more equal world for women. Thus, one columnist insists that women were no longer content with being spectators watching men in public life, they wanted their “own sportswomen” and “assemblywomen” (Women’s Page, Daily Graphic, Sept 12, 1952); another that women could better represent their needs and aspirations by entering into the newspaper industry and engaging more fully with print culture (Ashanti Pioneer, The Man and Woman of It, October 31, 1941).
There were discourses, such as the one on marriage and the debates on polygamy that would suggest that the more things changed, the more they remained the same. And discourses such as those on economic opportunities and even education, which suggest that press agenda was dictated not only by those who contributed to newspapers but also by the sheer dynamics of a society in a state of flux.
The gendered discourses mirror the aspirations of the elite of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and at the same time reflect the influence of the broader elite group, which emerged in the second quarter of the twentieth century, and which did not necessarily subscribe to some of the notions that had been promoted by their predecessors. But the true value of the various discourses found in the Gold Coast press lies not in the contents of individual papers, but in the ways in which they interrelated, in the tensions that were generated between them, and in the welter of simultaneity that was the experience of the readers of Gold Coast newspapers (Aled Jones, 1993).
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Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Gadzekpo, Audrey (2001). GENDER DISCOURSES AND REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES IN GOLD COAST NEWSPAPERS. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 2.