Beyond Mainstream Presses: Publishing Women of Color as Cultural and Political Critique

Abstract

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, American feminists began to address the invisibility of women’s literature in both commercial and academic presses. In addition to retrieving the literature written by women in the past and looking at it from a new critical perspective, which Adrienne Rich defined as ‘writing as re-vision’ in her landmark essay ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1972), they also considered it necessary to publish the work of contemporary women writers as well. Thus began an intense publishing activity with the foundation of several women’s presses, such as Shameless Hussy Press (1969), The Feminist Press (1970), The Women’s Press Collective (1970) and Diana Press (1972), to name just a few. While all these presses proved extremely instrumental in bringing to light the literary output of women, it soon became clear that they focused mostly on the production of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Consequently, by the early 1980s, women belonging to other ethnic groups started to challenge the white bias of these publishing houses and founded their own presses specialized in the work of black, Chicana and Asian American women writers. This meant a more radical move within the literary and social feminism of that time. In the wake of both the Feminist and the Civil Rights Movements, these women developed a deep race consciousness and claimed similar rights to those enjoyed by white women and men.