The Renaissance of Feminist Bookstores

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The Renaissance of Feminist Bookstores
1/21/2023 by Kathleen B. Casey
In the face of book bans and attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights, vibrant activist communities are coalescing around feminist bookstores.


Eleanor’s Norfolk calls itself “a radical neighborhood bookstore and bottle shop that also acts as a safe space for community activism, engagement and learning.” (Eleanor’s Norfolk / Instagram)

Last November, about 25 people, mostly strangers, gathered at a “salon talk” at Eleanor’s Norfolk, an intersectional feminist bookstore that opened in Virginia in 2021. The topic was feminist pornography. Contrary to popular ideas about these sorts of discussions, participants spoke frankly in a supportive environment about a subject as intimate as their first encounter with pornography.This is just one example of the ways in which feminist bookstores like Eleanor’s have been experiencing a renaissance over the last five years. At a moment when the rights of women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people are under assault and book bans are reaching a fever pitch, vibrant activist communities are once again coalescing in and around feminist bookstores.

In her research on the feminist bookstore movement, Kristin Hogan tracked the growth and subsequent decline of feminist bookstores in the U.S. and Canada. She begins with the opening of A Woman’s Place in Oakland and Amazon Bookstore (no, not that Amazon) in Minneapolis in 1970 and examines the expansion of feminist bookstores through the 1980s and mid ’90s, when there were over 130. But beginning in the late ’90s, these stores faced aggressive competition from chain bookstores and online behemoths, as well as a broader sense of complacency about the status of women’s rights. By 2014, the number of stores dwindled to an all-time low of 13. Since 2017, however, many more bookstores self-identifying as feminist have opened. Not including pop-ups and independent bookstores that more broadly identify as “radical,” the current number is likely over 30—more than double the number in business when Trump took office.
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Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Miss. (Violet Valley Bookstore / Instagram)




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“Central Texas has been experiencing an unprecedented amount of book bans and challenges the past couple of years and I swear they’re targeting only the BEST books,” wrote Austin bookstore BookWoman on Instagram. (BookWoman / Instagram)

Despite these obstacles, feminist bookstore owners understand that space has always been important to feminist activism and social justice movements more broadly. In Finding the Movement, A. Finn Enke argued that the women who opened feminist bookstores and cafes in the ’70s were primarily motivated by a “desire to foster community through provision of a new community space.” Enke wrote that stores like Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis and Pride and Prejudice in Chicago became “centers of sociality” that “constituted feminism as a spatial practice.” Amazon Bookstore even offered pregnancy testing, abortion counseling and helped connect women to “Jane,” an underground abortion service that provided an estimated 11,000 abortions in the early 1970s. The FBI clearly believed in the radical potential of feminist spaces, considering it surveilled the Amazon Bookstore through its infamous counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO).

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Even though most of the original feminist stores have since closed, Look said “things are so, so much better” than they were a few years ago. “In 2017, sales started going up,” Look said, pointing to how the political turmoil of the last five years has expanded the visibility and urgency of feminism in the U.S. Many feminist bookstore owners struggle to navigate the tension between creating a non-hierarchical space that interrogates capitalism, among many other systems of oppression. “It’s a constant struggle,” Look said. She describes herself as a “reluctant capitalist” who ultimately values “books not as commodities but as culture.” Like Charis, which focuses on “popular education,” Erin Dougherty hopes to expand Eleanor’s salon talks into a full-fledged “Free School” that focuses on community education. She also plans to transform the store into a shared cooperative in the next year. Despite having to compete with online companies like Amazon.com and the rise of e-books and audiobooks, feminist bookstores like Charis and Eleanor’s are serving vital roles, especially in the South. Feminist bookstores are, in fact, not “dying”; they are alive and well, ready and waiting to provide their communities with emotional and intellectual shelter.


https://msmagazine.com/2023/01/21/feminist-bookstores/