11
Founding the Feminist Press
You who teach, read writers who are women. There is a whole
literature to be re-estimated, revalued. . . . Read, listen to,
living women writers, our new as well as our established, often
neglected ones. Not to have audience is a kind of death. . . .
Be critical. . . . Help create writers, perhaps among them
yourselves.
Tillie Olsen, speaking at MLA, published in Silences
D
uring the middle of the 1960s, I began to review Doris
Lessing’s fiction for the Nation and, in 1968, I published
part of a long interview with her. As a result, in the spring of 1970,
I was invited by three different academic presses to write Lessing’s
biography. I answered these requests with a letter, saying that she
was only at midcareer, much too young for a biography, but that I
had a different project in mind, and could I come to see them?
To the directors of each press I described the persistent questions my students were asking about the lives of women in literature, history, and other fields. I told the publishers that I wanted
to produce a series of hundred-page small books by famous contemporary women about women of the past to whom they felt
some connection. “For example,” I said, “I expect that Doris Lessing
would enjoy writing about Olive Schreiner. And I know Denise
Levertov, who would write about Amy Lowell.” While the editors
were interested, their financial managers were not. Each used the
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same language to dismiss the idea, saying, “There’s no money in it.”
Then I took the project to Bob Silvers at the New York Review of
Books (NYRB), where I had been publishing essays. To his credit,
Silvers saw that the NYRB could print the pieces first in its pages
and then as books. He was interested, but his financial manager
repeated the mantra of “There’s no money in it” and the project was
dismissed.
When nothing came of those meetings, my husband suggested I
do it myself. After all, I had been part of a group that had begun a
newsletter and turned it into a magazine, the Radical Teacher. Why
not a press? I could call it the Feminist Press, since he would be a
part of it, and feminist was a nongendered word that included men.
I heard him say the name and something about it convinced me to
go to a meeting of Baltimore Women’s Liberation and ask whether
they would work with me on such a project.
A group of twenty heard me out, and then each person around
the circle responded, some with enthusiasm. But no one was available to work on the project. Each person claimed she was too busy
with other feminist work—mainly the Baltimore Journal of Liberation, one of the first feminist magazines in the country. In the end,
I left disheartened, vowing to forget the whole idea and to continue
a small project I had started with a former student, Ellen Bass, who
was living in Boston. We were collecting poems about women by
women, motivated in part by Amy Lowell’s “The Sisters,” especially
the lines,
Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot
We women who write poetry. . . .
I went off to the Cape for August, where I worked with Ellen
and returned to Baltimore in September to find the mailbox on the
street stuffed with what I thought was junk mail. To my surprise
there were dozens of letters addressed to “The Feminist Press.”
How could this be?
I understood, after opening the first few envelopes, one of which
contained a clipping from Baltimore’s Women’s Liberation Newsletter, announcing the start of the Feminist Press. As I opened more
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envelopes, it quickly became clear that, in the manner of what was,
in fact, a feminist revolution, other newsletters had picked up the
Baltimore group’s announcement and had repeated it endlessly
in their own mailings. For these letters came from all over the US.
Women were eager to work on this project, they said, either by
writing for it or by buying the finished products. Some of the envelopes contained a few single dollar bills; others contained small
checks. Altogether, there was about one hundred dollars.
At first I was simply angry this had been done without telling
me. Then I was furious when I realized that, in addition to “biographies,” the announcement claimed that the Feminist Press would
publish “children’s books.” I had never said a word about children’s
books. I knew nothing about them, and I certainly did not want to
be responsible for publishing them.
By the end of the month, I had simmered down enough to invite
everyone who had written to the Feminist Press, asking them to
attend a meeting in my house. If at least twenty-five people came
who would agree to attend regular meetings and work on this
project, then it would begin. If not, I wrote, I would return all the
money sent to me.
On the late afternoon of November 17, 1970, fifty people filled the
living room comfortably, most of them sitting on the gold carpeting
that had come with the house my husband and I had bought less
than a year before and which was still somewhat short of furniture. The group included two of my former students at Goucher
College, roommates Barbara Danish and Laura Brown; my closest friend, Elaine Hedges, who was then a professor at Towson
State University; and Cynthia Secor, a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania, whom I knew from an MLA connection. I knew
none of the others, all but one of whom identified themselves as
housewives and mothers living in Baltimore.
Most of the meeting was taken up with introductions. Leah
Heyn said she was there because her seven-year-old daughter had
asked for a book that depicted a woman doctor, and she admitted
that she was the person responsible for adding children’s books to
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the newsletter announcement. She had searched bookstores and
libraries and found nothing though she knew that women had
been doctors since the nineteenth century. As we went around the
room, it was clear that while no one had experience in publishing,
no one seemed awed by the tasks before us. The room crackled with
energy.
I told the group about the Goucher students who, the year
before, had asked why I had listed no women writers on the syllabus for my eighteenth-century literature course. I told them also
about my useless attempts to find materials in the library, and then
my idea about a series of biographies about women. I described
my surprise when I found that we were to be publishing children’s
books. And, lastly, I told them that we had one hundred dollars in
total donations to start the press.
In the mail, there had also been two proposals for biographies
from writers who could not attend the meeting. Mary Anne Oakley, a lawyer, had written from Atlanta to say she’d like to write
about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Jacqueline Van Voris, director of an
oral history project at Smith College, offered to turn her published
biography of Irish revolutionary Constance Markiewicz into a
one-hundred-page version for our series. Right on the spot, various
people suggested that I accept those offers. Then Mary Jane Lupton, a professor of literature at Morgan State College in Baltimore,
rose from the floor to introduce herself and to say shyly that she
was already at work on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Several people
urged her to continue.
From the start it was clear that we were going to make decisions by consensus rather than by voting. The spirit in the room
was convivial. I can remember thinking that it all seemed too easy,
as though no one was thinking about the work involved. But I did
not voice my fears, assuming that this was going to be a “movement
project” with a lifeline of a few years until something else came
along to replace it. From the first, I imagined that “regular” publishers would seize on the idea once they saw it in action. At that
first meeting, my husband introduced himself as the “token” man
present, and offered to do the administrative work for the Feminist
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Press. I knew I could not assume the major responsibility for moving the project forward, since in addition to my full-time teaching, I had three demanding projects already in hand: organizing
the poetry project—for Teachers and Writers Collaborative—that
brought my poetry students into Baltimore high schools; chairing
the MLA’s Commission on the Status of Women and managing
the survey on the status of women in English and modern language
departments; and running Goucher College’s annual poetry series.
I had also applied for a grant from the NEH to support a curriculum project that I would work on during a year’s leave.
The only formal business of the meeting was deciding that we
would meet monthly and that we would begin to work on children’s
books at our next meeting. Some time during the following week, I
received a small packet of Chinese children’s books from a friend in
Canada who had heard about the formation of the Feminist Press
and who knew, as I did, that Chinese imports were then illegal in
the US. Among those books was one called I Want to Be a Doctor,
the story of a girl who is a “doctor” and her younger brother who
is a “nurse.” Together they mend a “sick” rocking horse, using a saw
and a piece of wood. I knew the talents of Barbara Danish, who
had filled my Goucher office with paintings of dragons and a huge
papier-mâché dragon that hung from the ceiling, so I gave her the
Chinese book, urging her to produce an American version—without dragons. “The Chinese are generous,” I said. “They won’t mind
our copying their book.”
Barbara returned to my office within twenty minutes with a few
sketches for a story called The Dragon and the Doctor. Though I
groaned to hear the title, I couldn’t resist its clever appeal. At the
December meeting, when Barbara presented her story, the mothers
in the room were even more enthusiastic than I had been. What
remained of the Chinese book was the distribution of work: the
female sibling was the doctor; the younger male, the nurse. Barbara’s wounded dragon had a zippered tail, which, when opened
and emptied of a tennis racquet, a ball, a roller skate, and a portrait
of the dragon’s grandmother, served as a seat for the two children
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who then visited other reimagined creatures of the animal world,
all of whom spoke, as the genderless dragon did, in a vowelless nonlanguage—brck smrch, for example.
Still, we faced two obstacles: how to get the book printed in color
and how to raise the money to cover the costs. No one mentioned
publicity, marketing, distribution, or sales, for this group lived
entirely outside the publishing world. But these were the early days
of an ebullient women’s movement in which news traveled quickly
without the Internet. Some people volunteered to find lists and
write fund-raising letters that described the book and the need for
money. Barbara and Laura found a small printer in Baltimore called
Quickee Offset, whose owner offered to teach them how to prepare color separations. While the book’s contents were written in
less than an hour and while the several thousand dollars needed to
pay for five thousand copies were raised in a month, the process of
production lasted almost eight months. The Dragon and the Doctor
by Barbara Danish, the first Feminist Press book, was published in
1971 and is still in print. For our twenty-fifth anniversary, Barbara
enlarged the story to include two mommies among the animals.
A consistent dozen to fifteen of us continued to meet through
the winter months of 1971, and we began to discuss the biography series that had been my reason for approaching the Baltimore
Women’s Liberation Group. Leah Heyn offered to write the text
for a picture book about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first US woman
doctor. We also spent time hearing chunks of the Browning read
aloud, with the group urging Professor Lupton to write the story
for nonacademic readers. From the beginning I had imagined
books in the small format used by City Lights Publishers—five
by seven—and the group graciously allowed me to have my wish.
But the cover design proved the most contentious issue of our first
few months. We agreed only that each book would say “Feminist
Press Biography No. 1,” then “2,” etc., but we rejected all designs
that came before us, since we were committed to consensus and we
all had very different tastes.
The design we finally settled on was probably the blandest: the
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title Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared in olive green on light blue
paper and was then repeated in slightly darker blue above. That
first biography, published before the end of 1971, says 1972 on
the title page, although it has “Copyright 1971 by Mary Jane Lupton” on the back of the title page—but no copyright symbol. The
first edition of The Dragon and the Doctor was printed in the same
way: no ISBNs; no proper copyright symbol. At one meeting we
agreed that Dragon was to be priced at one dollar and biographies
at one dollar and fifty cents, and that no Feminist Press book would
ever be sold for more than that. One of our original group, Judy
Markowitz, who lived south of Baltimore in Columbia, Maryland,
volunteered to turn her garage into our warehouse. She would fill
orders, keep records of sales and inventory, and report monthly. So
there we were at the end of three months, a little group that had
raised enough money in small contributions to publish two books,
with plans for three others.
Two external events changed the history of the Feminist Press
dramatically within four months of its beginnings. First was Tillie
Olsen’s contribution. I knew of her activism and her writing from
my work in the 1960s as one of the founders of the Vietnam war
resistors group, the Committee to Resist Illegitimate Authority,
but I had met her only once, in 1970 when we bumped into each
other in the Amherst library of the University of Massachusetts.
She wrote to me in February 1971, telling me she had heard about
the founding of the Feminist Press and that she was in residence
at the Radcliffe Institute, working on a literary and biographical
afterword to Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills. She
enclosed a copy of the novella, which she had been carrying around
with her since she was a teenager in the 1920s. Although it had
originally been published anonymously, she wrote, she now knew
that its author was a woman, and she hoped that we would publish
it along with the essay she was writing. She urged me not to read
the story at night.
Of course, I paid no attention to the warning, read and wept and
wept some more. By daylight, I knew that if this piece of fiction
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