This paper on women’s columns published in Ghanaian and Nigerian newspapers from the 1940s to the 1950s illustrates ways of reading publics’ interaction which shaped emerging postcolonial identities. It begins in the 1940s when most daily newspapers regularly included columns dedicated to female readers. Each major Nigerian newspaper printed columns such as “Milady’s Bower” (West African Pilot), “Women’s Realm” (Southern Nigeria Defender) and “Eve’s Casket” (Daily Service). However, while the columnists used pen names, male and female readers contributed letters to the columns, revealing their identity and instigating debates on prostitution, acceptable public appearance and marriage advice to men and women alike. First, these sites in the newspapers challenge dichotomies between masculinity and femininity and thus enable a study of the relationship between them. Second, disguising authorship became a strategy to exert agency and create a new genre. Third, since photographs became an essential feature of many women’s columns in the 1950s, processes of self-fashioning gradually replaced the concealing of identities, further contributing to the study of print cultures. As such, this paper offers a reading of the emerging postcolonial public sphere through the genre of women’s columns.