Feminist Advocacy at For-Profit Publishers
Delivered by Lisa Pierce, June 30, 2008, ACRL Women’s Studies Section,
ALA Annual Conference
Greenwood Publishing Group consists of two imprints: Greenwood, a reference
publisher, primarily targeting high school, college and public libraries, and Praeger,
which publishes academic and general interest nonfiction. We’re the smallest division of
a large publishing entity, Harcourt. And after I agreed to be part of this panel, Harcourt,
and thus Greenwood, was sold by our parent corporation, Reed-Elsevier, to Houghton
Mifflin. The subsequent company, HMH, is one of the largest publishing companies in
the world.
This was not my first corporate merger. I was working as an editor for Times-Mirror
when it merged with Tribune, becoming one of the largest newspaper chains in the
country.
During this segment I want to talk about the challenges of identifying as a feminist in the
volatile world of for-profit publishing. Newspapers, magazines, books, wherever I’ve
worked over the past 20 years, I have tried to serve as an advocate for feminist topics.
I have never been alone in this. At every newspaper and magazine, every publishing
house where I’ve worked, I’ve met other women, plenty of women, despite what you
may have heard, who identify as feminists. Wherever I’ve worked, the feminists seem to
find each other and form informal networks to quietly, I like to think subversively,
advocate for articles and books that tackle issues of importance to women from a feminist
perspective.
One of the most obvious obstacles to adopting this stance, to working as a feminist in a
corporate environment, is that the editorial missions in these environments are expressly
profit-driven and not explicitly feminist or multicultural, even though the audience often
is – women are more prolific readers than men, and the bulk of librarians working in
collection development are women, and increasingly of color. They are purchasing books
for library patrons, also more like to be women than the overall population and
increasingly of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Unfortunately, this does not mean
that those making the macro-level decisions at for-profit publishing entities are falling all
over themselves to hire feminists and people of color or to publish books that reflect
these communities. Identifying as a feminist in corporate publishing environments means
living an oppositional existence and sometimes acting as the sole advocate for projects
with a womanist and/or multicultural perspective.
Projects about women’s issues are often viewed with skepticism from men and women
who do not identify as feminists - isn’t that too specific, too theoretical, too divisive, too
controversial, too sexually explicit? These are the kinds of questions often leveled at
feminist book proposals. The good news is that there are ways to advocate on behalf of
feminist projects within mainstream publishing imprints, newsrooms, consumer
magazines, and the like.
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At Praeger and Greenwood, for example, feminist projects tend to be championed by
those of us who have formed an unofficial network there. If a proposal we believe in is
facing resistance, then we begin emailing each other offline for help and if we agree it’s a
valid project, then we tend to lobby for one another. We might look up sales histories of
similar projects we've done in the past few years.
For example, recently some questioned whether a volume on Latina writers was too
specialized to kick off a high-profile series. But our literature editor, a feminist man, dug
into the backlist and proved that our titles on women of color authors are some of our
best sellers, year in and year out.
This is a constant battle. There is a persistent impression that women’s issues do not sell.
So while I was preparing for this presentation my colleagues kept noting that our recent
reference work - The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, 2 Vol by Leslie L. Heywood – had disappointing sales. In fact, they were
robust.
Greenwood’s most vocal feminist editor recently left to work at a trade press. Before
working at Greenwood she’d been an editor at Current Biography, where she tried to
push through a policy of having 50 percent of all new assignments be biographies of
women. She noted that more than 50 percent of the magazine’s readership was women,
but her proposal was defeated. While she was at Praeger, she was frequently told that her
feminist proposals were too narrow or too theoretical, or might come off as “screeds.”
Despite this, she managed to sign several books on feminist topics, including a critique of
abstinence-only sex education, female genital mutilation, the abortion rights of teens, and
DIY feminism.
On the Greenwood side in the four years I’ve been there we’ve done reference works on
sexual slavery and human trafficking, female spirituality across cultures, sex workers,
third-wave feminism and a series of critical biographies of Women Writers of Color.
We’ve published two multivolume works on African American women writers in less
than two years and both have been best sellers.
Librarians are incredibly powerful, especially at a company like ours. Every acquisitions
editor has to have a board of 4-6 librarians who provide feedback on every proposal
before it is seen by our marketing staff. When I first got to Greenwood librarians on our
boards were vocal about their need for more work on women of color and between their
vocalizing and some internal networking by the unofficial feminist network the number
of titles in this area is increasing. And we recently hired a new multicultural editor who is
very interested in acquiring works that intersect issues of gender, race and class and there
is a lot of enthusiasm for her acquisition plan. I’m not sure this would have been the case
just four years ago. So attitudes can change, even at a for-profit press, especially when
sales figures and demographics help to drive that change, but you have to be patient and
you have to be willing to engage in the same battles again and again.
I’ve often thought it would be so much easier to work in a more overtly ideological
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setting, but I also think for-profit publishing needs men and women who identify as
feminists to infiltrate the field at all levels, and not just at nonprofit or university presses.
Change at the list level (and subsequently at the book shelf level) has to happen editorby-editor, title-by-title; because not all women and girls have access to well-funded
university libraries that can afford to purchase high-priced academic works.
I was raised by a working-class Puerto Rican mom in a rural area and I read anything
from my under-funded local library that I could get my hands on that reflected strong
women back to me. I’m still frustrated in my efforts to see women like me reflected on
book shelves and on the Internet, where a huge digital divide still separates Latinos and
other people of color from the dominant culture, and it still separates women of color
from the most pervasive voices in the women’s movement.
The Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that Latinas are now the demographic at
highest risk for dropping out of high school and college, for teenage pregnancy, and for
suicide.
The popular media’s response? Well, a few months back Slate assigned a white selfproclaimed feminist to write an article on the topic in which she blamed these problems,
not on racism, not on sexism or cultural stereotypes about Latina sexuality, not on antiimmigrant attitudes, not on the rise in hate crimes against Latinos, but on the coming of
age ritual of Quinceaneros. The writer then trashed Julia Alvarez’s sympathetic book on
the traditional Mexican right of passage and the girls who take part in it. Why wasn’t
Alvarez condemning these over-sexed brown and beige girls who are clearly to blame for
society’s problems? After all, they wanted a party.
In preparation for this presentation I talked with one of my mentors, Selma Miriam, who
founded the Bloodroot Collective feminist restaurant and book shop in Bridgeport, Conn.,
over 30 years ago. The collective used to have a map on the wall with pins in the location
of all the independent feminist bookshops and at one point there were more than 150. She
talked about how she’s seen that number dwindle to almost none, how she’s watched as
feminist presses have closed or shifted their lists to more mainstream-friendly fare, how
she’s watched feminist distributor collectives disappear.
Many in publishing – including well-publicized “post-feminist” feminist trade authors claim that there is no need for feminist publishing these days because all the “big” issues
have been resolved. If so, someone really needs to explain this to my mom, a nurse who
is still facing racism and anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment on a daily basis from
patients and doctors and coworkers at the rural hospital system where she works. She is
still working in an industry that makes billions every year yet somehow can’t manage pay
practical nurses and nurses’ assistants, who provide the bulk of patient care, a living
wage. Someone needs to explain it to my fellow Puertoriquena colleague at Greenwood,
who, like my mom, was married with a baby at the age of 19 and who when she insisted
on returning to college was asked by one of her relatives “where do you think you’re
going? Do you want to be una mujer de casa or una mujer de la calle?” Do you want to be
a housewife or a whore?
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Because of my upbringing I’m not interested in advocating for post-feminist projects, for
authors who claim to be feminist so that they can essentially write “Take it from me. I’m
a feminist and even I think the patriarchy’s right about women; there’s no pleasing us, we
are ridiculous.”
I tend to think about feminism in terms of the enormous amount of work that still needs
to be done before all women have access to education, sexual agency, and the ability to
use their talents to earn a living wage. How do we make sure that women and girls have
the opportunity to read a more womanist, affirming, ethnically inclusive kind of feminism
that doesn’t divide them or make them feel bad about themselves?
I think it needs to start by creating networks among feminists across publishing segments.
Feminists at blogs, newspapers, magazines, nonprofit and for-profit imprints should be
talking to each other.
I recently joined a new networking organization called Latinos in Publishing, designed to
provide Latinos, from assistants to senior editors, with a network in hopes of making sure
that book shelves in libraries and stores begin to reflect the demographic realities of a
growing community. The group plans to set up mentoring networks for Latinos who want
to enter the field and to create avenues so we can champion authors and projects that
don’t fit our own lists to our Latino counterparts at other imprints.
Creating such a network among feminists would mean that, when a worthy project came
my way and I could not accept it, I could send it to another press where I could be
confidant that it would find a sympathetic eye and, maybe even, a good home. Every
editor knows that we pass up good projects all the time because those projects don’t fit
our organization’s editorial mission, but the larger mission needs to be getting good
work, important work, written from a feminist perspective, into the hands and onto the
computer screens of readers. Thank you.
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