Much as I love to make broad, “they changed the world,” claims for the places I wrote about in A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, it’s not entirely true to suggest that lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, dyke softball teams, lesbian land groups, feminist sex-toy stores, and queer vacation destinations were the first places of their kind to address customers and potential customers in a direct, friendly style. Still, they adopted an unusually friendly tone—often taking great pains to establish that they were part of the community they were marketing to.
This is true of most of the ads pioneering lesbian-feminist businesswomen placed—though I admit it’s surely relevant that the only places they could afford to advertise were the kinds of small publications and community newsletters they would have read whether or not they had seized the entrepreneurial mantle. I laugh every time I see this joint ad from the 1990s for Manhattan bars the Cubbyhole and Crazy Nanny’s that mentions the Cubby’s new exhaust fan. WOW, A NEW EXHAUST! That is the very definition of inside softball. (Or bad advertising, but I prefer to think of it as showing that the proprietors had a good sense of what their patrons valued.)
This “hey, we're just talking, dyke to dyke” approach is also clear in the greeting owners Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning placed on the inside page of the first mail-order catalog for their company Toys in Babeland (later just Babeland). The familiar tone and the smiling avatars, drawn by cartoonist Ellen Forney who also created the catalog’s product illustrations, reminded readers that Claire and Rachel weren’t just businesswomen, they were also family. If a reader had taken up the suggestion offered in Claire and Rachel’s last sentence and dropped into the store when they found themself in Seattle, they would’ve found a place where they could get expert advice about local bars and activities as well as help finding a good sex toy.
Early feminist toy stores had a particular need to establish that their businesses were “by us for us” because the existing adult stores they were trying to distinguish themselves from made it very clear they had little interest in welcoming women, and they certainly weren’t feminist. In this ad from a 1988 New York NOW newsletter, Dell Williams, the founder of Eve’s Garden, “the first mail-order catalog of its kind to dedicate itself specifically to the sensual needs of women,” puts a picture of herself at the bottom and tells potential visitors, “It will be my pleasure to serve you.”
In the 2020s, feminist entrepreneurs are still keen to show they understand the needs of our ever-changing community. When I asked Christina Pascucci-Ciampa, the owner of All She Wrote Books in Somerville, Mass., why she wanted to open a feminist bookstore in the current environment, she told me, “No algorithm can talk to you about the ideas that are in a book that she’s read and been inspired by.” So true!
EVENTS: I’m glad to say that I have some book events on the calendar. I was also recently invited to an amazing outdoor festival in the Oxford area that seems like something straight out of Midsomer Murders (only with more bookish attendees and fewer murders). I don’t have the date pinned down yet, but watch this space!
Friday, April 12: Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Noon.
Monday, June 3: Washington, DC. Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue, 7 p.m., in conversation with Christina Cauterucci.
Wednesday, June 5: New York City. P&T Knitwear, Lower East Side, 7 p.m. Exciting news about my conversation partner coming soon!
Friday, June 14: Edinburgh, Topping & Company, 7 p.m., with Alison Bechdel.
Monday, Aug. 19: Minneapolis, Magers & Quinn, with Krista Burton, 7 p.m.
Wednesday, Aug. 21: Chicago, Women & Children First, 7 p.m.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to get to it, but Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, is indeed magnificent.
LISTEN TO ME: On Working Overtime, fabulous new Working co-host Ronald Young Jr. and I talked about what freelancers can do to make sure they get paid as well and as efficiently as possible.