Women in the colonial spaces

The political speech acts of the Sierra Leonean male politicians were clear expressions a patriarchal tendency to control community emotions that might promote constructs about “self” and “power.” For the women in the colonial spaces of Sierra Leone, political participation offered a platform from which to subvert the influences of colonialism and patriarchy and pursue freedom for country and self alike. In a bid to stop Constance and Wallace-Johnson, the colonial government invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1939. This Act, which outlawed subversion in England and the British colonies, was one of the security measures adopted following the outbreak of the Second World War. The entrenched gender-based discrimination experienced by women in the political space of Sierra Leone was a constitutional crisis that patriarchal attitudes had shifted from the platform of objective reasoning of positive law and natural justice to the intersubjective space of cultural relativism.