Fifty Years of Feminist Bookstores
At their peak in the mid-1990s there were somewhere between 120 and 150 feminist bookstores in the United States. By 2014 there were thirteen. This is what they built, why almost all of them closed, and who is opening them again.
By Teona Abuladze · 12 min read
In 1972, Simone Wallace and her sister-in-law opened a bookstore in Westwood, a few blocks from UCLA, and called it Sisterhood. The stock list reads now like a syllabus nobody had yet written: Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, Our Bodies, Ourselves, shelves for Chicana writing, lesbian writing, childbirth, aging, domestic violence, the politics of health. There was a bulletin board by the door. People came in to read the board and left without buying anything, and that was fine, that was part of it.
Sisterhood lasted twenty-seven years. It closed in 1999, after a Borders opened across the street.
That arc — a storefront, a bulletin board, a chain store, an ending — happened about a hundred and fifty times in America between 1970 and the early 2000s. It is one of the strangest business histories of the twentieth century, because almost none of the women involved thought they were in business.
The women who were not running shops
Two stores claim to be first. A Woman’s Place opened in Oakland in 1970, started by a collective of eight women who had been selling feminist papers on the street. Amazon Bookstore opened in Minneapolis the same year, founded by Rosina Richter Christy and Julie Morse Quist, named for the mythological tribe. Neither founding group had retail experience worth mentioning.
What they had was a supply problem. The books they wanted did not exist yet in any quantity, and the ones that did exist went out of print fast, because mainstream publishers treated them as a fad with a short shelf life. So the bookstores became part of the production chain. Booksellers wrote to publishers demanding reprints. They ran letter campaigns. They told small presses what their customers were asking for, and the presses printed it.
“It looked like a retail business. But it was really a feminist plot to take over the world.” — Carol Seajay
Seajay would know. In 1976 she and Paula Wallace opened Old Wives’ Tales in San Francisco on a $6,000 loan. Two years earlier, four women in Somerville, Massachusetts — a biologist, a bookstore worker, an optician and a divinity school graduate — had pooled $15,000 and opened New Words on 6 April 1974. Capital came in these amounts. Nobody was venture-funded.
From 29 August to 5 September 1976, 132 women representing 80 organizations met in Omaha, Nebraska, for the first Women in Print conference. Publishers, printers, magazine editors, booksellers. The point was to build a parallel distribution system and stop waiting for permission.
Seajay went home from Omaha and started Feminist Bookstore News so the people who had met there could stay in touch. Five bookstores put in $100 each. The first issue came out on 14 October 1976 and ran eight pages. Over twenty-four years it ran 134 issues and 10,746 pages — order recommendations, sales figures, arguments, obituaries, gossip about sales reps. The last print issue was 140 pages. It is the closest thing the movement has to a complete set of minutes.
By 1977 there were nearly eighty stores. By the mid-1990s, depending on who counted and what counted, somewhere between 120 and 150.
What the system could actually do
In late 1973, Daughters, Inc., a small feminist press in Vermont, published Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. No mainstream house wanted it. It sold 60,000 copies in two years, almost entirely by word of mouth through this network of stores and readers — a number that would have made it a respectable commercial success at any New York publisher.
Then June Arnold, who ran Daughters, who had helped organise the Omaha conference, and who had argued publicly against selling to mainstream publishers, sold the reprint rights to Bantam for $250,000.
People were furious. The argument that followed never really got settled: was success inside the mainstream a victory or a defection? It kept resurfacing for the next twenty years in slightly different clothes.
The 1981 Women in Print conference in Washington drew over 250 women, of whom about twenty-five were women of color. At it, Barbara Smith announced the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
The lockout in Oakland
The stores were run by collectives, and collectives fight.
In 1982, the conflict at A Woman’s Place in Oakland turned into a physical lockout. Two or three older white members changed the locks on four others: Darlene Pagano, Elizabeth Summers, Jesse Meredith and Keiko Kubo. They described themselves as one Italian, one Jewish, one Black, one Asian. The dispute was about racism inside the collective and about whether lesbian separatism or coalition with male allies came first. It went to arbitration. The store reopened under a new agreement in 1983 with rotating leadership, and closed permanently in 1989.
The historian Kristen Hogan, who spent years in the Feminist Bookstore News archives, argues that this kind of conflict was the actual work — that the stores mattered most when they were places where white women were held accountable by women of color, in public, in the trade newsletter, in front of everybody. She calls it lesbian antiracism. Her harder claim is about what came next: that in the 1990s, as Barnes & Noble and Borders moved in, white booksellers reoriented around survival and competition, and the accountability work quietly stopped. The stores became small businesses with feminist inventory instead of movement institutions, and that, as much as the chains, is what killed them.
Not every store’s ending was so political. Womanbooks opened on West 92nd Street in Manhattan in 1975, founded by Eleanor Batchelder, Karyn London and Fabi Romero-Oak, stocking over 6,000 titles and running free concerts, workshops and readings. Audre Lorde read there. It closed in 1987 for a plain reason: women loved the place and treated it as a community center, and did not buy enough books to keep it open.
A store can be beloved and still go under. Those are two different measurements, and the movement spent thirty years confusing them.
The crash
The 1990s and 2000s went like this.
Old Wives’ Tales closed in 1995, rent and competition. Sisterhood closed in 1999. Feminist Bookstore News stopped publishing in 2000 — Seajay had said the word feminist itself was going out of fashion. New Words closed in 2002, killed by chains and online retail, and turned itself into a nonprofit programming organization instead.
In 1999 Amazon.com sued Amazon Bookstore over the name. The case settled that November: the bookstore in Minneapolis, which had used the name since 1970, assigned its common-law rights to the website in exchange for a license to keep using its own name. In 2008 new owners renamed it True Colors. It closed in February 2012.
By 2014, counts of surviving feminist bookstores in the US and Canada came in at thirteen or fourteen, depending on the counter. Roughly ninety percent of them were gone.
There was a final indignity in Portland. In Other Words opened in 1993 after another local women’s bookstore closed. Two decades later it became famous as the filming location for the “Women and Women First” sketches on Portlandia, a joke about humourless feminists that ran for years on IFC. In 2016 the store cut ties with the show, calling it diametrically opposed to its politics and accusing it of transmisogyny, gentrification and whitewashing. It closed in June 2018. For a lot of people under forty, the fictional version was the only feminist bookstore they had ever heard of.
2017
Something turned in 2017.
Sara Luce Look at Charis Books in Atlanta puts it plainly: that was the year sales started going up. Ms. counted more than thirty self-identified feminist bookstores in the US by January 2023, against thirteen six years earlier. Charis keeps its own list; it currently runs to about twenty-five American stores and twenty-two abroad, from Bermuda to Taiwan.
The new ones are not in the places you would guess. Violet Valley opened in 2017 in Water Valley, Mississippi, a town of under four thousand people. Burdock Book Collective in Birmingham, Alabama. 1977 Books in Montgomery. Socialight Society in Lansing, Michigan. Eleanor’s in Norfolk, Virginia, opened by Erin Dougherty in 2021. Harriett’s Bookshop in Philadelphia. Firestorm in Asheville. Fulton St. in Tulsa.
They opened into a broader independent boom. The American Booksellers Association counted 605 new brick-and-mortar, pop-up and mobile stores in 2025 alone, with membership up nineteen percent that year and a hundred and fifty-one percent over six years.
They also opened into a censorship fight. The American Library Association logged 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second-highest figure it has ever recorded, and 5,668 books actually pulled. About 39 percent of the challenged titles were by or about LGBTQ people and people of colour. Ninety-two percent of the challenges came from organised pressure groups and government officials, up from 72 percent the year before. Fewer than three percent came from individual parents.
A store that stocks exactly the books being pulled from school libraries has a reason to exist that is easy to explain to a landlord.
What it still costs
It does not always work.
Bluestockings opened on Allen Street in New York in 1999, lasted nearly twenty-two years there, converted to a worker-owned cooperative, and moved to Suffolk Street in 2021. In September 2025 the remaining worker-owners announced they were closing by the end of the year. The rent was $12,000 a month. The statement cited health, disability and money, unresolved disagreements about how a cooperative should actually run, and harassment from neighbours. There is no new location.
So: twenty-six years, a cooperative structure specifically designed to prevent burnout, and it still ended in a statement about people being at the limits of what they could manage.
The survivors from the first wave are now historical objects and functioning businesses at the same time. Charis Books, founded by Linda Bryant in November 1974, spent forty-five years in Little Five Points, moved in 2019 onto the campus of Agnes Scott College in Decatur in a partnership that gives it something close to institutional shelter, and turned fifty in November 2024. Women & Children First opened in Chicago in November 1979, founded by Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon, two students who could not find the books they wanted to study; they sold it in 2014 to two longtime employees, Lynn Mooney and Sarah Hollenbeck, and it now carries around 30,000 titles. BookWoman in Austin opened in 1975 as Common Woman, named after a Judy Grahn poem, and marked its fiftieth anniversary on 24 January 2026. Susan Post, who was in the founding collective, has been training a successor since 2024.
Fifty years is a long time to run a shop that was never supposed to be a shop. The bulletin board by the door turned out to be the durable part.
Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, “Feminist bookstores: The legacy and lessons of a women-led movement” (2022); Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Duke University Press, 2016) and Duke UP author interview; Ms. Magazine, “The Renaissance of Feminist Bookstores” (January 2023); Publishers Weekly, “The Culture Wars Are Energizing Feminist Bookstores”; Paste, “The Last 13 Feminist Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada” (May 2014); JSTOR Daily, “Feminist Bookstore News by the Numbers”; NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project (Womanbooks); The Pride LA and June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives (Sisterhood Bookstore); Charis Books & More history and bookstore list; Austin Chronicle (BookWoman at 50); EV Grieve (Bluestockings, September 2025); Amazon.com press release and Publishers Weekly on the 1999 trademark settlement; American Booksellers Association 2025 Annual Report; American Library Association, Office for Intellectual Freedom, 2025 censorship data; Wikipedia entries for A Woman’s Place, Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, New Words Bookstore, In Other Words Feminist Community Center, Women & Children First, Women in Print Conference and Rubyfruit Jungle.
