The book examines the significant role played by radio in empowering women in three West African countries: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The choice of these three countries enables a fair comparison: all three face similar social, economic and political problems, share similar religious, tra-ditional and cultural backgrounds and, most importantly for this book, all suffe…
In 1954, Dame Enid Lyons, the first Australian woman elected to the House of Representatives, remarked in an interview with ABC Weekly that radio had ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’, as it enabled women to engage with world affairs while doing the housework. According to Lyons, radio had given women the ‘confidenceâ…
The research for this book started by tracing the rise and fall of a set of programs aimed specifically at women audiences in the early years of public service broadcasting in Australia, Canada, and the UK. In doing so, I uncovered compelling narratives of working lives of the women who produced and spoke on the programs. The individual personalities and collective i…