Paper short abstract:

This paper references digital archives and women's memory as historical knowledge sources to reflect on the everyday lives of Liberian women in the 80s. Using the television program "Today’s Woman," I question the framings of womanhood and how these reflect the Liberian society of the time.

Paper long abstract:

The digital archives of the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS) have become crucial to the understanding and articulation of aspects of Liberia's history that have been ignored by traditional historians and historiography. Existing scholarship on the history of Liberia is mostly nationalistic and masculinized. Much of the everyday life of Liberian women remains unknown outside discourses on the civil wars that ravaged the country. What’s more, African history and historiography still grapple with the sidelining of women’s history, thus rendering them passive to the development of many African countries. With current debates on digital archives and memory as other(ed) ways of knowing, this paper calls up these unconventional sources of popular and historical knowledge to reflect on the everyday lives of Liberian women. Focusing on the television program Today’s Woman, hosted by Jestina Gray in the 1980s, I question the definitions and framings of “today’s woman” in the 1980s, analyzing the contents and topics discussed in the program to reflect the Liberian society of the time. I also draw parallels from memories and experiences shared during key informant interviews with select women to support or query the ideals and framing of issues as representative of what women of the 80s would, could, or should look like. These archives, covering the period from 1981 to 1990, constitute a site for multiple mediations crucial to the adoption of rarely considered approaches to, and understandings of the Liberian society.