| Founded | 1970 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Florence Howe |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York University |
| Official website | feministpress.org |
The Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. It publishes exciting 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 seeks out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story. They operate out of the City University of New York.
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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 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.
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
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10505
The New York Times, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A15FA3C540C708CDDA80894DF404482