The Intersections between Early Feminist Polemic and Publishing: How Books Changed Lives in the Second Wave

Abstract

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch were two of the foundation texts of second wave feminism – certainly, they generated the greatest amount of attention, the greatest number of headlines. Literary criticism and a critique of the canon defined both these polemical texts – indeed, Sexual Politics is perhaps the first feminist literary critical text – and these themes also occupied the women who set up the glut of feminist publishing houses that were established in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.

The feminist publishing phenomenon was predicated on the second wave idea that literature was a tool to gaining empowerment: hence the refrain ‘this book changed my life’. The feminist publishing houses took up the call to expose the biases of the English literary tradition by publishing early critical work engaged with this task. They also instituted reprint series that revealed the limitations and exclusions of the canon, and expanded its boundaries to include many more women writers.

Both Millett and Greer also problematised the normalising of binaried sexual behaviour – men as active, women as passive – in literature, and set out to counter this. Millett, Greer, and the feminist publishers have left a vital legacy. They shared the project of interrogating ‘great’ male literature, both in terms of its content and how the canon sets the boundaries of ‘greatness’. This article considers the intersections between them as the second wave got underway in the UK in the 1970s, examining what they have achieved in terms of feminist history and their ongoing influence on current formulations of feminist politicking.

Keywords:

• feminism
• publishing
• feminist literary criticism
• second wave
• book industry
• Kate Millett
• Germaine Greer
• rereading

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Interview with Carmen Callil, 10 November 2004.

²Interview with Marsha Rowe, 15 July 2004.

³For an anthology of some of the first of these texts, see Showalter (1986).

⁴Interview with Ursula Owen, 5 February 2009.

⁵Interview with Lennie Goodings, 8 November 2004.

⁶See the Women in Sport website at www.wsff.org.uk/the-challenge/the-challenge-elite-sportswomen.

⁷Interview with Ursula Owen, 5 February 2009.