Feminist Bookshops, Reading Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Great Britain, c. 1974–2000

Abstract

Historians of the Women's Liberation Movement have long stressed its decentralised form, with a deliberate refusal of the infrastructure of leaders and formal institutions. Instead, like other social movements of the 1970s and 80s, periodicals, networks of friends, and informal meeting places tended to provide the impetus for the development and diffusion of feminist ideas and strategies of protest. This article examines the significant role that bookshops played in this process, as politicised and commercial spaces. Feminist bookselling is situated within a longer tradition of bookselling, and understood as part of a wider process of attempting to bring social justice concerns to bear within capitalist settings. The feasibility and effect of women-only principles in bookshop settings is explored; bookshops emerge as contentious sites of activism in their own right. Reading has long been a central activity for feminists. Beatrix Campbell, a women's liberation movement and communist activist, described the intensity of the relationship between women, reading and writing in the 1970s: 'We ate the literature that was pouring out of the Women's Liberation Movement, we ate it [...] it was an extraordinary relationship to the written word, [...] all of these tracts and texts and books, we consumed as soon as they came out. And, whether you were an intellectual or not, you just read everything, and it impacted massively on your life.' Her violent reaction to Anna Coedt's The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, which she threw across the room on first reading, was testament to how challenging these texts could be, bringing up painful sentiments when they 'detonated' in women's lives. 2 Print culture could also generate solidarities, both through the ideas it conveyed, and also through its comforting material presence. Stella Dadzie, a key Black British feminist activist, recalled the way in which Black American feminist novels and plays by writers such as Audre Lorde and Alice Walker were familiar to her from visits to other activist households; the books cemented her sense of community with women in the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD): 'when I go into their houses, our bookshelves are all the same, y'know, you'll always see the same books on them.' 3 The relationship to books, pamphlets and periodicals was based not only on their provocative ideas, but also on their physical presence, conveyed sensorially through the deep green covers of Virago Classics or the smell of book bindings. As feminist bookseller Philippa Harrison described it, 'there was a mutual female pleasure in seeing those spinners of green books in a bookshop.' 4

‘Homosexuality is not a problem – it doesn’t do you any harm and can be lots of fun’: Students and Gay Rights Activism in Irish Universities, 1970s–1980s

“…Lucy Delap, in her study of feminist bookshops, has argued that bookshops contributed to the cultural transmission of feminist ideas. 113 I contend that universities similarly acted as spaces for the cultural transmission of gay rights in Ireland.…”

Introduction. Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s)

“…The imagining of a reading community has often been central to feminist activists and has helped them to articulate a shared political discourse and agenda. 26 The construction of such a (reading) community, is, however, not without tension or contention: who is rendered visible in this community and who is not? Who is imagined as included and who is excluded?…”

Complete Issue

“…This was because 'Women can only take charge of their lives if they can control their own reproduction' (Greenwood and King 1981: 168). Swells of feminist activism took place internationally as movements communicated with one another, increasingly enabled by the proliferation of feminist magazines and publishing houses (see Forster, 2016;Delap, 2016). Health and reproduction proved to be one of the issues that feminists communicated about most readily.…”

“…This 1981 pamphlet, Down There: an Illustrated Guide to Self-Exam, demonstrates the multiple sites of activism that were established in order to reclaim authority over women's own reproduction: as well as recommending involvement in a women's liberation group ('the best way to learn self-exam is within a women's liberation group -either a general or consciousness-raising group or one specifically focussed on women's health' 1981: 6) it also included a reading list and advised that speculums could be purchased at Sisterwrite, a feminist bookshop in Islington, North London (Laws, 1981: 28). Bookshops occupied a significant place in the Women's Liberation Movement (Delap, 2016), and here Sisterwrite provided both the site and the tools for accessing new bodily knowledges. The focus on the body and reproduction created new channels for the sharing of techniques, knowledge and information.…”