Chapter 10: Feminism is Like Indie Bookselling
…on collectives and collections and radical lesbians
On a hot August week in 1976, one hundred and thirty two feminist booksellers, publishers, and printers converged in Omaha, Nebraska for the most pivotal event in American literary history you’ve never heard of.
The novelist and publisher June Arnold convened the first Women in Print conference—and she chose a Campfire Girl campground in the middle of nowhere because it was geographically equitable. She designed a formal program of workshops, and she set a bunch of rules: each feminist organization could send two representatives; no organizations that included men could be included unless they were “Third World feminists working on Third World projects” with men; the conference would be kept secret; no writers would be invited, only workers in print media.
That week, the women shared skills in morning workshops and talked theory and politics in afternoon sessions. Then they took off their clothes and went swimming. One day, they sketched a map of the United States in the gravel and everyone stood on their state for a photograph—their power and reach made visible.
By the end of the week, they’d codified a radical feminist separatist vision of print culture, autonomous and women-centric. They would share information through a communications network; use their bookstores broadly as shelters and information centers for women; continue to develop their politics; learn how to manage the contradictions between radical politics and capitalist business practices; hold themselves accountable to one another; support all feminist media; and create a feminist “books in print.”
My argument: when it comes to contemporary best practices for indie bookstore survival in late-stage monopoly capitalism, lesbian feminist separatist booksellers did it first and did it better.