Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity by Agatha Beins, and: The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability by Kristen Hogan (review)

Liberation in Print, by Agatha Beins, and The Feminist Bookstore Movement, by Kristen Hogan, enter the recent reconsideration of what has been contentiously termed “second-wave feminism” through the lens of feminist print culture. They ask how print and print culture might complicate our understandings of feminist histories. In addition to drawing on archival research and oral histories, both authors foreground their own positionality as researchers: Beins opens with her experience of a surprising find in the archives, and Hogan begins her first chapter with an account of recording an oral history with bookwoman Carol Seajay, who encourages her, not insignificantly, to “Make sure you’re in the frame.” In this way, each book emphasizes the importance of feminist methodologies in ensuring we avoid repeating entrenched narratives.

While both periodicals and bookstores are frequently cited as important aspects of the feminist movement, much of the scholarship to date has stopped short of offering critical analysis of how these sites functioned. Hogan claims that feminist bookstores have been “too often overlooked in feminist movement histories” (xxiii); the same could be said of the grassroots feminist periodicals that Beins examines.

In Liberation in Print, Beins argues that studying feminist periodicals can help us better understand how collective feminist identities were formed. Beins focuses her study on five feminist periodicals from the 1970s, concentrating on regional grassroots publications that reflected a variety of forms and concerns (as opposed to those linked to national organizations or focused on a particular issue). She also chooses periodicals from regions “that are not usually foregrounded in the narrative of US feminism,” making an important contribution in asking how a geographic focus on certain large northeastern cities has shaped our narratives about feminism (20).

The drawback here—as Beins notes—is that her focus is on periodicals created in large part by white women. As Erica Townsend-Bell has noted, much feminist writing by women of color in the 1970s occurred in periodicals but typically not in publications that explicitly labeled themselves as feminist, so we run the risk of obscuring this work when we look only at periodicals that claim that label.¹ More research on periodical publishing by women of color during this era will be crucial to fully answering the questions this book raises.

The book also points to the need for further feminist scholarship within the fields of periodical studies and book history. Beins often frames her methodology in terms of white male thinkers—e.g., Robert Darnton on book history, Benedict Anderson on imagined communities, Michel de Certeau on strategies and tactics—while simultaneously noting the shortcomings of their methods for feminist approaches. Her engagement with theorists including Maylei Blackwell and Sara Ahmed is an important step in challenging dominant, male-authored approaches of these fields.

Beins argues, for example, that “repetition was one of the primary devices through which the term feminism solidified as a collective identity for women’s liberation activists,” (5) and that periodicals are an important site in which to trace the patterns and variation that constitute such repetition. Her five chapters trace a series of such patterns and variations across the five periodicals—from the conditions of their formation, to the importance of their production methods (showing readers how to “do” feminism), to the creation of imagined communities for women otherwise unable to “locate” feminism.

One such pattern is the repetition of the terms sister and sisterhood across the periodicals that she studies, which she traces in chapter 4, “Invitations to Women’s Liberation.” By analyzing the repetition of these terms across feminist periodicals, she makes an argument about the effects of shared language in shaping collective identities. Another memorable...