| In mid-twentieth-century Colombia, prominent women journalists pushed for the development of a critical and political press, written by women, for women, and about women. These writers insisted that women deserved a place in public forums, both as subject matter and creators of opinions that concerned not only women but the country as a whole. Practicing Journalism, Contesting Marginalization examines these journalists' critique of the contemporary establishment of the press as well as their stories of class and gender equality and justice in Colombia while revealing the ambivalences emerging from the production of their publications and the discursive realities they crafted as women writers from the 1940s through the 1960s. This dissertation explains how leading women journalists challenged men's journalism in unprecedented ways, but also frequently legiti-mized the male press's logics and hierarchies. It also studies how writers' gendered campaigns were classed and established a fixed order, one that authorized the condescending and disdainful treatment of those who were not knowledgeable, moral, and ethical, all features journalists associated with school-trained and professional women of a middle class in formation. The women's press articulated socio-political struggles and meanings that, though contradictory, defined a feminine vision of the gendered and classed worlds journalists lived in and delineated. At the intersection of Latin American media history and historical analyses of the middle class, this dissertation prioritizes such a feminine vision, still understudied and often treated as subsidiary in the existing scholarship. |
