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 womanistand/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.
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 ofWomen 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 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 editor-by-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 PewHispanicCenter 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 self-proclaimed 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 anti-immigrant 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 basisfrom 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 managepay 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?
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, witha 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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