The Feminist Press
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The Feminist Press at The City University of New York is a nonprofit literary and educational institution based in New York City. The Press publishes and promotes the works by women from all eras and all regions of the globe. Founded in 1970, the Press has brought more than 300 critically acclaimed works by and about women into print. The Press seeks to publish classic and inspiring works of literature by women from around the world, recover precious out-of-print and never-in-print documents, establish the history of women around the globe, inform readers everywhere on urgent social issues relevant to women, support the outreach of diverse community groups to bring books to underserved readers, and achieve activist and educational goals.
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[edit] Founding
From the beginning, in partnership with women’s studies, The Feminist Press has provided the books and other educational materials essential to changing the content and focus of classroom education. 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 abut 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.
[edit] Significant Works
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
The Answer/La Respuestra by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
We Walk Alone by Ann Aldrich
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Baghdad Burning by Riverbend
[edit] Series
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
[edit] Interesting Facts
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.
[edit] References
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10505
The New York Times, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A15FA3C540C708CDDA80894DF404482
