Kvinnokamp på nyhetsplats år 1906 - om offentlighetens spaltformade dimensioner

Abstract

In this artide Birgitta Ney uses the news coverage of two feminist manifestations in 1906 as a starting point in order to understand one part of the public sphere and the women who worked there as reporters. One story called "a doctors' scandal" caused a group of women to arrange a meeting in Stockholm. At the meeting a number of them were appointed to conduct an investigation into the matter. The other story covered a nationwide campaign to collect signatures for women's right to vote. Both manifestations were covered by the press and Ney uses one woman reporter and her artides as an example of how the these early female journalists could turn an obligatory coverage of women's activities into a veritable feminist space on the pages of the daily newspapers. When trying to find coverage of feminist actions in the daily press at the beginning of the last century it is best to turn our attention to columns with vignettes such as "For our Ladies", or the sections called the women's page - sections of the papers which have not attracted much interest when political change in our society has been studied. Women reporters, together with the women of the feminist movement, could use these pages, it seems, as an almost under-cover space of their own only a couple of pages away from the artides traditionally labelled political in the press.