The Feminist Press

The Feminist Press (officially The Feminist Press at CUNY) is an American independent nonprofit literary publisher of feminist literature that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. It publishes writing by people who share an activist spirit and a belief in choice and equality. Founded in 1970 to challenge sexual stereotypes in books, schools and libraries, the press began by rescuing “lost” works by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Rebecca Harding Davis, 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 Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Founding and history By the end of the 1960s, both Florence Howe and her then husband Paul Lauter had taught in the Freedom Schools in Mississippi, and Howe was already attempting to compile a 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 was held 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. 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.