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to Keep Women in Print main page Written by Rose Norman
Published in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIX,
No.3. Dec 2001.
Reproduced with permission
What's happening to feminist bookstores?
For over thirty years, feminist bookstores have been
heroes on the front lines of the women's movement.
Sometimes these stores are the closest thing to a
Women's Center that their community has, offering
information about everything from family planning and
domestic violence services to roommate exchanges. They
typically sponsor feminist book groups, offer "open mic"
nights and bring in feminist authors for readings. And
always the staff members know their books well and are
eager to share that knowledge.
But these stores are getting harder and harder to find.
The rapid growth of large chain bookstores offering deep
discounts has made it difficult for independent bookstores
of any kind to survive. Bookstore chains now sell over
fifty percent of all retail books in the United States, and
the number of independent bookstores is down from
around 5400 in the early 1990s to around 3200 in 2000.
Feminist bookstores have been hit hard. Feminist
Bookstore Network (FB-Net) membership dropped
from 107 stores in the United Starts and Canada in 1997
to 74 as of summer 2001. Suzanne Corson of Boadecia's
Books in Kensington, California, keeps track of the
FB-Net membership list. She reports that "Los Angeles,
Long Beach, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno and
San Diego all used to have feminist bookstores and no
longer do. In Texas, the only feminist bookstore left is
Book Woman in Austin. There used to be stores in San
Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Elsewhere in the United
States, Baltimore, Memphis, Pittsburgh and t Philadelphia
all used to have feminist bookstores and don't any
longer."
To learn more about what is happening in feminist
bookselling, I interviewed Carol Seajay (former publisher
of Feminist Bookstore News) and eighteen feminist
booksellers, four of whom closed their stores in the
l990s. Eight of their stores were founded in the 1970s;
one closed its doors in 1999 (Sisterhood Bookstore in
Los Angeles). Four of the stores opened in the 1990s,
the newest being Bluestockings in New York City, which
opened in 1999. The largest of these stores is Antigone
Books, with 4500 square feet in Tucson, AZ; most are
smallish, from 750 to 1200 square feet. The highest gross
sales among them were reported by Women & Children
First in Chicago: $1.1 million for fiscal 2000, about five
rimes what most feminist booksellers expect to gross in a
good year. Several are run as nun-profits and one of the
nonprofit stores, Toronto Women's Bookstore, is run
primarily by women of color.
Some of the challenges these feminist booksellers face
are common to all independent bookstores. They cannot
compete with the long opening hours and deep discounts
that mega-bookstores offer. Even large, successful
independent bookstores have trouble competing in this
climate. The Book Mark in Tucson, the largest
independent bookseller in the Southwest, closed in 1999,
saying that it could no longer compete wish she chain
bookstores opening up branches all over sown. Barbara
Kingsolver spoke out about it in the Arizona Daily Star,
writing "I owe my career to people such as those at the
Book Mark who first guided readers to my words. I
think of them as family."
Kingsolver could have been talking about small feminist
booksellers across the nation, who have been "family" to
feminist authors and readers, hand-selling books by new
authors and guiding new customers to feminist classics.
Many of the booksellers I interviewed are concerned
about what the takeover of bookselling by large
corporations means for feminist progress in this country.
They believe that the loss of feminist bookstores it
breaking the link between feminist authors, their readers
and resulting consciousness-raising and political action.
As publishers merge and chain bookstores grow, Mev
Miller of the Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in
Minneapolis warns that "we may find ourselves with only
three big trade publishers and two big bookstore chains
left. If we really care about feminism and many forms of
critical and alternative discussion and thinking, then having
access to a variety of independent publishers and
bookstores that carry these messages in meaningful ways
remains crucial."
The struggles of feminist book stores raise questions
about the feminist movement generally. What has
happened to the customers who made these stores
successful in the 1970t and 1980s? Why aren't feminists
shopping in feminist bookstores the way they did before?
One bookseller described a customer who said she buys
popular feminist books as the chain stores, to "show
there's a demand for them," and then comes to the
feminist bookstore for the harder-to-find titles. This kind
of thinking drives feminist booksellers crazy - and out of
business. The only way they can keep those
harder-to-find (and slower-selling) titles on the shelf is by
selling lots of more popular books.
Carol Seajay notes that it was these bookstores and
feminist presses who proved "there was not only an
interest but a demand for books by, for and about
women." Certainly it's good that some of these topics
have become more mainstream, but relying on chain
stores run by large corporations is of doubtful value for
the progress of feminism. Sara Luce Look of Charis
Books & More its Atlanta tells a story of a lesbian author
who wanted to do a reading at the Atlanta Barnes &
Noble rather than at Charis, in order to have her books in
the big chain store. "So they had a small event, and then
returned most of the books." Big stores tend to return
unsold books in six weeks. Feminist bookstores are more
likely to keep books for six months or longer, whether
they arc selling or not.
Without feminist bookstores, who will keep these books
on the shelves? Kate Randall, co-owner of Antigone
Books in Tucson, stresses that "because you might be
able to buy Gloria Steinem at Borders today does not
mean that you will be able to do so in s few years, and it
definitely doesn't mean you can get Our Bodies,
Ourselves there right now." The belief expressed by
many book-sellers I interviewed is that if feminist
bookstores disappear, the chains will not be nearly as
interested in carrying feminist books and that will make it
even harder to get them published in the first place.
Not all the booksellers I talked to reported drops in
customers. Kate Randall believes Antigone Books has as
many customers as ever, and Linda Bubon of Women &
Children First is doing a thriving business. Both of these
are large stores in big cities and among the oldest feminist
bookstores in the United States. W&CF very
aggressively prepared for the challenge of the chain stores
by forming an independent booksellers association in
Chicago, and by relocating to a larger store, in an area
that was actively developing independent retailers, near a
neighborhood with a lot of families. They doubled their
size (now 3400 square feet) and were able to expand
their children's section, now twenty percent of the score.
In the 1990s, when the chains moved from the suburbs
into Chicago, W&CF did experience declining sales, but
by then they had the resources to ride it out.
Being a savvy owner willing to take risks hasn't been
enough to save other feminist booksellers, even in large
cities, and it's not easy educating customers. Sisterhood
Bookstore hoped that emphasizing textbook sales would
make up for declining sales. With textbooks, they had
gross annual sales of over half a million dollars in some
years during the 1990s, but each quarter's revenues were
just paying the previous quarter's bills. In Indianapolis,
Harriet Clare moved Dreams & Swords to a larger and
nicer location down the street in the 1990s. She says that
when the chain stores first moved in she wasn't worried
because "I thought I had a loyal clientele. I was wrong.
They liked Borders being open till 11 p.m. and fancy
coffee and lots of space. Not everybody left, and not
everybody left all the time. What I couldn't make them
understand was that every book makes a difference."
For many of us, shopping regularly at a local feminist
bookstore isn't an option. For me the closest one is a
hundred miles away, so I do most of my book shopping
online. Fortunately, most feminist bookstores now have
online sales, many of them through www.booksense.com
which makes it as easy to buy any book from an
independent bookseller as from amazon.com. At
www.booksense.com, you type in your zip code and it
produces a list of independent booksellers near you, with
links to those offering web sales. FB-Net also maintains a
list of feminist bookstores in the US and Canada on their
website, www.fembooknet.com, Most feminist book
stores welcome phone orders, too, and many have
toll-free order lines.
The Booksense website is new, and not as well known as
amazon.com or the chains that dominate internet book
sales as much as they do bricks-and-mortar store sales.
Indeed, several book-sellers commented that internet
sales have been more damaging to them than chain stores
moving into their city. Heather Ruzicka-Furr of Lodestar
Books in Birmingham, Alabama says that "people who
might feel guilty about going to one of the big chains often
don't feel guilty about ordering books from amazon.com
from home." Ironically, although books are the number
one item sold online, even the online mega stores have yet
to report profits on online sales.
But mega-bookstores are backed by large investors;
feminist bookstores are generally supported only by the
owner's personal financial resources. Audrey May started
Meristem in Memphis in 1990 with $40,000, half from a
silent partner and the other half borrowed from her father.
For several years she worked without a salary from the
store, and she closed in 1997 as a result of three years of
declining sales and rapidly increasing losses, after eight
years in business. When Harriet Clare closed Dreams &
Swords in 1997 after fifteen years in Indianapolis, an $
11,000 personal loan she had made to the store
dissolved. When Pokey Anderson started Inklings in
Houston in 1988, she went from a salary of $35,000 as a
legal secretary, to $20,500 as a feminist book-seller. A
long-time political activist, she remarks, "You could say I
was donating $ 14,500 a year to the cause." Anderson
decided to sell Inklings after eight years in business when
she calculated that with her losses of $16,500 on
$104,000 in sales in 1997, she was making less than $6
an hour. All of the booksellers I interviewed indicated
that access to capital was a problem for them, and lack
of capital for needed improvements was critical for the
four who closed their stores in the 1990s.
Bookselling can be a tough business, and feminist
bookselling definitely requires passion for something other
than money For these booksellers, that passion is creating
feminist space in which to foster the development of
feminist consciousness. These stores are places where
women are valued, where feminist issues are primary,
where sisterhood is (still) powerful. We get these spaces
intermittently at women's festivals and concerts, and in
women's studies classes, but where do we find public
feminist space, day by day, year round, except in feminist
bookstores? Does the loss of so many of these stores,
and the struggle other stores face just to survive, mean
that we have outgrown our need for this space?
I doubt it. What seems to be going on here is that the
generation of women who grew up with the women's
movement now have enough books - in fact many are
busy donating their book collections to women's studies
programs like mine. With the mainstreaming of feminism
and the greater availability of feminist books in chain
stores and especially online, we have many more book
buying options; the younger generation may be more
interested in other media like video and e-books. That's
not to say there is no market for the books feminist
bookstores sell, but that the market is smaller than it used
to be. Books are increasingly expensive, making it harder
and harder to resist discounts and used books. Several of
the owners of book-stores that closed commented on the
many shoppers who would browse the store and leave
with only a bumper sticker or a button.
So the younger generation often can't afford the price of
books or prefer other media, the older generation already
have more books than they can store, and the
booksellers find that many of the things that make them
valuable to feminism are things they don't charge for -
ambience, knowledgeable staff, activist bulletin boards,
meeting space. Perhaps there are ways to charge for
these things, but where does that leave us?
Maia Ramnath of New York City's Bluestockings puts it
this way, "To expect us to compete with large
corporations at their own game misses the entire point of
our existence, which is precisely to offer an alternative to
the value system and economic structure they represent.
The needs we meet (or try to meet) are mutually
exclusive to those met by the big chains, and are in fact
their antidote." That's a radical statement by a member of
a bookstore collective that runs the only feminist
bookstore in the largest city in the United States - with
one paid staff member. But feminist bookstores, like the
feminist movement, are products of radical thinking, not
only about the status of women but about power
relationships and the guardianship of the earth. Ideas that
undermine the power structure and threaten the status
quo will always have to struggle to survive.
Simone Wallace of Sisterhood Bookstore speculates that
feminist bookstores do better when feminism is
embattled. "The Reagan years were actually good for us,"
she says. "I thought of myself as like a Mother Courage.
We did best when we were selling during the wars. Duing
peace, people didn't seem to have as much need for what
we had to offer." interviewed Simone Wallace in August
2001 . I thought then of the Bush Administration's closing
of the White House office on women and various political
appointments that indicate that feminism's battles are far
from over. Two months later the United States was
dropping bombs on Afghanistan in response to the events
of September 11 . The media coverage of these events
suggests that the main-streaming of feminism has had little
effect on our nation's response to terrorism, as feminism
has had little effect on the mainstream.
Four of the five conglomerates that control eighty percent
of book publishing in this country are media giants:
Time/Warner, Disney, Viacom/CBS and Murdoch's
News Corp. For conglomerates like these, and for large
corporate booksellers, books are commodities that must
earn their keep. Insofar as books, like other media,
convey ideas, they are a commodity to be controlled and
perhaps censured. It is time we took notice and took
action. There is plenty we can do:
We can make sure that every book we buy, on whatever
topic, comes from a feminist bookseller, online or in
person. We can donate money to the non-profits that
many of these booksellers have set up to help them stay
in the business of promoting feminist consciousness. (For
a list of these, see my website,
mortonweb.uah.edu/wip). We can tell our
friends, co-workers and students about the situation.
Friends don't let friends buy from cutthroat corporate
booksellers! More than anything, we ran renew our
commitment to the feminist ideas and ideals that created
these stories. Every feminist book that doesn't get
published because there are too few stores to promote
and sell it is an idea that is silenced.
And every book counts.
Contact Information:
Rose Norman
Professor of English
Morton Hall 215
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL 35899
Office: 256/824-2373 Fax: 256/824-2387
Email: NormanR@email.uah.edu