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.

Keywords:

• gender
• rape
• woman general
• Sylvia Pankhurst
• Haile Selassie
• League of Nations
• Italy
• New Times and Ethiopia News
• fascism
• colonialism

1. Contextual background

Fascism as a political philosophy based on aggressive nationalism and racism that focused on the prominence of a nation with tyrannical leader who regiments socioeconomic life and suppresses democracy and freedoms for the individual was on the rise across Europe with variants in Italy, Germany, and Spain (Paxton, 2005). The rise of fascism in Italy had particular relevance for the Italian nation and proving itself as a rising power in Europe. Fascism arose nearly four decades after Italia’s ambitions of expanding its colonial stronghold of Eritrea southward and subduing Ethiopia were thwarted after the March 1896 battle of Adwa in which the Ethiopian kingdom emerged decisively victorious. While the victory helped Ethiopia to maintain its independence, Italy was all along making preparations to avenge its defeat, heal the national stain of defeat by an African nation, and annex Ethiopia into its Italian East Africa. Forty years later, on 3 October 1935, in what came to be known as the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, a massive Italian Army under Marshal Emilio De Bono undertook a full-fledged invasion of Ethiopia from Eritrea, which was accompanied by a parallel blitz by another Italian army from Italian Somalia (Milkias & Metaferia, 2005). The military conquest of Ethiopia was hailed in Italy as an achievement of fascism. While Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations and had to be protected, neither the League nor the major powers were to be dependable. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was consummated as fascist troops entered Addis Ababa as Ethiopians vowed to fight on (Nicolle, 2012).

The rise of fascism in the interwar period was a menacing development to many astute observers as it signaled in no unclear terms war and destruction, whose costs were to be disproportionately borne by women. The true colors of fascism were becoming clear across Europe as Italy prepared for a major world war that would go down in history as a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude and scale. Italy’s numerous adventures and militarism as a late comer to the scramble for Africa was felt not only in Europe but also deep in Africa where Italy had prepared for years to attack and force the submission of Ethiopia, aided by a diplomatic climate of narcissistic indifference and even open support for Italy’s illegal actions (The Daily Telegraph, 1935, p. 4). Italy was eventually able to formally annex Ethiopia with the blessing of the big powers, but there were also voices that stood by and supported Ethiopia’s sovereignty as a member of the League of Nations (Barker, 1971). Across Europe and the United States, Ethiopia was the subject of press coverage often portrayed as a victim nation that was betrayed by a world body that had the pledge to defend all member states (“Three Great Powers Betrayed US” NTEN, 11 July, p. 4; Pittsburgh Courier, 23 November 1935, p. 10). As the discourse of a fascist war against Ethiopia ebbed, and once fascist Italy announced victory, the plight of Ethiopia had become even more pathetic, with the international press now focused elsewhere as Ethiopia was no longer newsworthy.

While the mainstream press had diverted its focus and attention elsewhere, there was to emerge an alternative outlet which was to become known as New Times and Ethiopia News. Since in the early days of the Abyssinian crisis, Ethiopia was in the global spotlight as a helpless victim of aggression, NTEN, as a special category of the alternative press dedicated to international justice, was assisted by a climate of global sympathy for Ethiopia and a discursive army of leftist scholars from across Europe and the United States using the outlet to expose the depravity of fascist occupation (Cizel, 2006). Despite the considerable value of the intellectual and journalistic crusade of the time, the scholarship on the alternative press of the interwar period and the subsequent years of World War II has received little attention. In particular, the rise of fascism and colonial expansion and the international and national mobilization to confront the onslaught by Mussolini reference to Ethiopia have been marginal topics of historical media scholarship. NTEN as a subject of British, Ethiopian, and international historiography deserves further enquiry into the production, circulation, and consumption of alternative journalism products, especially from the vantage point of women’s studies on account of the obscurity and neglect that seems to have characterized the gender dimension of interwar press historiography.

Behind NTEN was Sylvia Pankhurst who was a key leader in the suffrage movement, an anti-imperialist, and an anti-Fascist fighter on the global stage with a focus on the defense of Ethiopia from Italian fascism and colonialism. Conceived and led by Sylvia Pankhurst as a feminist of distinguished international stature, New Times and Ethiopia News, became an internationalist antifascist and anticolonial weekly at the height of the Abyssinian crisis and in its aftermath. With support from contributors that included some of the finest European and Ethiopian antifascist scholars of the time that included Hakim Martin Workneh (aka Charles Martin), Neil Hunter, RC Hawkins, Hazet Napier, Stanley Jevons, Hilaire du Berrier, Ramsay Muir, JA Rogers, and many others, the alternative newspaper stood in defense of Ethiopia at the League of Nations and European power corridors, defending and articulating Ethiopia’s position, interests, perspectives, and predicament as it faced invasion and annexation by fascist Italy (Fine, 1992). Genres of the newspaper included news and views, editorials, letters from our readers, Ethiopia in the press, OP-Eds, and advertisements. News varied in length from almost full pages (which were mainly issue-based news) to just a couple of paragraphs (on particular combat stories including ambushes by Ethiopian patriots). Opinion pieces were often very long extending to more than a page, as were editorials by Pankhurst herself. The language was typically critical, forceful, anti-colonial and antifascist, and often condemnatory. Stylistically, stories would provoke sympathy for Ethiopia and its people, and invite understanding and support. The dominant trend seemed expression of outrage against nations and parties for not doing enough to protect Ethiopia as a member of the League.

Combat and other news reports related to the situation in Ethiopia were dispatched by a reporter based in Djibouti and others in Eastern Africa. These formed the crux of the content of NTEN, which was published in London, and distributed internationally across Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Readers included politicians, diplomats, leaders, rights activists, editors, and reporters, and although considered hostile, it was also read by Italian fascists albeit for monitoring purposes (Woldearegay, 2022).

Whilst Ethiopia was the motivation for the creation of the newspaper, as the first victim of fascism, in the following year 1936 the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War between Nationalists and Republicans added to the threat of fascist expansion globally and formed another important area of focus for Pankhurst and her newspaper. She considered Spain the second victim of fascism and used the newspaper to highlight the tragedy, atrocities, and plight of Spain in editorials, news, and Op-eds. While certainly the Spanish crisis was considered a more consequential problem for geopolitical imperatives (Shilliam, 2016) as a “race … to save not only Spain, but eventually Europe from barbarism” (Kaye, 1985: 3–4), and while the newspaper started to pay growing importance to the European crisis, Ethiopia continued to receive the biggest attention and coverage by NTEN. The masthead of NTEN had defining mission markers. The newspaper branded itself as “THE NATIONAL ANTIFASCIST WEEKLY”; “THE PAPER FOR LIBERTY, JUSTICE, AND DEMOCRACY”, THE “PAPER FOR ALL INTERESTED IN INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE”, AND “THE VOICE OF VICTIM NATIONS AND DEFENSELESS MINORITIES”.

Pankhurst’s antifascist and anticolonial international activism stood in sharp contrast to mainstream reportage on the plight of Ethiopia as both inadequate and fleeting, failing to defend subaltern interests and viewpoints as well as the work of pro-fascist elements in Britain itself (Baldoli, 2002). NTEN, which débuted on 5 May 1936, remained an organ of international activism defending not only Ethiopia but also other nations that had fallen victim to fascism, most of all Spain under General Francisco Franco. It represented leftist interwar British journalism, with eyes set on the home front but more importantly on conditions in countries struggling against fascism and colonialism (Pankhurst, 2003).

In diverse genres including news reports, opinion pieces, political cartoons, and photography, the newspaper reported on the Ethiopian war and international protests against fascist Italy. It offered a window on European and international politics, the League of Nations, the rise of fascism, and the threat it posed to the international order. It chronicled the controversies, the abandonment, and the general dynamics of the war and the need to mobilize against the dangers of fascism, Nazism, as well as Japanese militarism and expansionism with China as a principal victim (Pankhurst, 1992a). A key motivation for the antifascist journalism that Sylvia Pankhurst introduced as a global project in defense of the subaltern was principally the indifference to Ethiopia’s plight by the big powers and the open support to Italy by other unscrupulous members of the League of Nations, leaving Ethiopia to its resources.

The paper was intent on sustaining patriotic morale, and helping the world especially the European public understand the trajectory of the resistance against fascist rule and the plight of Ethiopia in the face of the significantly asymmetrical character of the war between an ill-equipped African army and a modern European military-technological force that was involved in the extermination of an African victim population.

Scholarship on newspapers, World War II, and society in interwar Europe would be incomplete without an examination of the role and importance of NTEN. It is also central to a nuanced understanding of women and journalism during the Great War. In large measure, it resonated with the agenda of black American and Caribbean activists and journalists (Robinson, 1985).

New Times and Ethiopia News’ international press digest on the Ethiopian war was also extensive and helped to put in a wider context Ethiopia’s resistance both in the war against occupation and the diplomatic odyssey in Europe. The press digest is often referred to coverage of Ethiopia by the Black press in the US, highlighting in particular the irate reaction of the African American population (Wemlinger, 2015).

In the then world order, gender had important ramifications. There was considerable resistance against the entry of women into war journalism, but eventually the war was an opportunity for women to join the war as news correspondents and journalists across Europe (Salwen, 2001). Likewise, Sylvia Pankhurst found the rise of fascism to be an opportunity to rally behind helpless nations through a combination of activism and journalism - using the New Times and Ethiopia News as a discursive outlet (Pankhurst, 2003). Women’s issues found spaces as topics impacted by the rise of fascism and Nazism, although they hardly had a mainstream position. NTEN took upon itself to inform the public in Britain and across Europe, the US, Africa, and the Caribbean and highlighting the tragedy of fascism and colonialism, often by focusing on the plight of women and the atrocities against them. Sylvia Pankhurst was joined by an international brigade of women activists committed to ending the human devastation brought on by fascism and Nazism. They organized, protested, and discoursed aggressively for the world to stop the tide of fascism and Nazism. From the letters to the editor section, it is clear that the paper was read by significant diplomatic and political actors and scholars including Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Emperor Haile Selassie, and many British members of parliament.

They made Ethiopia the focus of their international activism with Sylvia Pankhurst playing center stage as the pioneering editor of the antifascist New Times and Ethiopia News, that among others, exposed to the world Mussolini’s adventures in Ethiopia and the price paid by the country’s women as objects of exploitation and victims of a genocidal war. The impact of the paper on the international public opinion or policy may require dedicated inquiry, but in Italy itself where it was distributed, NTEN was able to infuriate Italian fascists including Mussolini himself as one of its readers (“New Times and Ethiopia News Attacked”, NTEN, 14 January 1939, 3). In calling for more assistance to expand the circulation of NTEN, Pankhurst called the press “more valuable than guns, for it stabilizes opinion and morale” (“For Ethiopia and Justice: A Call to Friends the World over” (NTEN, 15 June, 194. p. 2). Furthermore, the Ethiopian ambassador in London hailed the role of the newspaper at a London rally: “Her [Ethiopia’s] cause would have been relegated to oblivion but for the brave effort and valuable paper the NTEN” (“Ethiopia the Valiant, NTEN”, 20 April 1940, p. 3).

Not surprisingly, on account of its biting antifascist discourse, the newspaper and its editor were subject to defamatory attacks by Mussolini’s irate newspapers more specifically Mussolini’s Arione Coloniale as well as Popolo d’Italia, which attacked the NTEN editor as “the notorious … Sylvia Pankhurst, the old, prurient, spinster” (“New Times and Ethiopia News attacked”, NTEN, 14 January 1939, 3). Gender was indeed an issue in Pankhurst’s journalism against fascism for which there is a backdrop.

In her early protest against fascism, she founded and served as honorary secretary of the Women’s International Matteotti Committee and rallied antifascists around the world to stand up against the global threat represented by Italian fascism. She also served on the World Committee of Women against War and Fascism established in 1934 as a subcommittee of the World Assembly of Women (Liddington, 1991). The Women’s World Committee was in support of the International Committee for the Defense of the Ethiopian People which met shortly before the Italian onslaught against Ethiopia in 1935. New Times and Ethiopia News benefited from Pankhurst’s earlier experience in feminist journalism as a founding editor of the Woman’s Dreadnought, a broadsheet that defended the rights of working women in Britain from 1914 to 1924 (Pankhurst, 1999). It addressed the concerns of women by women in a medium suitable to the literacy levels of the target readership, which seems to have helped Pankhurst realize the potential and power of grassroot newspapers, which further helped the establishment of the alternative press product on an international scale which she called New Times and Ethiopia News.

A few previous studies have explored limited historiographical dimensions of NTEN in the context of the period of occupation, but no study has explored the gendered aspects of alternative news outlet. It is the purpose of this study to fill the gap in the history of the press as it relates to the place of Ethiopian women and their agential exploits as well as their plight in the face of a colonial power that was inherently misogynistic (Srivastava, 2021).

Motivated by Sylvia Pankhurst’s background as a socialist feminist, this study engages with the role of the newspaper during the period of antifascist resistance from a feminist vantage point. It explores women’s agency and engagement with the war as well as their experience of victimhood in the period of fascist occupation. The study is motivated by existing gaps in this direction in the historiography of journalism of the period as represented by NTEN as resistance press-which has for the most part looked at the general history of war although the period witnessed women’s multifold participation that defied rigid gender binaries and hierarchies as they relate to the traditional institutions of the military and diplomacy.

The study draws inspiration from the recommendation that the Italian period of Ethiopian history “still awaits a lot more, and more critical, research” (TRIULZI, 1999, pp. 517–18). In particular, the gender dimension of Italian fascism and its implications for Ethiopian women as racialised subjects suggests that more female historiography is in place, not just in the exploration of victim status but also in the agency that local and international resistances enabled.

All the same, the research void pertaining to how the women’s role was transcribed by the newspaper or how women were represented as participants in the struggle against fascism has not been filled. As a subject that merits attention, the enquiry into women’s varied roles addresses both Ethiopian and European women, who in their own special ways, contributed to the fight against fascism and colonial occupation of Ethiopia. Filing the important lacunae serves an important purpose as an exercise in feminist historiography set to interrogate as “ … an ethically and intellectually responsible gesture….in order to address silences, challenge absences, and assert women’s contributions to public life” (Glenn, 2000, p. 387).

The study is anchored within the framework of fascism studies, especially in the resistance to the movement and ideology by relating it to gender. Thus, it extends the scholarship of European women’s struggles and the British women’s network against fascism which considered Ethiopia an important part of their diplomatic and discursive contestation. Their “hands off Ethiopia” campaign as championed by Pankhurst herself had gender underpinnings because women were targeted by colonial forces and bore the brunt of atrocities as defenseless victims and as war refugees pouring into neighboring countries. Besides being gendered, the Ethiopian women’s history has a media dimension as the newspaper project by Sylvia Pankhurst considered women in a variety of important roles. In this paper, we consider women in antifascist warfare as well as their role in the diplomatic struggle to mobilize the international community against the illegal occupation of the country. Ethiopian women also had significant contributions as combatants and in celebrated cases as commanders and generals that made headlines in New Times and Ethiopia News. Several scholars have addressed different dimensions of New Times and Ethiopia News (Shilliam, 2016; Woldearegay, 2022; Woldemariam, 2010; Pankhurst 1992), yet a full treatment of the issues and themes of the newspaper from a gender perspective remains an important gap that needs to be filed by media historians.

2. Theoretical framework

The theoretical ecology of alternative media underpins the emancipatory role of alternative communication structures across varying social, political, and cultural contexts. While there may be conceptual divergences, alternative media theories as extensions of critical media conceptualizations help to deconstruct power in all its forms across historical periods (Fuchs, 2010; Glynn, 2020; Laughey, 2007; Merrin, 2014). Alternative media may be conceived as technologies and attendant formats whose most defining function is to provide alternative opportunities to voices suppressed by mainstream media, corporate interests, or governments. They serve important agenda-setting roles by bringing to the forefront interests and topics of groups marginalized, excluded, or considered illegitimate nationally or internationally (Fuchs, 2010; Jeppesen, 2016). Local interests may be promoted by some varieties of social media, and some other alternative media have more ambitious international projects for self-definition, self-expression, and self-determination of peoples such as social movements in colonies fighting to bring an end to colonialism, fascism, or imperialism.

The anticolonial press may be situated in the context of anti-colonial discursive framework (Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001). This discursive space is important in the decolonization drive to achieve full freedom and independence through information operations and moral crusades (Pankhurst, 1999). An alternative anti-colonial press serves to challenge colonial domination discursively until and up to the point of liberation from the colonial project that is bent on inferiorization of the subjugated in all forms (Fuchs, 2010). It aims at the recovery of dignity and freedom taken away and restoration of identity.

As such, it challenges colonial discourse and rejects its attempts at luring the local populace to quietly surrender to value and welcome colonial domination by staging a counteracting discursive resistance against all forms of colonial order. It reclaims history, pride, civilization, ethnicity, identity, and independence. Fanon’s writings on anti-colonialism (Arnall, 2020; Bird-Pollan, 2014) have a special intellectual appeal in the attempt to understand critical journalism. In the historical context of Ethiopia, Mussolini had clear antipathy to journalism of any kind even to servile press, and there were many European titles he banned as threats to his amoral colonial project (Woldearegay, 2022). As a further move, he also expelled European journalists from Ethiopia who would be witnesses in the feral rule he had put in place (British Subjects Expelled from Ethiopia”, NTEN, 28 November 1936, p. 2).

In addition to the anticolonial discursive framework, feminist media theory is relevant in this paper as a political conceptual lens explaining the context and text of women in journalistic circles as well as the media production and distribution process relevant to women in the context of fascism and its misogynistic dimensions. Feminist media theory is applicable to local ecology, but it also offers an international perspective with an analytical angle for international media projects (Steiner, 2014). As a subject of pertinent epistemological exploration, gender is more than the biological difference between women and men. The definitional literature treats the construct as a factor that interfaces with interlocking dimensions of society such as race, nationalism, and relational asymmetry in power and politics in reference often to experiences of women (Downing, 2000). Feminist media theory may also address the journalist’s multiple identities, including organizational, professional, racial, and gender - which may all have bearing on the work of resistance journalism that is double-edged addressing concurrently both racial and gender oppression. Additionally, the theory of the partisan would help elucidate the place and relevance of a European internationalist exemplified by Sylvia Pankhurst engaged in an African fight against a European fascist system embedded in the context of an intense political commitment and irregularity, affective and cognitive empathy and an altruistic sense of political justice that characterize the partisan (Carl et al., 2007). The paper also takes intersectionality as an important analytical framework to understand the intersecting layers of oppression and violence women face because of their color and their gender. Their struggle is therefore for a world simultaneously free from the interlocking systems of racial and gender oppression and exploitation under colonialism and fascism (Dhamoon, 2015).

3. Method

This study combines historical research methods and thematic analysis which involves the use of primary (NTEN) and secondary sources (scholarly literature) to understand the construction of the place of women in the historical period understudy. The study of history “attempts to systematically recapture the complex nuances, the people, meanings, events, and even ideas of the past …” (Berg & Lune, 2012, p. 305), and the thematic and historical analysis in the main attempts to highlight the role and place of women in prewar Ethiopian and relevant international history.

Thematic analysis is considered particularly suitable for the study of press coverage as a broad, flexible, and varied method of data analysis (Javadi & Zarea, 2016), although it has also been conceived as a tool (Boyatzis, 1998). The study employs thematic analysis as a flexible—theory relevant method common in newspaper research. The method helps in the identification, analysis, and reporting of the “bigger picture” or thematic elements that run through the data set in newspaper editions. In the journalism context, the method has a “giving voice” (Fine, 1992) function that capitalizes on relevant textual elements that, methodically put together, help to give visibility to the agenda of the research (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

This study follows a constructivist paradigm of theme development based on an alternative press product that covered the prewar years that saw the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy under fascism. In particular, inductive thematic analysis is employed that starts with open coding of data and moves on conceptually to develop clusters or themes that pertain to the research focus, the historiographical context, and the theoretical orientation for NTEN as emancipatory press. The method is based on Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis strategy with six sequential steps: (1) becoming familiar with the data, (2) generating codes, (3) developing themes, (4) rereading themes, (5) defining and identifying themes, and (6) finding exemplars (from newspaper extracts) and write-up. The crucial body of evidence is the newspaper’s various genres but most importantly the news that has the requisite historical data regarding the newspapers’ role and importance in representing women’s participation in and the effect of the war on Ethiopian women.

4. Sampling

In qualitative methods such as thematic analysis, sampling tends to be purposive as the focus is not on sheer numbers but on selection of theme-relevant events. Thus, this study selects texts that have the most empirical and theoretical relevance to the explanatory and expository needs of the particular study (Mason, 1996). Newspaper texts as data items in this study are purposeively but exhaustively selected to produce a full analytical portrayal of the condition and role of women during the period of antiracist resistance across the country and internationally.

The sample of stories in the study covered the period of the resistance from 1936 to 1941 and the issues of New Times and Ethiopia News over the period of resistance, extracts being selected for informational relevance and power. As in much thematic exploration, “representational generalisation” was an important concern to sketch a representative picture of the history of Ethiopian women in the period of fascist occupation as portrayed by NTEN as alternative press but not on the basis of statistical logic. The portrayal was enabled by a critical case sampling strategy (Patton, 2014) used to do justice to significant content that highlighted key developments of special importance in the interwar period as they are related to women and their agency (Suri, 2011). A total of 27 pieces were purposely selected starting from the maiden edition of 5 May 1936 that addressed directly women in the antifascist struggle or the topic of Italian invasion and its ramifications for women until 1 February 1941 when the emperor entered Addis Ababa and Italians prepared to go after the defeat of fascist army. It should be clear, however, that numerical sampling guidelines were neither available nor relevant. Sample adequacy was taken as contextual to the particular study and in ways suitable to the particular paradigm and its assumptions of ontology and epistemology. Informational relevance to the objectives of the study (historically interrogating women’s multi-role experiences and agency) was more important than informational statistics. While news stories formed the main data source in the sample, editorials that addressed women’s victimization, voice and agency were also included.

5. Dominant themes across NTEN issues

A thematic examination of the multiyear data of NTEN of news stories and opinion pieces would show that the following were the most important women-relevant discourses of the period of antifascist resistance. They relate to Ethiopian women’s agential power as well as their victimization in the period of invasion and occupation by Mussolini. The victimization of Ethiopian women including the incidence and effects of assault is ascribed doubly to their gendered and racialised vulnerability. Their dehumanization, and traumatization, as a result of the colonial encounter was particularly prevalent in the early phases of the fascist occupation.

6. Fascist atrocities against women and girls

A common theme in much of the newspaper is fascist depravity against Ethiopian subjects which has a marked gender dimension (Sbacchi, 2005). Women are presented as prime targets in the colonial subjugation project over a five-year period (“An Ethiopian Woman Tells of the Italian Occupation”, NTEN, 21 November 1935, p. 1). The effect of the fascist invasion is most emotively conveyed in connection with the plight of Ethiopian women for whom war would be disproportionately tragic. While in Italy itself fascism represented retrogression because of its repressive character in relation to women’s earlier civil rights and other gains, fascism for Ethiopian women as colonial subjects meant even more-adding agony and indignity to their destitution. In fact, it may be said that the fascist war on Ethiopia was a multifarious war on its women (Asante, 1974).

As war often leads to dislocation, New Times and Ethiopia News carries a headline that depicts the fate of women in particularly distressing terms. As they try to flee following Italian military offensive, “women fall behind and are eaten by lions” (Many Ethiopian Refugees Eaten by Lions” and “Women and children are left behind and killed” (NTEN, 15 January 1938, p. 1). The newspaper often gave estimates of the number of victims. Under “Great Fighting in Ethiopia”, (NTEN, 25 June 1938, p. 1), the paper reports about “hundreds of innocent women burnt”. The war certainly had special ramifications for women as war by a foreign invader meant considerable threat to their physical and psychological integrity and dignity which places a disproportionate effect of war on them. But there is also a broader agenda in that invaders would “attack women not as women but instrumentally as proxy for state and nation” (Laukka, 2018, p. 17). This agenda seems especially to be the case in the conflicts and wars in which complete defeat of the enemy is the ultimate goal in desperate situations (“Grave News from Ethiopia”, NTEN, 21 November 1936, p. 4).

In its 21 November 1936 issue, NTNE reports gendered violence against the women of the victim nation, which was beginning to be used as an instrument of conquest (“Ethiopians Capture Makele, NTEN, 8 August 1937, 1). Throughout the period of resistance, the Italians used rape as an instrument of war. In one instance, NTEN mentions the case of the molestation of the wife of a patriot in Tigray by an Italian commander which results in the vengeful capture of Mekele, the provincial capital, by Ethiopian patriots and the extermination of an Italian army unit (“No woman safe”, NTEN, 21 November 1936, 2). Contrary to expectations, several askaris (East African Italian mercenaries) were incensed by the rape and helped the Ethiopians in the attack against the Italian troops in the area.

The paper reports that “….Italians have indulged in abusing young girls, married women, and even nuns in covenants” and … . … Ten or twelve Italian soldiers would get hold of any Ethiopian woman and abuse her in turn in such a way that many maidens and young girls have died as a result” (“Tragic conditions in Ethiopia”, NTEN, 14 November 1936, 2). The same report stated that “17000 [Ethiopian women and girls] are pregnant and Italian soldiers are forcing every woman they come across no matter who is (“Tragic conditions in Ethiopia”, NTEN, 14 November 1936, 2).

The affliction suffered by Ethiopian women included the pain of royal women who were so desperate they became nuns as reported in a 22 January 1938 issue of NTEN (Negus family in poverty selling Trinkets in Jerusalem … .”, NTEN, 22 January 1938, 2.) (But most of all, it was ordinary women and children that paid the heaviest price. “Women and children dismembered and carbonized by fascist bombing”, NTEN, 20 July 1938, 2). Studies on international law of war, and war crimes in Ethiopia have documented Italy’s massacres, use of mustard gas, indiscriminate bombing of civilian households, and executions of prisoners of war whose veracity was recognized by the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) that probed claims of war crimes committed by Axis powers in World War II (De Lorenzi, 2018; Pankhurst, 1999).

The NTEN reports expose the nature of fascism as manifested in the behavior of fascist armies that have no respect for the rules of war that prohibit targeting civilians. With more focus on women, the newspaper unpacks the sexual crimes associated with fascist armies via gang rapes that lead to the possible pregnancies of even married women and far worse to the fatal consequences of rape crimes. The reference to numbers of Italian soldiers (10, 12) raping a single Ethiopian woman unpacks the horrors and deadly force that fascist troops employ in the asymmetrical war between an advanced European power and a backward African nation. The paper suggests that Italian fascist troops engage in crimes of violence against women but are not held to account. In effect, the paper alludes that the female became a war field and rape as a weapon of fascist wars. The world body failed Ethiopia and allowed the mass atrocities that raged for years.

Most poignantly, the butchery in the infamous year of 1937 in whose coverage NTEN had special focus was to unravel the deaths of thousands of women in the fascist massacre that claimed over 30,000 lives. The newspaper offers details of the Addis Ababa massacre in which up to 30,000 Ethiopians are believed to have been killed are presented in a series of editions and the paper serves as a source to many books on the massacre (I. Campbell, 2017). The paper reports in more graphic ways that women were “dismembered and carbonized by fascist bombing” (“Ethiopia under Mussolini’s Rule, NTEN, 14 December 1940, p. 1). A Hungarian physician resident in the city of Addis Ababa at the time observed that “the corpses of women and children over which vultures hovered were lying in all directions (“Ethiopia under Mussolini’s rule”, NTEN, 14 December 1940, p. 1). He describes the level of atrocity he witnessed:

A medical man, having exercised his profession, dealing with the worst kinds of disease, and having gone through the world war, with frontline ambulances, should have good nerves: and I have good ones. Yet the things I saw in Abyssinia and especially on the night of the were too much even for my medically trained and war-tired nerves.” (“Ethiopia under Mussolini’s rule”, NTEN, 14 December 1940, p. 1).

Elsewhere, even expectant women were not spared as NTEN reports that “pregnant women were forced to cut grass with their teeth and beaten” (“From the Lips of Refugees”, NTEN, 12 August 1939, 1). Throughout the period of resistance, women as the most defenseless victims, symbolized agony inflicted by fascism in their own country, whose fate the world had forgotten, save the few moral crusaders, in Europe and the United States (Le Houérou, 2015). Under the headline “Maltreatment of Women” (NTEN, 21 November 1936, p. 1), the newspaper exposes fascist atrocities against Ethiopian women.

NTEN offered early instances of the alternative press and its discursive agenda of defending the subaltern. Fascist attacks as covered by NTEN targeted even the most neutral institutions of the day (“The Bombing of Red Cross Missions”, NTEN, 13 June 1936, p. 1). Whilst the Red Cross was normatively free to provide aid under conflict and other humanitarian contexts, the humanitarian organization was a target itself as it was considered an unwelcome eyewitness to the destruction of medical facilities by Italian armies, its own vehicles, as well as the use of indiscriminate mustard gas by the Italians (Baudendistel, 2006). Certainly, an important role of the press of the subaltern is to “disrupt the silence”, to “counter the lies”, and to “provide the truth” (Downing, 2000). As a read-through of multiple editions of NTEN would show, following the initial global media spotlight on the fascist incursion that subsequently ebbed, NTEN was the steadfast global voice of the subaltern at the center of the gathering, production, and distribution of news and editorial discourse unpacking and exposing fascist misogyny and objectification of Ethiopian women and girls.

7. Women on the diplomatic front

Diplomacy was an area of life where women were largely “invisible and voiceless” (Spivak, 1988). However, women of the Ethiopian aristocracy were involved in diplomatic resistance, reflecting in part the gender and class interfaces of the time. These women of elite circles were aided by a global and mainly European network of antifascist women, in addition to Sylvia Pankhurst herself as the organizer who took it up on themselves to fight fascism and to stand in unison in the defense of Ethiopia and other victim nations. Global women on several networks across Europe and the Caribbean mobilized counter-discourse and consolidated the larger antifascist struggle. They used NTEN as a networking platform to organize diverse forms of resistance to stem the tide of fascism. Their internationalism represented an exemplification of models of partisan theoretically articulated in reference to Pankhurst’ diplomatic and anticolonial activisms centering on Ethiopia as a victim of fascism (Srivastava, 2021).

In partnership with Pankhurst and other friends of Ethiopia, notable Ethiopian royal women were engaged in a diplomatic offensive supporting the international public relations of the Emperor and his international team of supporters and antifascist activists. Princess Menen, the wife of the Emperor, called for an international action to intervene and stop the barbarity against Ethiopia and its people. As New Times and Ethiopia News reported, on 13 September 1935 the princess told the world: “… There is still time for those who desire justice to take action to end the most unjust of wars… I, therefore, appeal to France the emblem of equality, fraternity and liberty; to Great Britain, defender of justice; for all races and to the whole world to abandon all further delay in saving my country” (“Empress of Ethiopia to Broadcast Peace Plea,” New York Times, 10 September 1935: 12).

Her message was also conveyed by the New York Times. In the realm of internationally protesting fascist preparations for an attack on Ethiopia, Prince Menen, the wife of Emperor Haile Selassie, had a call for the world to prevent an attack against Ethiopia. She was insistent that fascism was a false promise to bring civilization to Ethiopia, and she was optimistic that her message would lead to international action for peace, which all women invariably would support because war would have grave consequences for all involved, especially families (“In Ethiopia travail and calamity, in Europe …Betrayal and now oblivion”, NTEN, 8 August 1936, 2). Her appeal that “our glorious and independent homeland, which we have defended with so much innocent blood, may be preserved to us, and to our children’s children”, was widely received (“Princess Tsehay to the Women of Europe”, NTEN, 13 June 1936, 4).

As the trailblazing woman in Ethiopian diplomacy, the Empress had a call to women in particular, “Women of the world unite. Demand with one voice that we may be spared the honour of useless bloodshed” (“Princess Tsehay to the Women of Europe”, NTEN, 13 June 1936, 4). Princess Tsehay, her daughter, also appealed to the world for help in stopping Mussolini’s atrocities in her country, further consolidating the diplomatic work of her mother and father. She described the suffering of Ethiopian women that unfolded under fascist rule underlying its unprecedented outrageousness. “I sincerely hope that the wives and mothers of other nations will never have to endure the torture of the Ethiopian women, who have been called up to nurse the wounded and horribly burned bodies of the soldiers who dared the gas attacks of the enemy … … ”(To the Women of Europe”, NTEN, 13 June 1936, 4).

In its issue of 13 June 1936, New Times and Ethiopian News carried her message to the Women’s Advisory Council of the League of Nations, asking for pressure on Italy against its use of gas.

For 7 days without break, the enemy has been bombing armies and people of my country, including women and children with terrible gases. Our soldiers are brave men and know that they must take consequences of war. Against this cruel gas we have no protection, no gas masks—nothing. This suffering and torture is beyond description, hundreds of countrymen screaming and moaning with pain. Many of them are unrecognizable since the skin has been burned off their faces (New Times and Ethiopian News, 13 June 1936, 4).

While the mainstream European press appeared to normalize and naturalize the tide of fascism, NTEN served as a diplomatic platform offering discursive spaces for women to fight “interlocking systems of oppression” that included oppression as colonial subjects and as members of the fair sex and transnationalising the anti-hegemonic public sphere by dissenting voices (Collins, 1990). Furthermorw, NTEN coverage of women’s participation in diplomacy represents early figurations of diplomacy in feminine terms although the practice was generally a male preoccupation.

8. Women in combat roles

The Italian invasion led to a formative period of changing gender roles in the military sphere for Ethiopian women. Although Ethiopia’s history has been in large measure one of wars, women’s participation had been, if at all, in the support function, until the interwar period, due in the main to cultural barriers. Until the Italian period, Ethiopian women’s place was much restricted. Now women were not only entering the male domain but also excelling. Apparently, driven by the demand for more troops and as a response to misogynist colonial invader, Ethiopian women not only enlisted as combatants but also rose to prominence as senior generals of the resistance army. The gender-military dimension of women’s successes was to be represented in inspirational ways by the editor of New Times and Ethiopia News-who applauded and exhilarated the combat roles of women as important inputs in the effort to defeat fascism.

As an important feminist run newspaper, NTEN would create communicative opportunity to challenge conventional representations and recast women in new roles that challenged traditional definitions ever since its first edition (Waldron, 2020). Counter news discourses would thus open up new possibilities for women on the front lines leading armies and winning battles, as stories of them in New Times and Ethiopia News occasionally demonstrated.

Whilst diplomacy offered limited avenues to Ethiopian women, warfare opened more spaces for agency. Precipitated by the shockwaves of the period of fascist occupation that included violence against women and humiliation against the traditional Ethiopian family, the Ethiopian woman’s place was no longer at home and women now enlisted in large numbers unfettered by class or tribal lines, in addition to their roles as caregivers and nurturers. While the emperor’s call to arms presented below was general, it was implicitly for men,

“The hour is grave. Arise everyone. Take up your arms and rush to the defense of your country. Rally to your chiefs. Obey them single heartedly. Repel the invader … God be with us. Forward for the Emperor and country.” Not everyone will be mobilized …… … and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without a wife will take any woman without a husband. Women with small babies need not go. Those blind, those who cannot walk or for any reason cannot carry a spear are exempted. Anyone found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged (“War Drums Sound in Ethiopia“, New York Times, 5 October 1935, 1).

Nonetheless, women did respond by showing up for combat, although the Ethiopian military was for the most part male. The resistance newspaper featured a number of female fighters who responded to the call and put up resistance in several parts of Ethiopia as military leaders and combatants, often accompanying their husbands. These women were often daughters or partners of the ruling class, and their work was an extension of their royal role. Many were in combat support roles. Many were raped (including some wives of patriotic leaders) by the Italians and had experienced colonial violence and humiliation which had a motivationally important role in their resolve to fight against their violators (Shillington, 2012). Women were in fact organized in their resistance struggle under the Ethiopian Women’s Voluntary Association, which oversaw the resistance activities of women fighters and synergistically operated in close cooperation with the mainstream resistance movement through the country. Their numbers are not exactly known, but many are named in the history paper. The historical record of Ethiopian patriotic women included such household names as “Kebedech Seyoum, Qelemework Tilahun, Shoa Reged Gadle, Laqetch Demissew, Qonjit Abinet, Likelesh Beyene and Abebech Cherkos”, who distinguished themselves in combat (“The Heroic Women of Ethiopia”, NTEN, 24 December 1938, p. 1).

NTEN amplified Ethiopian women’s extraordinary bravery in several headlines. The newspaper chronicles the valor of woman general Zewdie Asfaw who ‘overwhelms fascist—occupied Addis Ababa and another woman general Belayneh Lulseged in western Ethiopia in the province of Wellega whose feats result in significant casualties among Italian troops (“The Heroic Women of Ethiopia”, NTEN, 24 December 1938, 1). The woman general’s effective mobility and agility is chronicled as she is again seen in combat near Addis Ababa in the central region of Shoa with more troops under her command, helping to immobilize fascist troops and limiting their movement to the metropolis (“Woman General Again in the field”, NTEN, 1940, 2). Front page coverage was given to such women patriots who had engaged Italian invaders and beat back army units and “had shown much bravery in the war … ” as NTEN reports in its 31 October 1936 issue of the newspaper (“The Heroic Women of Ethiopia”, NTEN, 24 December 1938, 1).

Like the particular general to which NTEN referred, women are cited as heroic leaders and their epic deeds are recorded in several other headlines: “Ras Seyoum’s daughter avenges her husband” (NTEN, 13 August 1938, p. 1); “Ras Kassa’s Daughter Attacks Sekalie” (NTEN, 13 August 1938, p. 1). While the headlines of women-led and operated battles were few, they were nonetheless discursively powerful as they were about more than gendered valor. Beyond patriotism, often warrior women in leadership were motivated by the urge to settle scores with the killers of their loved ones. Women who lost husbands to fascist atrocities often avenged the deaths of their husbands (Adugna, 2001), but the combat role of women was far more than a personal act of vendetta but part of a national patriotic cause and a response to a call for arms.

Besides active military roles, combat service support was importantly provided by women in the resistance. Both combat arms and combat service support were ably accomplished by women in the resistance (Adugna, 2001). As reports chronicled, there were women in their thousands supplying water and food, as well as nursing the wounded (Adugna, 2001; Prouty, 1986). Women were also involved in clandestine intelligence operations as members of the underground anti-fascist movement. Their espionage was much needed in that war against a technologically superior foe. The asymmetry required of Ethiopia’s patriots the gathering of essential intelligence on enemy movement, numbers, plans, etc. The success in intelligence activities by Ethiopian women seemed to have helped turn around the initial pessimism and dejection owing to the use of mustard gas that had hurt the Ethiopian patriots and their combat capabilities. Women involved in intelligence were astute masqueraders. Lovesick Italians fell for the charms of tropical women on clandestine missions. Thus, with more defeats and a bleak outlook of a total capitulation, “Italian authorities are suspicious of women” (“Italian Authorities Suspicious of Women”, NTEN, 7 January 1939, 2.).

There is another reason to treasure the women’s role in the marked steadfast resolve and consistent patriotic integrity. Thus, women were hardly ever to be found crossing over to helping the fascist side despite attempts by the occupation force or to be lured to mercenary service. Their steadfast loyalty was an antithesis to the treachery of some Ethiopian feudal lords who switched sides and joined the fascist occupation forces in exchange for titles and financial and material inducements. It was also clear that among Ethiopian black mercenaries hired by Mussolini women were not to be found (Abebe, 2017). Despite being dependent and poor, Ethiopian women were able to reject offers and maintain patriotic integrity. Thus, they are generally absent in the literature on collaboration with the invading troops that ravaged the Ethiopian nation, assisted by mercenaries with unpatriotic motives (Getahun, 2019).

They had the steadfastness and indefatigability that the difficult years required in the face of the odds against the virtually forgotten African nation. Many paid sacrifices with their lives but many more lived through difficult years and were fortunate to see the defeat of fascism and the regaining of dignity. Whilst a few names are mentioned in NTEN, there were many more who had great roles that were inscribed in their final resting place. Sylvia Pankhurst writes that “the women of Ethiopia are having the greatest influence on their fighting men. These poor women have full cause, including womanhood’s deepest cause … Joan of Arc never showed braverer, nobler, or purer patriotism than do these heroic women of Ethiopia” (“The Heroic Women of Ethiopia”, NTN, 24 December 1938, p. 1).

The Abyssinia war was a period of women’s agency unraveling on several fronts; domestic and international, diplomacy and politics, warfare, and support. The course of the antifascist resistance saw women transforming their situations from victimhood to agency and opening a new chapter for women in the annals of African history of resistance - which has been rightly memorialized. In Addis Ababa’s Trinity Cathedral, where veterans of the Abyssinian war are buried (as is Sylvia Pankhurst herself), many women are laid to rest alongside their husbands, symbolizing the complementary sacrifices. In the typical epitaph, tribute is paid to the husband‘s role in the war of resistance but a short text also memorializes the wife’s participation in the war typically as a co-fighter. For women, the cultural framework still broadly operated even though women were engaged in new non-traditional roles that stretched their traditional chores.

9. Conclusion

The interwar period was a period of unprecedented journalism of moral and political protest in spite of the obviously considerable risks to the men and women involved in the various activities required in press production and dissemination. NTEN carried their inspirational stories, their work, and service to their country during its most difficult years of occupation and resistance against fascism. Their consciousness as women was raised, and they became important torchbearers.

Their anti-colonial and anti-fascist fight was assisted by Sylvia Pankhurst and her colleagues all over Europe, Africa, and the Americas and those contributing to New Times and Ethiopia News, dedicated to the struggle against fascism. An extension of “a persistent tradition of small radical publications” since the early nineteenth century, the paper represented international liberatory communication activism that sought a just world, a just public sphere and is an exercise in prefigurative politics (Leach, 2013). As indeed it was, it called itself “The Voice of Victim Nations and Defenceless Minorities”. But, it was also the voice of women. In one issue Punkhrust’s “A Suffragette Point of View: Women Must Fight Hitler “(NTEN, 1 July 1940, p. 1) is republished warning about the particular ramifications of fascism and Nazism for women.

From earlier days, Pankhurst sensed the danger presented by the rise of fascism and the need to fight it (“Our Policy”, NTEN, 9 May 1936, p. 3). Thus, NTEN was an ardent opponent of fascism when many papers were ambiguous about their position. It was prefugaratively joined later by more movements and nations as the true colours of fascism were unmasked and those who badged taking action were now able to realize they were themselves targets (Emperor Haile Selassie ‘s speech was prophetic “Us today You Tomorrow” at the League of Nations in Geneva, foretelling the universal dangers of fascism and the consequences of opportunistic myopia and inaction). The editor wrote at the time that “NTEN is read and quoted all over Africa, all over Europe, and copies reach Rome itself,” fostering subaltern counterpublics for political justice (“Mussolini Stung”, NTEN, 13 February 1937, p. 2).

In representing Ethiopia’s war against fascist occupation, NTEN’s news journalism had special relevance, presenting a lineup of complex actors and their actions characterized by dichotomies of the hero and the villain, the victim and the perpetrator, and the drama of conflict that sustains the reader. It served important political objectives by exposing fascism and its misogynistic colors.

From the angle of the press as an institution, Sylvia Pankhurst and her paper represented an extension of the multifarious resistance by the thousands of women and girls in defending the honor and dignity of a nation abandoned by the world powers who saw little use in defending the lofty principles of the world body they helped establish. The amnesia surrounding women’s roles in the antifascist struggles is a continuing concern among historians of the press and this piece represents an attempt to unmute the important legacy of their contributions and to prevent any future historiographical erasure.

10. Limitations

The study may be a subjective projection of the researcher’s particular perspective on the important issues of the day as in other historical studies where interpretation and inference may be impacted by the researcher’s particular background and choice of analytical strategies. As in other studies of remote periods of human history, another challenge in archival media research and faced in this particular study is that triangulation is difficult as oral informants from the period, i.e. those not immediately present such as editors and reporters were not available. Historical sources of media studies are fragmentary in character rather than complete records of the events of the day. The study should be understood in light of these limiting circumstances.

Correction

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanuel Gebru Woldearegay

Amanuel Gebru Woldearegay (PhD, MA, MA) is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Addis Ababa/University in Ethiopia. Dr Woldearegay is interested in media history, medical communication, and public relations, among others.

Dr Mekonnen is interested in communication history, organizational communication, marketing communication, media management and media policy. Currently, he is coordinator of the School’s Graduate Programs.