They started in temporary spaces, in neighborhoods where the rents were cheap and where lesbians, women of color, and radical feminists were hungry for books. The feminist bookstore movement can be traced to Minneapolis in 1970. What would become the Amazon Bookstore Cooperative began in the front room of a collective feminist living space, open from 3 to 6 in the afternoon, or by appointment. It finally landed on Hennepin Avenue, where students and faculty from the University of Minnesota’s women’s-studies program mingled with activists, women from the community, and the occasional FBI agent looking for a fugitive.
City by city, women made bookstores in spaces no one else wanted — spaces that frequently lacked air conditioning and heat. They hauled boxes and built shelves and stocked them. In long, intense, sometimes divisive conversations, they raised hard questions about racial, sexual, and class privilege that grounded how they curated and sold books. They made bibliographies, lists, and maps that organized their collections by ethnicity, genre, nation, and dozens of other categories. These women moved from space to space, scrubbing misogynist graffiti from the steps, replacing broken windows, greeting customers with coffee and inviting them to sit down and read. In the process, feminist bookwomen imagined a global, multiracial, cross-class movement of activist readers invested in lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.
As Kristen Hogan, a former bookwoman now at the University of Texas at Austin, shows in The Feminist Bookstore Movement, challenges to this vibrant community of readers and booksellers emerged in the 25 years after the founding of the Amazon Bookstore Cooperative. For one, they needed to become businesswomen, an identity that put them in danger of complicity with systems of power they sought to transform. By the 1980s they also had to contend with chain stores, which, fueled by publishers’ deep discounts, systematically undersold independent bookstores. Then, in the late 1990s, Amazon.com, the behemoth with no relation to the women’s cooperative, negotiated even deeper discounts, and took advantage of the Internet to offer consumers any book, at any time.
It’s difficult to write the history of women’s bookstores without romanticizing a complex world of books, ideas, feelings, and feminist community that many of us miss. Hogan describes the pleasures of these communities, as well as the anger and factionalism that their commitments provoked. A literary history that opens and closes with Hogan’s own experience working at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, The Feminist Bookstore Movement leads us through the rise and fall of this network, which, at its peak, included 130 businesses in North America.
Carol Seajay’s Feminist Bookstore News (FBN), first published as a mimeograph from her desk at Old Wives Tales in 1976, helped these activists share strategies for survival and for cultivating antiracist feminism until 2000. Today their dream survives in places like Bluestockings, a collective bookstore on the Lower East Side of New York still run by volunteer labor; Bloodroot, a bookstore and vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport, Conn.; BookWoman of Austin, Tex.; and fewer than a dozen other survivors scattered around the United States.
FBN’s critical role of circulating news, information, and feminist theory among bookwomen allows Hogan to place bookselling, and the cultivation of literary space, at the center of 20th-century grass-roots radical feminism. Bookstores’ central role in organizing women pushed radical feminism to be accountable to its antiracist, internationalist, and antihomophobic ideals. At the same time, feminist bookwomen were co-opting and transforming commodity capitalism to promote women writers, writers of color, and the small presses that published them. Feminists’ collective power as a buying public was underlined in 1977 when, in the wake of Random House’s declaring that “the market for women’s books is over,” bookwomen doubled down on their orders, forcing other major publishers to admit that they could still turn a profit from feminism. “The mainstream, or ‘straight,’ press had to be continually reassured that feminist books would sell,” Hogan writes, and with their power to activate one another and book buyers, feminist bookstores “were a central and vocal part of that proof.”
Although Hogan shows the intersection between the growth of women’s studies and the rise of feminist bookstores, her focus on FBN and the networks of bookwomen may understate the influence of the women’s-studies movement — as it emerged within universities and professional organizations — on publishing. Women’s studies was, of course, nurtured and shaped by feminist bookwomen in exactly the ways that Hogan describes. By making books by women visible and available, the movement helped faculty. In addition, feminist bookwomen’s foregrounding the diversity of “women’s” books undoubtedly played as shaping a role on academic feminism as did the early grants from the Ford Foundation that built women’s centers.
The women’s-studies movement also created new readers and new customers for feminist bookstores, a dynamic that Hogan acknowledges, but which may be more significant than she allows. In fact, a rich range of publications that reviewed, published, and made visible a new cadre of feminist writers emerged parallel to the bookstore movement: Feminist Studies launched in 1972; Signs in 1975; Women’s Review of Books in 1983.
Yet, Hogan also emphasizes that the disappearance of feminist and independent bookstores may have had more-disproportionate consequences on intellectual and political life than we know. Lesbian authors, women of color, and the small presses that publish them become largely invisible when corporate markets win. National chains can offer more books, in more categories, but they are generalists: They offer a narrower selection in each category, and to turn a profit, they must return books that do not sell immediately. Although feminist authors championed by feminist bookwomen, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, successfully transitioned to this brave new world, most feminist authors, as well as presses that could not afford to discount their books, did not.
A second loss, Hogan contends, was to a feminist bookselling practice. In their struggle to survive, bookwomen had less time for activism and process, and increasingly identified themselves as savvy independent booksellers — “this new professional identity erased public memory of their vibrant history of necessary movement-based activism.” What remained in their practice was its fundamental attribute, what Hogan calls “the feminist shelf,” a mapping of the store that guided customers to books they wanted but could not identify before they entered the store.
Hogan’s research also argues that feminist bookstores changed bookselling, creating practices that chain stores would appropriate shamelessly. Comfortable spaces filled with discarded furniture where customers could read for hours and never buy a book, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, racks of fliers, and bulletin boards announcing events, rooms for rent, and part-time employment — these were all previews of how chains would woo customers by turning bookstores into coffee bars. As bookwomen fought for survival in the 1990s by joining forces with, and becoming more like, other independent bookstores, chain stores expanded on the back of a publishing market that feminist bookstores had midwifed. In a final irony, Amazon.com, the online bookseller (which has now opened its first actual store), won the rights to the name of the Minneapolis bookstore that had begun it all.
