By Janet Brewer
Those of us who were around in the Seventies will remember the books which meant the most to us back then. For me it started with The Feminine Mystique, The Captive Wife and The Female Eunuch. Thank you, Betty Friedan, Hannah Gavron and Germaine Greer for setting down on paper the ideas which were already whirling in my head, and for helping me to make some sense of them.
Bristol had its own Women’s Centre from February 1973, and soon we had bookshelves filled with the feminist books and pamphlets which weren’t so easy to find in bookshops. This project became known as Women’s Books.
It had all started a year earlier, when Brenda Jacques arrived in Bristol, bringing with her a stock of pamphlets. These included Women Workers Struggle for their Rights and The Myth of Motherhood. Brenda became the WLM ‘Literature Secretary’. By the time the Women’s Centre officially opened in Waverley Road, Sue Beardon was Literature Secretary. Sue gave much time to the Centre until a rota of volunteers was established, and it was under Sue’s guidance that Women’s Books really took shape. I first joined the centre rota and then the Women’s Books team in September 1973, along with three other volunteers. New books that month included Red Emma Speaks and Combat in the Erogenous Zone.
We bought in books at a discount, through a wholesale service called Bookwise. Every now and then we would check our stocks and order a list of books, and then wait for a hefty carton of books to arrive. We opened up to a treasure trove of gleaming new paperbacks. If there were new titles, we advertised them in Bristol’s monthly Women’s Liberation Newsletter. Spare Rib was ordered directly from the Spare Rib Collective. Sometimes we also held copies of Red Rag or Shrew, but those were not in so much demand.
We stocked not only the ground-breaking overview books which explained women’s position in society, but practical books to help with specific aspects of our lives. Our Bodies, Our Selves from the Boston Women’s Health Collective demystified healthcare, and Women’s Rights: A Practical Guide, with its brilliant pop art Superwoman cover, taught us how to understand the law. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear was standard reading for those of us involved in setting up the Bristol refuges.
Other titles expanded our understanding of women’s lives in other times or other countries. Big Mother and Little Mother in Matabeleland, and Country Girls in 19th Century England were two History Workshop pamphlets. I still have my faded copy of Country Girls. Those cost 30 pence each, while Hidden from History, a major source of context for women’s later battles, cost £1.50.
As different women browsed the Women’s Books shelves, new topics were suggested to us. Linda Ward added poetry to our list, and Karen Snodin suggested non-sexist adventure books for girls, which we bought from Canada.
As well as selling at the Women’s Centre, we took the books out to conferences – these were for special groups in Bristol, or the South West regional conferences. We always met women eager to buy, and it was good to be able to provide the books they needed.
So many of the books we read were important to us not just as individuals, but also because they held us together more closely in our working groups, and as a movement.
I left the group in 1977, and Linda took over. It was still going strong in 1978, and profits that year had paid for a new duplicator at the Women’s Centre. However, with bookshops starting to take more notice of feminist literature, the need to provide our own stocks waned, and Women’s Books seems to have been dissolved in 1980.
Some details of the books named above:
Big Mother and Little Mother in Matabeleland (Edgar Moyo, History Workshop pamphlet no 12, 1973
Combat in the Erogenous Zone (Ingrid Bengis, Wildwood House, 1972).
Country Girls in 19th Century England (Jennie Kitteringham, History Workshop pamphlet no 11, 1973)
Hidden from History (Sheila Rowbotham, Pluto Press, 1974)
Our Bodies, Our Selves (Boston Women’s Health Collective, 1973)
Red Emma Speaks (E. Goldman, Vintage, 1973)
Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will hear (Erin Pizzey, Penguin, 1974)
The Captive Wife (Hannah Gavron, Pelican, 1973)
The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer, MacGibbon and Kee, 1970)
The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan, Penguin, 1965)
The Myth of Motherhood (Lee Comer, Spokesman Pamphlet no 21, 1972)
Women Workers struggle for their Rights (Alexandra Kollontai, Falling Wall Press, 1971)
Women’s Rights: A Practical Guide (Anna Coote and Tess Gill, for NCCL, Penguin Special, 1974)