International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Essel, O. Q., & Opoku-Mensah, I. (2017). Dress fashion in feminist and child rights campaigns in Ghanaian public sculptures of the 1990s. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 18(32). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v18n32/.

This article examines how dress fashion in outdoor sculptures of the 1990s in the Accra cityscape accentuated feminist activism, sensitised child right campaigns, and encouraged girl-child education in support of governmental efforts and activism of civil society organisations in Ghana. It gives attention to how dress fashion of the time was used in the social construction of feminist identities and the promotion of child rights through outdoor public cement sculptures. The study takes a multidisciplinary dimension of looking into the synergy of using public sculpture for multiple attention-seeking constructs: dress fashion, feminism, child right and education. Simple narrative analysis was used in the presentation of data gathered through observation and photographic documentation of selected public sculptures of the 1990s in the Accra Metropolis. The study revealed that ‘kaba’ fashion and precolonial feminine wraparound dress styles, contributed to the creation of feminist identities and intensified feminist activism in Ghana in the 1990s.