Women’s voices in the public sphere

Abstract

As alternative media, suffrage periodicals played an important role in women’s fight for universal suffrage, which marked a milestone on the road to democracy. Opening up a space for women in public discourse, these papers shaped and were shaped by processes of democratisation. This study explores how they balanced informative, propagandistic and commercial functions, and how women positioned themselves and others as social actors in the context of the movement, challenging gender ideologies. In line with Rühlemann and Aijmer’s (2015) notion of corpus pragmatics, the study combines the assets of corpus-linguistic methods, e.g., by drawing on keywords as pointers to relevant areas of interest, with a pronounced qualitative perspective, complementing the search results by features demanding manual analysis and discussing the findings in their socio-historical context.