Cogent Arts & Humanities (Dec 2023)
Alternative voices from London: Women and the Abyssinian War in Sylvia Pankhurst’s internationalist weekly New Times and Ethiopia News
Abstract
Ethiopia’s national and military morale was at its lowest ebb when Italian forces seized Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936, following the failure of the League of Nations to stop Mussolini’s colonial aggression and the lack of political will among the big powers. New Times and Ethiopia News (NTEN) debuted on the historic day of 5 May conceived as an emancipatory journalism project to give the liberation struggle a new lease of life on the diplomatic, political, and military fronts. The newspaper advocated the need for international mobilization against fascism and colonialism with Ethiopia as a victim nation as its focus. An important facet of the liberation journalism was gender-based discursive struggle against colonial and fascist exploitation and war crimes targeting women and girls. In the activist journalism represented by NTEN that subsequently became an important global platform involving a network of mainly European feminist writers and academics who opposed fascism and Nazism, Sylvia Pankhurst also addressed issues of agency and the circumstances affecting Ethiopian women and girls anchored in her global view that the rise of fascism had ravaging ramifications for women. Using historical research methods and thematic analysis with a feminist lens, this study identifies thematic discourses of women in military roles, diplomacy as well as atrocities against women, covering the period of the struggle against Italian occupation of Ethiopia. The study finds that the paper was a classic example of international alternative press that chronicled women’s exploits and opposed excesses against them. The study contributes to the body of scholarship on the interwar period of alternative press journalism and more particularly understanding of the gender dimension of the role and plight of women under the claws of colonialism.
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