‘Edited and Approved by Women for Maximum Benefit of all Readers’: Newsprint Journalism, the International Women's Year and the Remaking of a Gendered National Public in 1970s Ghana

Abstract

AbstractDuring the International Women's Year (IWY) of 1975, United Nations bodies made concerted efforts to ensure global awareness and understanding of the IWY aims of equality, peace and development, via the mass media. In this article, we engage with these strategies of global information distribution from the vantage point of Ghana, West Africa. Drawing from interviews with women journalists and examples from the women's pages of the national state‐owned Daily Graphic newspaper, we argue that the onset of the IWY presented an important opportunity for women living under the constraints of military rule. A small but determined group of journalists capitalised on a longer history of readers writing into newspapers, and on lower levels of government surveillance of women's pages. Working with and through multi‐layered forms of address, they adapted the homey, gossipy women's pages and turned them into spaces of engagement between men and women as co‐citizens. During the IWY, connections were forged between international events and agendas and ‘domestic issues’. By hosting older debates about widowhood, inheritance and polygyny, and newer debates about family planning, formal education and employment, the women's pages positioned Ghanaian women as a key constituency in national development, but also enabled more assertive critiques of men's privileges.