The Feminist Press
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This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. (October 2012) |
| Founded | 1970 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Florence Howe |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | City University of New York |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | feministpress.org |
The Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. It publishes writing by women and men who share an activist spirit and a belief in choice and equality. Founded in 1970, the Press began by rescuing “lost” works by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and established its publishing program with books by American writers of diverse racial and class backgrounds. Since then it has also been bringing works from around the world to North American readers. The Press operates out of the City University of New York.
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Founding [edit]
By the end of the 1960s, both Florence Howe and her husband Paul Lauter had taught in the Freedom Schools in Mississippi, and Howe was already attempting to compile a mini-women’s studies curriculum for her writing students at Goucher College in Baltimore.
As the 1970s approached, Howe was convinced that, just as she needed texts for teaching about women, so would other educators. Her appeal to a number of university and trade publishers to issue a series of critical feminist biographies proved of no avail. Ultimately, the Baltimore Women’s Liberation, an active local group and publishers of a successful new journal, helped to raise money for the Press’s first publications.
In The Press’s founding years, Tillie Olsen changed its course dramatically by giving Howe a photocopy of the 1861 pages of The Atlantic Monthly containing an anonymously published novella called Life in the Iron Mills. In 1972, The Press issued this work by Rebecca Harding Davis as the first of its series of rediscovered feminist literary classics. Olsen’s second suggestion, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, and Elaine Hedges’s suggestion, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were published in 1973, and both of these have become staples of the American literature and women’s studies classrooms since.
The Feminist Press also publishes WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, an interdisciplinary academic journal.
Significant works [edit]
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English [1]
Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Long Walks and Intimate Talks by Grace Paley
Changes by Ama Ata Aidoo
Still Alive by Ruth Kluger
La Respuestra by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
We Walk Alone by Ann Aldrich
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Series [edit]
- 2X2 Series
- Classic Feminist Writers
- Contemporary Classics by Women
- The Defiant Muse
- Femmes Fatales
- The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series
- Jewish Women Writers
- Women Changing the World
- Women's Lives, Women's Work
- Women Writing Africa Project
- Women Writing in India
- Women Writing the Middle East
Facts [edit]
- The Feminist Press was founded after Florence Howe received $100 in contributions in her mailbox.
- The Feminist Press is the longest surviving women’s publishing house in the world.
- The first book to be published was Barbara Danish’s The Dragon and the Doctor.
- Gloria Jacobs is the Executive Director of The Feminist Press.
References [edit]
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10505
The New York Times, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A15FA3C540C708CDDA80894DF404482
