Thank you Thursdays: Feminist Publishers

Saunter over to your women’s studies bookshelf and open up that first flap to discover who published your favorite feminist tomes. Chances are it wasn’t Random House or Simon & Schuster, or one of the other major biggies (with a few exceptions). Instead you were probably introduced to feminism thanks to the ingenuity of publishers like the Feminist Press, Seal Press, or one of the other many, many small, independent publishers that takes a chance on feminist lit.
I just sold a new book (stay tuned for details), so I’ve been thinking a lot about ye ole publishing industry and the way it works. It is an industry that started out with a deep commitment to Ideas–to giving people the goods on how to live a great life, to challenging the status quo, to the development of long careers of writing, reading, and editing. But because of market forces hard to explain in one little blog post (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the rise of less literary forms of entertainment etc.), the publishing industry is not heavily dependent on dollars and cents.
This isn’t to say that some books aren’t published simply because they contain brilliant ideas, but it is to say that we would naïve if we really bought the idea that publishers aren’t primarily interested in the bottom line these days. Did my editor at Simon & Schuster buy Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters because she felt a moral obligation to spread the word about food and fitness obsession? In part. But in truth, she was able to convince her publisher to buy it because they thought it would sell. Point blank.
Feminist presses, on the other hand, still strain to juggle the bottom line with a higher calling. They are committed to spreading the feminist gospel, to challenging traditional notions of gender, to finding new voices who are marginalized and/or left out all together by mainstream publishers. For this–and for Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, Riverbend’s books out of Iraq, and Brown Girl, Brownstone etc.–we thank them from the bottom of our big, feminist hearts.
If there is a book, published by a feminist press, that changed your life, please let us know in the comments.