This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics
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This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252039805 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2015 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
This Book is an Action
Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics
By Jaime Harker, Cecilia Konchar Farr
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08134-7
CHAPTER 1
Feminist Publishing/Publishing Feminism
Experimentation in Second-Wave
Book Publishing
Jennifer Gilley
In her book Feminism and Pop Culture, Andi Zeisler characterizes the proliferation of second-wave feminist writing as belonging to two categories: the publishing of feminism, referring to books written by feminists but published by corporate presses; and feminist publishing, referring to pamphlets, newsletters, and books both written and published by feminists themselves (64). These two strains of publishing, rather than being distinct, actually fed off each other and, taken together, reveal a nuanced and experimental relationship between second-wave feminism and publishing. Yet historians of this period have not examined the phenomenon of either. Kathryn Flannery, in her book Feminist Literacies 1968–75, argues that "publishing is left out of historical studies of feminism because practices of literacy, particularly book publishing, are tainted by their relationship to the power structure" (2). Yet studying the publication histories of second-wave feminist literature actually reveals an array of feminist interventions into traditional modes of publishing, not just by creating alternative feminist presses but by experimenting with different royalty structures and contracts with corporate presses.
In this essay, I will explore two case studies that each illustrate an attempt to infuse feminist politics into the economically driven apparatus of book publishing: Sisterhood Is Powerful and This Bridge Called My Back. Zeisler cites Robin Morgan as an example of a "movement participant" who published with a "storied establishment house" (64), but the book to which Zeisler is referring, Morgan's anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful published by Random House in 1970, actually belies any such easy categorization. As an anthology meant to capture the cutting edge ideas of the movement, the book contained many pieces that had already circulated via the feminist underground, so it could be seen as having feminist publishing roots. Furthermore, Morgan insisted on incorporating as many feminist principles as possible into the traditional publication process by demanding that only women within Random House work on it and by turning the book into an economic engine for the Women's Liberation Movement, pouring all of her royalties as editor back into the movement through the Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund. Exploring the publication history of Sisterhood Is Powerful provides a landmark case study of feminist experimentation in publishing that was inevitably fraught with controversy due to the ideological struggles of the time over economic and political "purity."
For my second case study, I will turn to the feminist press movement for the fascinating publication history of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which was published first by Persephone Press in 1981, then by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press when Persephone went out of business. With both presses, the anthology was published under an unusual type of contract in which contributors, rather than receiving a one-time payment at the beginning, would continue to receive payments for every ten thousand copies sold. While laudable for its feminist valuing of the authors' work, this strategy proved to be quite difficult in practice for the presses, but it exemplifies the type of experimentation that the feminist press movement was committed to in the 1970s and early 1980s. Overall, these studies show the variety of ways in which feminists tried to get around the "taint" of publishing's relationship to the power structure in order to enact a feminist sensibility not just in the content of their writing but also in its production and dissemination.
Publishing in Second-Wave Feminism: Some Ideological Context
The politics of publishing were long fraught in Women's Liberation, but they erupted in 1976. June Arnold's article "Feminist Presses and Feminist Politics," published in the summer 1976 issue of Quest, stands as the clearest and most-oft quoted articulation of the us versus them political stance on publishing in feminism. Arnold declares that Madison Avenue publishers are "what we can call the finishing press, because it is our movement they intend to finish. They will publish some of us — the least threatening, the most saleable, the most easily controlled or a few who cannot be ignored — until they cease publishing us because to be a woman is no longer in style" (19). Arnold is characterizing Zeisler's "publishing feminism" category as a deliberate cooptation of feminism on the part of corporate publishers for the purpose of deradicalization and then extinction. Arnold would have put Morgan into the "few who cannot be ignored" category (for reasons I will explain later) without any recognition of her attempt to co-opt the corporate publishers for her own ends. Arnold's observation that being a woman was currently "in style" for publishers was a salient one: a New York Times article from August 17, 1970, had declared that "the women's liberation movement is about to have its season in book publishing" (32). (It lasted a lot longer than many imagined.) In addition to this overt hostility to feminism on the part of corporate publishing, Arnold also points out that publishing with "the finishing press" supports companies whose "profits go to oppressing women in South America [such as] Gulf and Western, owner of Simon and Schuster" (24). It was also widely known that Random House was owned by RCA, who had military contracts and was therefore considered to be part of the Vietnam-era war machine.
Harriet Ellenberger and Catherine Nicholson, founders of the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom, supported Arnold's view and, in their first issue (October 1976), wrote that "Corporate America controls establishment publishing because control of communications ensures control of politics and industry ... [corporate presses] exist primarily to kill revolution" (Ellenberger and Nicholson 126–129). The alternative to this was the feminist press, of which both they and Arnold were a part. Ellenberger and Nicholson assert that "the lesbian presses exist primarily to make revolution" both through the ideological content of what they publish and through the material structures that must be put in place to publish this content (126). Ellenberger and Nicholson argue that "by keeping this issue in feminist hands from mindflash to bookstore, we gain all these things: we solidify our ties with each other; we learn the whole time we're doing; we recycle our money; we reach more lesbians with a journal written just for them; we strengthen the chain that will make this possible in the future; and most importantly, we create breakthroughs in the content, in the vision BECAUSE we are so clear about this: we are not justifying our lives before the world, we are talking to women" (129). Although both of these pieces were written in 1976, they reflect political impulses that were certainly in play from the beginning of the second wave (despite the early lack of alternative feminist presses) and are therefore good illustrations of one type of publishing ideal that Robin Morgan and other feminist writers would have had to wrestle with as they made decisions about their work. Overall the feminist print movement, whether for-profit or nonprofit in intent, was considered to be crucial to the publication of feminism for a host of political and material reasons.
Foremost among these reasons was the idea that feminist presses were necessary to publish new work that corporate presses would not touch for ideological or economic reasons, at least until the material was proven to be saleable. Carol Seajay, editor of the influential Feminist Bookstore News, wrote that "whatever is newest, groundbreaking and close to the cutting edge of feminist thinking is published by feminist publishers. ... Often they break new ground with a book, or several books, on a topic and commercial publishers follow this up with several more books on the same subject" (30). Charlotte Bunch, also a veteran member of the feminist print movement seconded this dynamic: "First, I believe that the existence and visibility of feminist (and esp. lesbian-feminist) writing that we have today is largely a result of the existence of feminist presses, periodicals, journals, and books over the past 10 years. (Even that printed by male presses would not have happened if we had not created and demonstrated the market.)" (25). According to Seajay and Bunch, feminist publishing directly feeds into publishing feminism. They would describe this relationship as a parasitic one rather than a symbiotic one, with the life-giving force coming mainly from the new voices surfacing through the feminist press. Bunch draws attention in particular to lesbian-feminist writing because lesbians were a marginalized group even within feminism and considered too marginal and controversial to ever get picked up by commercial presses, at least until Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle proved how much money there was to be made in this market. Lesbians, therefore, had to start their own presses to be heard, and women of color were at a similar disadvantage. Barbara Smith, publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, explained that "as feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published, except at the mercy or whim of others, whether in the context of alternative or commercial publishing, since both are white-dominated" (202–207). This lack of access to publication outlets led to the popularity of the slogan "the freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press" in the feminist print movement, and the urgency of getting marginalized voices in print was the primary raison d'être for feminist publishing.
In addition to being the ones most likely to publish cutting-edge material, there was also an ethos surrounding the feminist presses that suggested they would be more committed to supporting the work and its author according to feminist principles rather than purely economic ones. One central tenet of this commitment was to keep books in print. Corporate presses were frequently accused of letting their feminist books go out of print if the first print run did not sell out immediately, while "women's presses keep the book in print until it finds its audience" (Arnold 19). Indeed, a major goal of feminist presses is to keep all of their books in print and the Feminist Press got its start reprinting works of women's literature that had long since gone out of print. Feminist publishers were also expected to have a higher standard in regard to financially compensating authors and contributors. Traditional publishing contracts dedicate a very low percentage of sales to author royalties (10 percent for hardback, 6 to 7 percent for paperback) and never pay any royalties to contributors to anthologies. Contributors generally get a small one-time payment up front that comes out of the editor's royalties. Under the collective ideals of feminism, the anthology is the most politically appropriate vehicle for nonfiction because it contains a wider diversity of voices than a single-author book does, and from an egalitarian point of view, each of those contributors deserves an equal share in the royalties. One feminist writer, Melanie Kaye, even felt that only the contributors to anthologies should get paid, not the editors, because "editors should not make money off other people's work" (Clausen "Politics" 106). Persephone Press, a lesbian feminist press that published extremely influential books from 1976 to 1983, experimented with enacting these types of egalitarian principles in their contracts, but the realities of the publishing business for a small undercapitalized press meant that there was rarely enough cash to pay royalties at all and these experiments failed. I will explore this issue in more depth for my second case study, This Bridge Called My Back, which was first published by Persephone Press and then by Kitchen Table under a similar contract.
Another commonly cited benefit of feminist presses is that they targeted a particular audience: lesbians, women of color, or just women in the movement who were presumed to be sympathetic, rather than reaching a mass audience. Arnold writes that "If I publish with a women's press, I reach the women who need and can use what I say" (22). A prominent example of this thinking was the belief of Rosemary Curb, coeditor of the Naiad Press book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence, that the preferred audience for her book would be the same "women's studies audience" that greeted other small feminist press books, not the mass audience the book achieved once stories from it were sold to Penthouse Forum and paperback rights were sold to Warner books (Curb 4). (Clearly she and Barbara Grier, publisher at Naiad Press, had different ideas about audience and the desirability of limiting or expanding it beyond narrow political boundaries, as the controversy over Lesbian Nuns attests.)
The desire for a limited and politically exclusive audience would have resonated in the lesbian separatist movement but was simultaneously anathema to many other writers who wished their writing to reach a mass audience. Jan Clausen was one such feminist writer, and even publisher (Long Haul Press), who did not embrace the cultural separatism believed by some to be a benefit of feminist publishing: "I sometimes find myself thinking of life in the feminist literary community — even in bustling New York — as 'life in the provinces.' This is my private, rueful phrase for a feminist literary existence which, both for reasons of our choosing and ones not of our choosing, tends to be extremely isolated from other literary communities" (Clausen A Movement of Poets 36). When she talks about "reasons of our choosing," she is talking about the us versus them separatist tendencies that I have outlined so far as a major strain of the debate about feminist publishing that came to a head in 1976, but her own article "The Politics of Publishing" acts as a counterargument to these points and shows a much more diverse field of thought, at least among the writers themselves (as opposed to the publishers), with regard to the politics of publishing feminism.
In "The Politics of Publishing," Clausen reports on the results of a survey she sent to "over 35 lesbian writers, editors, and publishers" in June 1976. This survey was occasioned by three controversial events that had brought the debate over feminist publishing versus publishing feminism to the fore. First, the small press magazine Margins had requested that Beth Hodges do a sequel to the lesbian publishing special issue she had edited for them, but some women protested that this material should be placed in a feminist magazine instead. Second, an attempt to have a second edition of The Lesbian Reader (Amazon Press) brought out by Harper and Row fell through over conflicts about copyright, contributors' fees, and "What kind of compensation we are entitled to expect from the commercial press" (97). The third event was a May 1976 panel discussion on lesbian publishing at the New York City Lesbian Conference. The panel was lead by June Arnold and Parke Bowman of Daughters, Inc., Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin of Out and Out Books, Fran Winant of Violet Press, and Bertha Harris, and "what many in the audience hoped would be a discussion of practical aspects of publishing and self-publishing quickly turned into an acrimonious debate over the validity of publishing with 'the man'" (97). Amid this maelstrom of community debate, Clausen sent out her survey to get a wide variety of opinions on the political choices faced when publishing. In contrast to the vehement opinions held forth at the panel, "no one categorically ruled out options outside the women's press" (99). In fact, respondents laid out several justifications for choosing commercial presses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Book is an Action by Jaime Harker, Cecilia Konchar Farr. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Introduction, 1,
Part I,
1. Feminist Publishing/Publishing Feminism: Experimentation in Second-Wave Book Publishing Jennifer Gilley, 23,
2. A Revolution in Ephemera: Feminist Newsletters and Newspapers of the 1970s Agatha Beins, 46,
3. "What Made Us Think They'd Pay Us for Making a Revolution?" Women in Distribution (WinD), 1974–1979 Julie R. Enszer, 66,
4. Closely, Consciously Reading Feminism Yung-Hsing Wu, 87,
Part II,
5. "The Element That Shaped Me, That I Shape by Being In": Alternative Natures in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and The Edible Woman Jill E. Anderson, 113,
6. The Second-Wave Sandbox: Anne Roiphe's Monstrous Motherhood Lisa Botshon, 130,
7. Desire and Fantasy in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying Jay Hood, 149,
8. Coming Out and Tutor-Text Performance in Jane Chambers's Lesbi-Dramas Jaime Cantrell, 163,
9. Creating a Nonpatriarchal Lineage in Bertha Harris's Lover Laura Christine Godfrey, 88,
10. The Color Purple and the Wine-Dark Kiss of Death: How a Second-Wave Feminist Wrote the First American AIDS Narrative Phillip Gordon, 205,
11. "This Really Isn't a Job for a Girl to Take on Alone": Reappraising Feminism and Genre Fiction in Sara Paretsky's Crime Novel Indemnity Only Charlotte Beyer, 226,
Contributors, 245,
Index, 249,