Stephanie Young on 'Business Feminism' at Los Angeles Review of Books
With a nod to the recent Women's March, with its oscillating signs and banners, Stephanie Young meditates on feminist activism's relationship with bookstores. Young's exploration begins in her North Oakland neighborhood, where one of the first feminist bookstores in the United States appeared forty years ago, Information Center Incorporate: A Woman’s Place. Along the way, she reviews Kristen Hogan's 2016 text, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. A "constellation searcher of queer antiracist feminist stars," according to Kristen Hogan's Twitter handle (@feministshelf), in this latest book, Young writes, "Kristen Hogan recasts the story" and "argues that feminist bookstores were much more than businesses."
Rather, as BookWoman’s founding charter described itself, they were a "women's resource center disguised as a bookstore." Lesbians could be out at their workplace, crowded bulletin boards connected people with health services and political organizing, and some stores offered lending libraries or shared space with self-defense collectives.
While Hogan uses several case studies of individual stores, the foundation of her work is The Feminist Bookstores Newsletter, an influential trade publication edited by Carol Seajay. Tracing conversations that unfolded there from the early '70s to late '90s, Hogan maps a community that shared booklists, strategized to intervene with publishers, and reported on differing visions of what feminist spaces could or should be.
Whereas many Second Wave accounts are written by 1970s feminist activists or scholars, Hogan occupies a unique position. She co-managed the Toronto Women's Bookstore in 2007 and worked at Austin’s BookWoman in the late '90s. The former closed in 2012. While BookWoman is still operational, it is one of only 13 remaining feminist bookstores in the United States and Canada. If Hogan didn't experience her subject's beginning, she did have an intimate relation with its end. She describes reading an issue of the Feminist Bookstore News during a shift at BookWoman shortly before it ceased publication in 2000 after a 24-year run. In some ways, The Feminist Bookstore Movement is a classic Second Wave recovery project, casting a loving glance backward as it seeks to uncover a series of lost moments obscured by the financial fate (and fight) of feminist bookstores in the '90s.