Women reporters during the first decades of the twentieth century seemingly wrote more at ease in their columns, as if they could show off their stylistic talents when writing outside the genre conventions of reporting the news. In this study I focus on some aspects of this journalistic genre and I want to explore the spaces open for women on the pages in the daily press and its capacity to function as an arena for feminist criticism on contemporary topics. Women reporters have often been described as having a poisonous quill, as being funny and not a little bitchy - they often used a sarcastic language when deconstructing contemporary phenomena. This study also aims at understanding how irony might have been used as a stylistic cover creating a certain space in the columns for gender struggle amongst the news.
The Sunday columns by Elin Brandell from around 1910 told a weekly story from a fictitious women's club where political questions could be found munched upon by these women friends in between sandwiches and love stories. Her later column, published under the name of "Non-political wife", gave her many reasons to make fun of MPs and their political tap dancing and language. She highlighted the weaknesses of the political discourse of those days by trivialising it, treating it as witty conversation - with a feminist twist. Elin Brandell is one of around ten women reporters whose texts will be studied as examples on how to use a journalistic space through the columns as more or less disguised agitation.