This week I got sidetracked on what I recognize is an "I know this will probably end up being a sentence (at most) in the book, but I can't stop researching it anyway" rabbit hole.

It started with an open letter that Daughters Inc., the lesbian-feminist press that first published Rubyfruit Jungle, sent to the feminist media in 1977, explaining why they had not been sellouts when they sold mass-market rights for that Rita Mae Brown novel to Bantam, a mainstream press.

I found their take pretty convincing. The following chunk gives a sense of their "actually, we're doing what our writers need us to do, and besides, what about all those writers who've always published with the big guys" reasoning:

Rita Mae is the only "famous" feminist who has consistently and exclusively published with the feminist presses. Because she published Rubyfruit Jungle with Daughters we were able to publish a total of nineteen books of which only some pay their own way within our limited feminist markets. Rita Mae "sold in" to the feminist presses in 1972. All our presses would be much stronger today if other "famous" feminists had taken the same risk.

If I were optimizing for efficiency, that would probably have been the end of it--I had captured the quote that I will put in the book when I sit down to write. Naturally, though, I couldn't resist seeing what else Big Mama Rag, the publication where I saw the open letter, had said about Daughters, Inc.

It turned out that they'd printed a LOT about the company, notably a six-and-a-half-page (over two issues) behemoth of a polemic against Daughters, attacking not, as I expected, the company's decision to license a mass-market edition of a lesbian novel to a company owned by men but, rather, an interview that four women associated with the press--owners June Arnold and Parke Bowman and workers Bertha Harris and Charlotte Bunch--had given to the New York Times.

I know that interview well. It's one of those nuggets of absolute gold whose discovery makes me punch the air. It was a chonker of a piece, more than 5,000 words of Lois Gould, a heterosexual feminist, talking to the Daughters women about their political views and how they were putting them into practice at the press. The piece was published in the Sunday magazine on a day that seems like a great one to have your company profiled--Jan. 2, when everyone still remembers that they had just resolved to spend more time reading the newspaper. The Daughters women were given enough space to explain their thinking--and I guess they felt comfortable enough with Gould to share a few off-the-cuff thoughts that weren't yet fully developed.

This made for really interesting reading, but it also infuriated Marina Franchild, who WENT OFF! She expressed her anger in four full densely typed pages (with no illos) in the April 1978 issue of Big Mama Rag and another two and a half in May.

I'll be honest, Franchild's attack was hard to read. There's one logistical reason for that--back then, in the analogue age, there was no way to "link to" the NYT piece, and even though Franchild used quite a few quotes, none of her impassioned complaints really made sense if you didn't have the full NYT article in front of you--which, let's face it, no one would've. (For this reason alone I would have voted against running the article.) Then there was the spirit of the piece. It was addressed directly to the women who had been quoted in the NYT--and the tone was really harsh. Finally, the politics. I'm a forever socialist, but I do sometimes forget how unappealing I have always found socialist-feminism. (To summarize its foundational belief, perhaps unfairly: We'll tackle sexism and homophobia after the class war is won.) Ultimately, Franchild didn't consider Daughters a "feminist business" because it was focused on art rather than politics, and she thought the Daughters women were using the women's liberation movement "for personal betterment." (I realize this is a very brief précis of a very long article, but I promise it's not worth further summarization.)

You would expect a bunch of readers to react to a piece like that--and they did, on both sides of the question--but I was struck by the Big Mama Rag collective's statement. In the May issue, they included a short note saying that in April, when they had published the first half of Franchild's jeremiad, they "discovered the article right before we began production" and they had "since engaged in self-criticism for sloppy process in not taking time to discuss the article more. Several members of the collective had not even read the article until it came out in print in the paper. While this often happens in the mad rush to get the paper out on time, for an article as controversial as this one, we realize that we should have taken more time to talk about it ourselves." They promised to write a full editorial on the topic for a future issue and "resolved to tighten up our process all around, by making political discussion by everyone on the collective a prerequisite to publishing any controversial articles."

Guess what? Someone complained about that editors' note--and I was surprised by how much I agreed with them! Ann Leffler (who later became a professor at the University of Maine) wrote to say that establishing a double standard for controversial vs. noncontroversial material would hobble feminist media and would diminish the movement itself. That's because, "If you have to go through a lengthy collective process only for controversial articles, and you're already pressed for time, you would have to be masochists to consider publishing controversial articles very often. Result: you won't." Why would that be an issue? Because noncontroversial articles tend to reflect the values of "people with the dominant view" who "tend to be white, middle or upper class, heterosexual, Protestant, etc. ... A movement without a lot of open fights is usually a movement ruled by exactly those social groups which already benefit from the system the movement was meant to attack." Fair!

Was that the end of it? Of course not! In the July-August 1978 issue, the promised editorial appeared, and the collective praised Franchild's piece for raising important issues, including, "the responsibility of feminists when dealing with the straight press, accountability to the feminist community, collective responsibility for feminist strategies, maintaining a radical overview with regards to reformist political tactics, and attempting to create feminist businesses." Still, they criticized themselves for general disorganization and for not contacting Arnold, Bowman, Bunch, and Harris to get their response ahead of publication.

The collective also blasted Franchild for indulging in what they called "irresponsible criticism"--effectively for assuming the very worst of the Daughters women, rather than taking their past record into account.

That wasn't quite the end, though. In a section subtitled "Dealing With the Establishment Media," the collective hammered Arnold, Bunch, Bowman, and Harris for failing to stick to the topic of Daughters and the politics of feminist publishing when talking to a straight journalist, concluding, "They volunteered much information that distorted and badly misrepresented the women's movement."

I admit, I was getting a bit shirty here. Looking at this from the other side--as someone in search of juicy quotes that might be slightly off topic (because workshopped talking points are very rarely of much interest to anyone), I was appalled by this attitude. And then I remembered that recently Today in Tabs' Rusty Foster had written an excellent column about the New York Times' trust problem in which he concluded that it would be foolish to talk to the NYT about trans issues, or as he put it, "I have trans children in my family and I definitely wouldn’t talk about that with the Times. In fact I didn’t." Plus ça change ...

Yeah, none of this will be in the book!

RECOMMENDATIONS: I barely listen to music anymore, and I've never really played an instrument. (Primary school recorder classes don't count, I'm pretty sure.) Nevertheless, since I am basically a YouTube addict, I found myself watching a guy who fixes broken musical instruments (and along the way explains how instruments work) and then uses them to make songs and samples. Honestly, all the videos on the David Hilowitz Music channel are pretty fascinating, but maybe start with this $13 thrift store mandolin. (Watching several of his videos has also given me a deep appreciation for the miracle that is wood glue.)

*I have no idea how a mammoth could get into a hole made by rabbits.