“In high school The Second Sex was my Ann Landers,” activist and historian Rosalyn Baxandall once recalled. “I read and reread every wilted page for advice.” Barbara Omolade, active in feminism and Black nationalism, has described how, after reading Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America, “I was suddenly burning with questions about how women survived the transition from African woman to slave mother…my intimate and personal questions about how Black women in the past took care of their children linked the past with my own daily life.” And for activist and writer Meredith Tax, it was the first issue of the Boston-based journal No More Fun and Games: “As I read, I began to smile, for I recognized the voice: angry, raw, full of pain combined with a kind of bitter triumph at seeing the situation for what it was.”

THE FEMINIST BOOKSTORE MOVEMENT: LESBIAN ANTIRACISM AND FEMINIST ACCOUNTABILITY by Kristen Hogan Duke University Press Books, 328 pp., $89.95

In memoirs and oral histories, you see this experience again and again: women of the feminist movement of the late 1960s through the 1980s encountering the book or magazine that changed a life. (Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was even advertised with the tagline “Chapter 6 Might Change Your Life!” The chapter in question tackled “Love” and how sex segregation had made emotion women’s work.) Whether through Firestone or Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde or Adrienne Rich, activists recall how feminist consciousness entered their lives, how it became unthinkable after that to see their experiences and the wider world the same way again.

Books that spark these kinds of transformation, however inevitable they might come to feel to us, don’t just fall from the sky. They are inextricably bound up with the friends who put them in our hands, with the groups that discussed them, with the small publications that excerpted and publicized them. In her new book, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, Kristen Hogan looks at an often ignored part of this story: the international network of feminist bookstores that flourished from the early 1970s to the 1990s, with 130 stores at its peak. These stores applied collective pressure to the publishing industry, and challenged business models that claimed the best books would naturally find their audience. They helped sustain the growing network of feminist periodicals and presses, like Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, The Feminist Press, and Spinster’s Ink. They debated ways of organizing books that would help readers find not just what they wanted but also what they didn’t know they needed. And they played a crucial role in the independent bookstore movement that opposed large chains in the 1990s and now fights to live another day in the age of Amazon.



Hogan’s story is one of idealism—an idealism that, if it hasn’t been lost or diverted toward other forms of action, has been criticized in recent decades. The feminist movement of the 1970s particularly tends to get a bad rap nowadays for its lack of racial diversity, for focusing on the issues of most concern to affluent, college-educated white women. But Hogan gives us a more complicated narrative; she focuses on a broad base of women from different backgrounds working together as activists, rather than on a few commercially successful writers. It is a history from the bottom-up rather than a female-adjusted Great Man style of history.

If the second wave now looks less inclusive than it actually was, the feminist historian Stephanie Gilmore has argued, that may be because of our focus on only the most influential theories and concepts that emerged from it. If a certain influential text is not inclusive, then the movement must not have been. We see this in the persistence of the notion that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique single-handedly “launched” the movement. Yet when we look at actual grassroots activism, Gilmore argues, a different picture emerges, one where cross-racial coalitions faced challenges but also found ways to work together.