Feminist Publishing

For feminists, publishing has been an important way to share information, promote ideas, develop new theories and strategies, and organize for change. During the past 30 years, the publishing industry increasingly has consolidated into large media conglomerates, resulting in fewer publishing outlets for feminist voices. At the same time, the digital revolution, which is as significant for publishing as the development of the Gutenberg printing press in the middle of the 15th century, is creating new opportunities and challenges for feminist publishing.

At the beginning of the 21st century, some feminist publishes, founded during the Women's Liberation Movement, continue to flourish. Ms. magazine, which published its first issue in July 1972 under the editorial leadership of Letty Cottin Pogrebin, continues to publish now under the non-profit auspices of the Feminist Majority Foundation. A wide array of feminist journalists, writers, and theorists have written for Ms. magazine and been involved in its editorial leadership. Ms. magazine, like other feminist institutions suffered during its history from financial challenges, including problems with advertising revenue, but a flexible approach to publishing and the ability to change have produced an enduring periodical.

While dozens of periodicals that were the life-blood of the Women's Liberation Movement during the 1970s and 1980s have shuttered, others, like Ms. magazine, continue. Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal founded in 1976 by Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Ellenberg (Desmoines), Calyx Journal, also founded in 1976 and focusing on publishing creative work by women writers, Herizons, a quarterly Canadian feminist magazine founded in 1979, and Lesbian Connection, a community gathering of news, notices, and ideas founded in 1974, all continue to publish. Newer [Page 542]feminist magazines, Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture and Bust magazine, both founded in the 1990s, publish feminist voices of a generation of women who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s. The newest print magazine, make/shift, reflects a newly revitalized feminism with publishing focused on antiracist, transnational, and queer work from a feminist perspective.

During the Women's Liberation Movement, book publishers flourished, but in the early 21st century only a few independent, feminist book publishers survive. The Feminist Press and Spinifex Press in Australia are two feminist publishers that continue to publish a robust catalog of significant books. Other publishers who have continue to publish independently in their feminist mission are New Victoria Press, which focuses on fiction, Alice James Books, which publishes poetry, and Paris Press, which publishes work by women writers that has been overlooked by the literary and publishing world including Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry.

Seal Press in the United States and Virago Press in the United Kingdom both were purchased by corporate publishers but continue to publish feminist books. In the past decade, new publishers have been founded. Redbone Press is a literary publisher of writers of color; Kore Press is dedicated to publishing poetry and prose by women; Perugia Press publishes poetry by women; Bella Books publishes popular lesbian novels; Bold Stroke Books publishes lesbian romance novels.

Although print publishing continues for some feminist publishers, other feminist publications have migrated from print to the Web publishing. On The Issues, the progressive women's magazine published by Merle Hoffman, migrated in 2008 to an online format after 25 years of print-based published. Similarly, Trivia, which published as a print journal from 1982 until 1995, resumed publishing in 2004 as an electronic journal.

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