Mixed Media

Simone Murray

Description

The feminist press movement transformed the publishing industry, literary culture and educational curricula during the last quarter of the 20th century. This book is both a survey of the movement internationally and a detailed critique of its long-term impact.



Feminist presses are described as 'mixed media', always attempting to balance politics with profit-making. Using a series of detailed case studies, Simone Murray highlights the specific debates through which this dilemma plays out: the nature of independence; the politics of race; feminist publishing and the academy; radical writing and publishing practice; and feminism's interface with mainstream publishing.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Books With Bite: Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion

2. Books of Integrity: Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing

3. Opening Pandora’s Box: The Rise of Academic Feminist Publishing

4. Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing

5. This Book Could Change Your Life: Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing

Afterword: Feminist Publishing Beyond the Millennium:

Inscribing Women’s Print Heritage in a Digital Future

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644884
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Mixed Media

Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics

Simone Murray

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Simone Murray 2004

The right of Simone Murray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

0 7453 2016 3 hardback 0 7453 2015 5 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

for Helen

whose this both is, and is not

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

Introduction

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Contents

‘Books with Bite’: Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion

‘Books of Integrity’: Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing

Opening Pandora’s Box: The Rise of Academic Feminist Publishing

Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing

‘This Book Could Change Your Life’: Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing

Afterword Feminist Publishing Beyond the Millennium: Inscribing Women’s Print Heritage in a Digital Future

Notes Bibliography Index

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220 234 257

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 ‘The Communications Circuit’ by Robert Darnton.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Virago’s sale in late 1995 was widely interpreted in the international media as the end of an era.

The first Virago Modern Classics reprint title, Antonia White’sFrost in May[1933] (seen here in its 1992 cover design) bears all the hallmarks of Virago’s house style: dark green livery, restrained title-face, and a painting by a lesser-known artist.

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Abacus struggles for a visual encapsulation of Kate Millett’s revolutionary new concept ‘sexual politics’, combining political rosettes with classical male and female symbols. Note which gets to be on top. 186

Chatto and Windus’s female nude cover design for the first UK edition of Naomi Wolf’sPromiscuities.

190

The subsequent Vintage UK paperback cover for Wolf’sPromiscuitiesadapts the original (nipple-free) US cover design. 191

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Acknowledgements

Funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, the British Council and the Australian Research Council made possible the lengthy research and writing of this book. Sections of this work appeared in earlier versions inThe European Journal of Women’s Studies5.2 (Sage, 1998) andAlternative Library Literature 1998–1999: A Biennial Anthology(McFarland, 2000). ‘The Communications Circuit’ is redrawn from Figure 7.1 in ‘What Is the History of Books?’ [1982] fromThe Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural Historyby Robert Darnton. London: Faber, 1990. p.112. Richard Collins cartoon first published inAustralian Financial Review, 8 November 1995. Reproduced by permission of the artist.Frost in Maycover reproduced by kind permission of Virago Press, a division of Time Warner Books UK.Sexual Politicscover reproduced by kind permission of Abacus, a division of Time Warner Books UK. Promiscuitiesby Naomi Wolf published by Chatto & Windus and Vintage. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Many women from the international feminist publishing movement generously shared their first-hand experiences in informative, engaging and occasionally raucous interviews: Sally Abbey, Philippa Brewster, Sue Butterworth, Carmen Callil, Stephanie Dowrick, Alison Hennegan, Hilary McPhee, Lilian Mohin, Ursula Owen, Alexandra Pringle, Dale Spender, Harriet Spicer, Elizabeth Webby. John Sutherland and Kasia Boddy, both of the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, read and commented upon this work in its earliest phases. Philip Errington shared an office the size of a prison cell, sanity-saving in- jokes and a stuffed fish for two years of this project’s life. Maureen Bell, Gail Chester and the Book History Postgraduate Student Network provided intellectual stimulation and moral support in the face of interdisciplinary indifference. Anne Galligan, Louise Poland and other members of the Publishing Research (Pu-R-L) listserve constituted a rare instance of publishing research concentra- tion and community. David Doughan and the staff of the Fawcett Library – now the Women’s Library – in London carefully built and maintained an

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essential women’s research centre despite flooded basements and years of under-resourcing, and generously shared their wealth of knowledge. Anne Beech of Pluto Press UK recognised that the legacies of the feminist publishing movement deserved serious scholarly attention and championed this project accordingly. The extended Pluto Press team were admirably professional in seeing the book through to finished product, and are wholly exempt from the more scathing industry verdicts pronounced elsewhere in this volume. Steven Pannell generously loaned computer equipment at a critical and impoverished point. Nick Caldwell and Maureen O’Grady assisted with illustration preparation in the pressure-cooked last months of the project. Helen Gilbert, Graeme Turner and Frances Bonner, all of the University of Queensland, sponsored numerous make-work schemes when they were most sorely needed. Sparring partner and valued friend Dan Neidle laid on free drinks and film tickets in the darkest, most isolative days of this project and refused to let my social atrophy be complete. The postgraduate community of the University of Queensland’s School of English, Media Studies & Art History offered collegiality, peer support and memorably good times in the writing-up phase of this project. Angi Buettner, Susan Luckman, Peta Mitchell and the School’s academic and administrative staff were unfailingly generous with their ideas and friendship. Although they were at interstate remove from the front line of writing, I thank all members of the Posse (both official and honorary) for occasional belief, healthy scepticism and forcefully re-engaging me with the world beyond the desktop. My warmest thanks goes to Kieran Hagan for non-invasive support and get-away plans.

Still, Madam, the private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of ‘intellectual liberty’.

Virginia Woolf,Three Guineas(1938)

Introduction

I should begin by declaring, not an interest, but a lack of initial interest in another sense: a feminist publishing house is not a cause to which my heart responds. There are surely few occupations which can claim to need a sexist back-up less than novel writing? It is almost the only respected, paying art at which women have been busy nearly as long as men and with a comparable degree of success. Nor, contrary to a widespread modern myth about the Awful Lives of women in the past, did they once have to be George Eliots to get away with it … In our own century the numbers of successful women writers (successful in the sense of being published, read, enjoyed, remembered, not necessarily well-paid of course) must be equal, or nearly so, to the numbers on the male side. Neither young nor old nor women nor men nor homosexuals should, if they are good atwriting, need to occupy a professional reservation as if they were an endangered species. Tindall, ‘Sisterly Sensibilities, or, Heroines Revived’ (1979: 144)

How green were our bookshelves, how black and white our lives, those long-gone days when sisterhood was global and every remotely right-on household sported the distinctive spines of Virago and The Women’s Press. Once those bottle green and striped covers were a passport to the front lines. Now you might well find your favourite feminist author on the Penguin shelf, and grab your next blockbuster from the railway Virago stand. In a word, feminist publishing has succeeded. Briscoe, ‘Feminist Presses: Who Needs Them?’ (1990b: 43)

In the ideological and temporal distance that separates these two positions it is possible to trace the outlines of the most significant development in late twentieth-century book publishing: the emergence and infiltration into the cultural mainstream of feminist presses. Gillian Tindall’s observations, extracted from a 1979New Societyreview of Virago Press’s fiction list, query the veryraison d’être of a feminist publishing house, reading the past success of individual female novelists as evidence of a publishing industry gender-neutral in its operations and scrupulously apolitical in its self-conception.

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