Reading at feminist bookstores: Women's literature, women's studies, and the Feminist Bookstore Network

This dissertation explores how feminist bookstores have built and are building communities through and around print, the influence of feminist bookstores on the publishing industry, and the involvement of feminist bookstores in founding the fields of women's literature and women's studies. I introduce the concepts of the feminist literary sphere, to describe feminist bookstores as spaces of public discussion and activism made possible by texts, and the feminist shelf, to articulate a new way of reading women's texts through recognition of their contexts in interdisciplinary feminist literatures collected on the shelves of feminist bookstores. To develop this analysis of feminist bookstore activism and its invitation to change our reading practices, I focus on archival and oral history research of the Feminist Bookstore Network and four feminist bookstores: New Words in Cambridge, Massachusetts; In Other Words in Portland, Oregon; Womanbooks in New York, New York; Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, California. The lives of these feminist bookstores, supplemented with stories and moments from other histories, provide a sample of the foundations and innovations of the feminist bookstore movement.