Observer’s All Woman conceptualiser impressed with magazine’s exciting growth

Twenty years after, Gina Morley, conceptualiser of the All Woman magazine which is now a staple of the Monday Observer, says she is impressed with the publication’s growth and development.

“All Woman has evolved and changed with the times, it is exciting, more interactive and more diverse. I’m amazed and pleased that it has proven its relevance in such a substantial way,” Nassau, Bahamas-based Morley gushed on a visit to the Jamaica Observer last week.

Morley dropped in on the newspaper while in Jamaica to see her three children – Mia, Makeda (both Jamaican) and Duval Patrick (Bahamian) – settle in at their boarding schools in Mandeville and St Elizabeth.

She briefly met the current All Woman magazine editor Petulia Clarke and congratulated her warmly on the “steady hand and creative thinking” with which she has guided the publication for the past nine years.

Clarke told Morley: “I am really happy to meet the woman behind it all. All Woman was and remains a great idea.”

Morley, an attorney-at-law and journalist, also conceptualised the forerunner to the All Woman – Today’s Woman – for the now defunct Jamaica Herald newspaper, which she left to join the Observer as legal officer in 1995.

All Woman was launched on April 15, 1996, three years after the founding of the Jamaica Observer in March 1993. The idea behind the magazine, Morley said, was to present women in a wholistic light and to highlight the every day issues in which women were interested. It’s tagline then was “For the woman who wants it all”.

“It was my passion. I wanted to see women at the forefront – front and centre,” she said, adding that she was pleased that some of the original features were retained in the current magazine, including health, feedback, women’s sexuality; legal column, wedding features now called Vows and the cover story of a woman who is an achiever.

A great lover of Jamaica, Morley was born on Exuma Island in The Bahamas and educated at the International School of London, England and the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in Barbados.

She noted that she was made an honorary member of the Cave Hill-based Jamaican Students Association then led by Paula Llewellyn, now Jamaica’s DPP.

Morley came to Jamaica in 1988 to attend the Norman Manley Law School from which she graduated in 1991. She fell in love with the island and stayed. She worked first as a clerk of the court in May Pen, Clarendon, before joining the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions as a prosecutor where she again met up with Llewellyn, then a rising star in the ODPP.

“I just love Jamaica. Even though I am currently living in The Bahamas, I know that spiritually I belong in Jamaica,” she said in an interview.

As proof of her ‘Jamaicanness”, Morley operates a kiosk called “Jamaican Sinting” in Nassau, offering kindred souls “a slice of Jamaica” through a variety of Jamaican-made items.

“I should never have left Jamaica,” she says of her decision to return home after having her first two children, both girls. Everything I do here is Jamaican.”

She is currently the producer/presenter of a 30-minute programme called It’s the law and a second Bahamian Bio on Guardian Radio 96.9 FM and television and streamed on the Internet. Her immediate plans include producing a Caribbean version of the Bahamian Bio within the next three months.