In response to a burgeoning feminist and lesbian movement and countering an explosion of chain and mall bookshops during the 1960s and 1970s, feminist bookstores in the United States grew and flourished during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (Cholmeley, Hogan, Castleman). These bookstores supported a vibrant ecosystem of feminist publications, publishers, booksellers, craftswomen and more. Within the movement, conflicting values emerged between feminists' desires to create and nurture spaces that supported women and inspired revolutionary feminism and the realities of entrepreneurial capitalism. Feminists wondered, how to keep a radical business afloat while upholding feminist political commitments? Feminist Bookstore News ( FBN), the trade magazine created and supported by the women in print movement, documents these challenges and feminist booksellers' responses. Through a close reading of FBN, this article explores three areas where economic necessities conflicted with feminist values and how feminists productively resolved these conflicts: who can read FBN (only booksellers or a broader women in print community?), advertising within the pages of FBN, and sliding scale subscription fee for FBN. Through these examples, an ethos of cooperation emerges among feminist booksellers as an economic strategy for survival and as a principled commitment for reconciling feminism and entrepreneurial capitalism. In addition to cooperation, FBN contributed a vital intervention for economic sustainability: sidelines. Sidelines, the sales of feminist, book-adjacent merchandise with a higher markup, were crucial to the economic model of feminist booksellers and FBN championed them and assisted booksellers in implementing sidelines sales. By understanding how feminist booksellers navigated conflicts between politics and economics and how they responded to the material conditions of small business entrepreneurship, a more complete picture emerges about how the women in print movement is “dialectically inextricable from the economic and demographic circumstances that concentrated and incorporated the publishing business” (Groeneland and Brier).
Enszer et al. (Sat,) studied this question.