Women’s print and periodical culture in the Anglophone Caribbean

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Kirsten Brohm, PhD fellow in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University and a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library

The early to mid-20th century saw a remarkable expansion of print and periodical culture across the Anglophone Caribbean. At a time marked by social and political change, magazines and periodicals became important spaces for debating cultural identity, colonial governance, and the future of the region. Alongside their role in political – often anti-colonial – discussion, these publications also helped to establish a new literary infrastructure, creating opportunities for Caribbean writers to publish creative work and criticism.

This development was particularly significant given the limited number of local publishing houses in the region in the early decades of the 20th century. Magazines, newspapers, and periodicals offered a more accessible and affordable route into print, opening up new possibilities for emerging writers and reshaping the literary landscape of the region.

The rich holdings of the British Library’s Americas and Oceania collections have been central to my research within this field. The collections include a wide range of women’s magazines and periodicals published between the 1920s and 1970s, many of which circulated across both the Anglophone Caribbean and the UK. Exploring these materials makes it possible to gradually recover a largely overlooked archive of writings by Anglo-Caribbean women and to examine how print and periodical culture contributed to shaping feminist political discourse in the former British Caribbean colonies in the decades prior to independence.

My research at the British Library is complemented by archival research at key institutions in the Caribbean, including the National Library of Jamaica. Together, these collections offer new perspectives on the role literature played in feminist activism across the region during the early and mid-20th century. By focusing on magazines and periodicals edited by Anglo-Caribbean women on both sides of the Atlantic, I am also interested in tracing the transatlantic networks through which feminist ideas circulated and evolved. The breadth of the British Library’s collections – spanning several decades – makes it possible to follow these developments over time, revealing both continuities and shifts in Anglo-Caribbean women’s print and periodical culture.