Articles

The Perception of Women Journalists and Feminism in Belgian Newspapers (1880-1950)

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Abstract

Journalism has traditionally been a male-dominated profession that has only gradually opened to women. In many Western countries in the late nineteenth century, the growing presence of female professionals across various sectors of society was one way in which the feminist movement gained visibility. This article aims to trace the discourses on women journalists and feminism in Belgium and explore their possible intersections. Focusing on the period from 1880 to 1950, we combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyse a corpus of 11 digitised French-language Belgian daily newspapers. Our goal is to assess the extent to which the Belgian press produced discourses on women journalists and feminism, how these narratives were interconnected, and whether they reflect a professional journalistic discourse on women journalists and feminism. Quantitative analyses, based on word frequency, key multi-word expressions, and collocates of the terms under investigation, have allowed us to objectify the presence and content of discourses within several subcorpora. This overview of the discourses makes it possible to identify discursive moments and specific texts which, through close reading, provide opportunities for a qualitative analysis of the discursive relationships between feminism and women in journalism. Our working hypothesis – that discourses about women journalists and feminism were closely intertwined – has been nuanced. The quantitative results do not demonstrate the existence of a distinct discourse on feminism and women in journalism, nor on feminist journalism. However, the identification of collocates has allowed us to highlight two notable feminist journalists who were strongly associated with feminism and analyse their press coverage.

Keywords: journalism, feminism, newspapers, feminist journalists, Belgium, history, Text mining

How to Cite:

Deseure, B., Le Cam, F. & Gribomont, I., (2025) “The Perception of Women Journalists and Feminism in Belgian Newspapers (1880-1950)”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 12(2), 45-67. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.91568