by Kristen Hogan
Duke University Press
4/15/2016, paperback
SKU: 9780822361299
From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations.
Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story--mostly lesbians and including women of color--measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world.
In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.
Reviews:
"Carefully researched and highly engaging. . . . The Feminist Bookstore Movement is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of feminist writing and publishing, as well as anyone seeking to understand how feminist alternative economies and communities took shape and survived in the late twentieth century." --Kate Eichhorn, Journal of American History
"An oft-forgotten chapter in the women's lib movement of the 1970s was the rise of independent, women-owned bookstores, many of which created safe spaces for conversations that spurred second-wave feminism. Hogan has written a history of those thought-leading small businesses and the lesbians and women of color behind them, in which she celebrates the power of the feminist printed word."-- Ms.
"Using archival research, interviews, and personal experience, Kristen Hogan offers an insightful, loving history of feminist bookwomen's vital contributions to social-justice work and literary traditions: their literary advocacy, activism, and transformation; complex lesbian antiracist feminisms; multicultural coalition-building; innovative relational reading practices; and impact on transnational feminisms and the book industry. Blending historical recovery with forward-looking calls to action, The Feminist Bookstore Movement should be required reading for any feminist who appreciates a good book." --AnaLouise Keating, author of Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change
About the Author:
Kristen Hogan, who worked at BookWoman in Austin and at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, is Education Program Coordinator for the University of Texas Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas, Austin.