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Abstract
Feminist Book Fortnight was a signal event in the history of feminist publishing, but its history has not yet been written. Throughout the latter half of the 1980s, the Fortnight promoted feminist literature in the UK and Ireland and helped to sustain and power a revolution in feminist publishing. Drawing on the archives of Spare Rib magazine, this article analyses the often fierce tension between the Fortnight’s activist aims and its commercial imperatives, and maps out the distinctive regionalism of this annual book trade promotion. Books and literature were of vital importance to the women’s movement and Feminist Book Fortnight supported the expansion of the feminist literary marketplace outside London. As I will show, the Fortnight navigated not only between the activist margins and the commercial mainstream, but between isolated feminist outposts and metropolitan centres. Combining feminist digital geography with oral histories and literary analysis, this article concentrates not on women readers or authors but on the workings of the industry which mediated the production and consumption of feminist literature at this time. I argue that the Fortnight’s complex renegotiation of extant publishing practices (Murray (2017): 814), both commercial and regional, constituted its most significant contribution to the larger feminist movement.
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to my colleagues on the Business of Women’s Words project, especially Margaretta Jolly and Lucy Delap for their valuable and generous feedback on this article; to Jane Anger, Jane Cholmeley, Gail Chester, Ferha Farooqui, Gay Jones, and Jane Watts for generously sharing their memories and personal archives; to all those who have granted kind permission to reproduce images; and to the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RPG-2017-218] and Northumbria University for funding the project.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Spare Rib referred to henceforth as SR.
2 While Nigerian-born Emecheta lived and wrote in Britain, many of her novels focus on the role of women in Nigerian society.
3 See Laurel Forster on how constructing the means of communication was integral to the development of second-wave feminism (Citation2016: 813).
4 Cf. Spare Rib map (2021), British Library, https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/map (accessed 7 October 2022).
5 It was however far from the only book trade promotion event in operation at that time: Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ promotion was established in 1983, as was the Trask Award; the Whitbread Awards increased their allocated prize money substantially in 1985; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize was established in 1987 (Todd Citation1996: 101, 86–7, 91).
6 Spedding had a reputation among Spare Rib collective members for having a shrewd head for business and negotiation—Róisín Boyd attributes the take-up of Spare Rib by Comag, the Cosmopolitan distributor, to Spedding in an interview by Zoe Strimpel for The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing oral history project, reference C1834-05 © the British Library and the University of Sussex.
7 WH Smith sales had long been used as a yardstick for success in the world of feminist publishing; Marsha Rowe used it as a measure of how well Spare Rib was distributed, and the authors of Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors note that Sheba’s first book, Sourcream, sold well because Smith's stocked it; as did the journal Camerawork (Cadman, Chester and Pivot Citation1981: 38, 90).
8 Gail Chester, personal archive, IFBF ‘Minutes of Meeting held on 26th July 1983’.
9 See Todd on the ‘development of a “meet-the-author” culture’ as a ‘major change [in British publishing] since the late 1980s’ (Citation1996: 100).
10 Feminist Bookstore News henceforth referred to as FBN.
11 Letter from Spedding to FRB 1988, Working-Class Movement Library (WCML), Salford, org/radbook/5/2 box 8.
12 Cf. Women in Publishing: An Oral History. https://www.womeninpublishinghistory.org.uk/ (accessed 25 October 2022).
13 Cf. Bird (Citation2003).
14 Delap (Citation2021) traces the move from a more to less commercial basis for the magazine as it gained public funding and its related changes in collective membership.
15 ‘FRB Conference July ’85 Workshop Notes’, WCML, Salford, org/radbook/1/3.
16 Minutes of FRB Annual Conference 1986, WCML, Salford, org/radbook/1.
17 Richard Todd describes prominent literary awards such as the Booker Prize as ‘associated in the public mind with the entrepreneurship that characterized the Thatcher decade’, and its shortlist as a ‘consumers’ guide’ or ‘commercial “canon”’ (Citation1996: 61, 71).
18 Indeed, feminist author Alison Fell dubbed the Fortnight ‘Paranoia Book Fortnight’ for this reason (Gerrard Citation1989: 60).
19 Everywoman, set up in 1985, was ‘informational and liberal in approach’ (Chambers et al Citation2004: 152).
20 For a longer discussion of ‘municipal feminism’ and its relation to the WLM, c.f. Ross (Citation2019).
21 Gail Chester, personal archive, IFBF ‘Minutes of the Meeting held on 4th October 1983’; Gay Jones, personal archive, ‘Minutes from Planning Meeting held at A Woman’s Place’, 1984.
22 Gay Jones, personal archive, application for funding from South West Arts, 1984. For a history of In Other Words, c.f. Jones Citation2021a.
23 Gail Chester, personal archive, IFBF ‘Minutes of Meeting held on 6 December [1983]’ and ‘Minutes of the regional meeting, 24 January 1984’.
24 Search for ‘Feminist Book Fortnight’ on British Library’s Spare Rib map: https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/map.
25 I have not been able to obtain copies of this ‘full national programme’, which remains elusive.
26 One regional campaign, contemporaneous with the establishment of the Fortnight, was Spare Rib’s support of the miners’ strikes of 1984 and 1985, a political event that dramatically drew the whole of the national imaginary toward the regions.
27 Gail Chester, personal archive, letter dated 21 June 1984.
28 Cf. Goldsmith (Citation1994).
29 Rose notes that titles such as Charting the Journey demonstrate the frequency with which feminist writing ‘makes use of spatial images’ (Citation1993: 140).