The Feminist Press
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| Founded | 1970 |
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| Founder | Florence Howe |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | City University of New York |
| Official website | feministpress |
The Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. It publishes 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 Feminist Press is the longest surviving women’s publishing house in the world. The Press operates out of the City University of New York.
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 initial 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. On November 17, 1970, the first meeting of the newly formed Press occurred in Florence Howe's living-room. The first book to be published was Barbara Danish’s children's book The Dragon and the Doctor in 1971. Florence Howe saw her dreams of producing feminist biographies come true with the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the end of 1971.
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 Rebecca Harding Davis's anonymously published novella 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 curriculums since (the 1990 Norton Anthology of American literature included both Life in the Iron Mills and The Yellow Wall-Paper). In the spring of 1971, Florence and her husband moved to New York. Howe brought the burgeoning press with her to her newly accepted professorship at Old Westbury. The President of the school allowed her to operate out of the corridor of a building originally intended as a garage for campus vehicles. The Press was met with excitement and support from students who worked in the small office in exchange for college work-study. Two New York City publishing professionals, Verne Moberg and Susan Lowes contributed to the publication of three volumes of reprinted fiction released in 1972 and 1973, both of which Howe believes to exemplify the Press's enduring commitment to producing course adoptable books to supplement curriculums dominated by male writers. the Press continues its commitment to recovering and compiling the important work of otherwise overlooked and unpublished female artists in collections such as In Her Own Image and the Women Writing Africa series. In 1972, the Feminist Press became a 501(c)3 organization with tax-exempt status.
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