The Women's Press was a feminist publishing company established in London in 1977. Throughout the late 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, The Women's Press was a highly visible presence, publishing feminist literature.
Founding In 1977, 28-year-old New Zealand-born "rising star"Joan Goodman, "Getting Into The (Sometimes) Glamorous World of Publishing", Cosmopolitan, June 1976. publisher Stephanie Dowrick founded The Women's Press in London with personal support from feminists active in the women's liberation movement (WLM) and with financial support from literary entrepreneur Naim Attallah. He guaranteed the press's launch overdraft on the basis of Dowrick's previous commercial and literary publishing experience.Penny Perrick, "The man who finances feminism", The Standard, May 4, 1982.Susan Maxwell, "Seeking balance between passion and survival", NZ Herald, January 27, 1979.
Attallah, via the Namara Group, eventually owned the Literary Review and already owned Quartet Books, which had previously partnered with Virago Press. "Stephanie was [Editorial Manager] with Triad Paperbacks when…Quartet asked her if she would like to do some books for them. She declined but…Attallah, head of the group that includes Quartet Books, suggested that she set up a separate company."POL (UK), May, 1979.
"Dowrick arrived in Europe at the age of 20 and, after a series of odd jobs in London and Berlin returned to London. She then entered book publishing, and [after her start at George Harrap], in quick succession, became managing editor of New English Library and then editorial manager of Triad Paperbacks [Cape, Chatto and the Bodley Head, together with Granada Publishing].""In Search of Stephanie" by David Leser HQ, Nov/Dec 1993.
This high level experience with major trade publishers encouraged Dowrick to attract to The Women's Press potentially high-profile writers challenging the status quo. Dowrick's conviction was that "[t]here was space for a new feminist publishing house that would reflect one of the most exciting political currents in society and make commercial sense." As Attallah recalled, "It was set up with a hundred £1 shares, with me holding fifty-three percent and Stephanie the balance of forty-seven per cent [...] to begin with Stephanie was the only full-time employee and the whole operation was started in her living-room in her house in Bow."
Attallah defended his support of Dowrick's overtly feminist publishing stating that "women's liberation is for everyone” and "no one in their right mind would oppose it". The financing had to depend on commercial acumen. "It didn't cost a lot initially because I worked in my home for no wages and then for very low wages."Simon Collins, "I can turn my hand to things, New Zealand News UK, 12 August 1981. Dowrick worked as the sole full-timer until 1979. "We...pay ourselves modest wages and are responsible for what and how we publish, and for eventual solvency."Brenda Little, "A PRESS OF HER OWN", Cleo (UK), June 1979.
The logo of The Women's Press was an iron, a play on the symbol of unthanked domestic labour associated with women, with black and white stripes running down the books' spines to represent an iron's electric cord. The multi-media designing for brand identity was done by Canadian artist/designer Donna Muir. The wit and skill of Muir's distinctive work extended to posters, badges, postcards, stationary and especially to the spines and prelims of the books at a time when overt multi-media brand recognition was in its infancy.
Through the close association of Dowrick with therapists and writers from the Women's Therapy Centre, TWP explicitly embraced the slogan "the personal is political", and vice versa.Priscilla Pitts, "Feminist Books – Full Steam Ahead With The Women's Press", NZ Herald, 1978. Dowrick was joined part-time by Sibyl Grundberg, and in February 1978 The Women's Press issued its first five books, including Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner and a reprint of Jane Austen's Love and Freindship (sic). Other reprints in the 1978 list included Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Other Poems with a "dazzling" introduction by Cora Kaplan and the first British publication of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. The Women's Press emphasised contemporary works over classics and understood itself as raising consciousness and making effective contributions to women of all cultures and classes over a range of areas.
By 1979/1980, its publishing programme included non-fiction titles on sexual and race politics, physical and mental health, environmental and peace politics, art history, aesthetics, gender studies and many other disciplines. It operated with minimal staff during its first five years, and a small informal advisory group of feminist academics and media workers. Suzanne Perkins worked on the covers and although part-time and working from home, became a company director. All the cover artists were women. The aim was to commission and enable genuinely intersectional writing that could support women of varied cultural backgrounds, and would challenge the status quo wherever it limited women's sense of agency and possibility, while meeting commercial realities and publishing excellence.
In 1979, the Press moved from Dowrick's home in Bow, East London, to offices in Shoreditch, East London, developing links to similarly innovative feminist publishers in Europe, including Sara (the Netherlands), Frauenoffensive 1974-2016 (Germany), Les Editions des Femmes (France), as well as expanding distribution in Australia and New Zealand.
In 1980, Dowrick established The Women's Press Book Club as a revenue stream for TWP and to benefit TWP authors via direct sales to committed readers. The Book Club allowed members to order several books a month, some published by TWP, others bought in.
In 1981–2, TWP benefitted as a new publisher from selling UK and ANZ paperback rights to Penguin in Kinflicks author Lisa Alther's follow-up novel, Original Sins, and from selling foreign rights in non-fiction titles. By the end of 1981, Dowrick reported that in four years, "…we have achieved more than I thought possible. People no longer question our role, and our books are seriously reviewed."Stephen Pile (Atticus), "The monstrous regiment?", The Sunday Times (UK), 15 November 1981.
Dowrick was an active TWP Director 1977-1985, mentoring de Lanerolle through 1982-4, then from 1991 to 2000 was Chair of the TWP board."The rewards of energy and madness", The Bookseller (UK), 20 March 1998. In 1981, she was the first winner of the Pandora Award given by the UK group, Women in Publishing, "For the best contribution to the positive image of women".
Sexual Politics "What we learned and practised [at The Women's Press] was this. One group of human beings cannot determine the value of other human beings' lives without reducing us all. I do not think I fully understood as a younger woman that the power of feminism, race justice, gay, environmental and peace politics calls for a new understanding of what it means to be human. That's what liberation means: liberation from the utterly false proposition that some lives intrinsically matter more than others."
Its politics were aimed at interrogating the gender, social, racial and economic status quo locally and globally, especially as these affected women and children. This was explicitly intersectional: “From climate disasters hitting hardest in the poorest communities, to a sharp rise in racism and discrimination, to the spread of online misogyny and anti-rights rhetoric – it's clear that equality is still out of reach for too many. The world can feel overwhelming and stacked with overlapping injustices. So how do we make sense of it all and how do we fight back? Intersectional feminism offers a way in. It helps us understand how different types of inequality – like racism, sexism, ableism, and classism – don’t just exist side by side but often collide and compound."
In 1977, as it prepared to publish, Dowrick wrote: "The Women's Press reflects one of the most exciting continuing changes in society this [20th] century: the progress of women towards a position of equality. We are not only asking for the same rights as men, we are also actively reassessing the society in which we are to play an equal part. We are examining history to find our place there and, while demanding power, are questioning where the distortions of power lie. The Women's Press is a new voice of this change."
This is echoed by social historian Sheila Rowbotham: "We must ask ourselves equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit should not be the height of our ambition."
Of The Women's Press and the women's liberation movement more generally, Dowrick said: "We understood there'd be no human rights without race and gender justice. We understood that exploiting people or the planet was a violence that we could not tolerate. We were anything but quiet."
"You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time." (Angela Davis, The Women’s Press author, 1982)
“Be prepared to be enlightened, enraged, amused, engaged, and above all provoked.” (Beatrix Campbell, The Women’s Press author,1998)
No uniformity of feminist analysis was demanded from writers. "Feminism isn't sacred. It isn't a religion. (We should be free to question all aspects of it.)" Carmen Calill, founder of Virago, The Guardian (UK), 6 June 1990. Radical feminists, including from the US, were published alongside socialist feminist writers, largely though not exclusively British, European, New Zealanders. Black feminism was explicitly intersectional, strong from the earliest times and developed through the 1980s and 1990s despite the rise of racism in Britain with the election of Margaret Thatcher, intensifying from 1981.
Gender politics were not minimised. Across art, literary and cultural history, it published work that challenged assumptions about women's capacities and achievements. "Traditional" caring roles were well understood. "We live in an intensely sexist society which denigrates women publicly and makes it very difficult for them to be a mother, while at the same time sentimentalising the idea of motherhood. The archetype of the mother is one who makes up for all the cruelty, competitiveness and hostility in the outside world – and remains unaffected by it."Stephanie Dowrick, quoted in, "Intimacy and Solitude, An Interview with Stephanie Dowrick", Carol Alexander, One Earth, Winter, 1992/3
Through each of three major phases of its history, the emphasis changed with leadership priorities. "Feminism is not a monolith. Like any large political or social movement, powered by passion and coloured by the real life experiences of multitudes of women, it has its internal schisms, divisions, factions and splits.""Feminism: The Next Step" by Yvonne Preston, The National Times, 27 January 1984
1977–1990s Under Dowrick's leadership The Women's Press differentiated itself from Virago Press, by emphasising contemporary political concerns, using the slogan "Live Authors, Live Issues". Also through brand identity, and publishing leading US radical feminist writers as well as those from Britain, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.