The other week, a book on a topic unrelated to spaces that shaped queer women’s culture helped me realize something important about why feminist bookstores were especially successful in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The book was Lawrence Wright’s Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (1994)—which mentioned that The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, had sold more than 750,000 copies. Wright, whose work I generally admire, didn’t note this fact with admiration, but rather to remind readers that a book that had exerted a tremendous impact on American society, an impact he clearly thought was in excess of what it should have had, was written not by psychologists or scientists, but rather by a poet and a journalist. (The horror!) The case Wright chronicled in Remembering Satan was egregious—the sexual assault investigation at its center was handled extremely poorly. It would also be silly to deny that there were unsubstantiated cases of sexual abuse in the “satanic panic” of the 1980s. Nevertheless, The Courage to Heal helped hundreds of thousands of women make sense of their childhoods and their lives in a way that nothing before had managed. It was sold in all kinds of stores, but I am willing to bet that feminist bookstores sold more copies than any other kind of bookshop because women felt more comfortable asking about it, looking at it, and buying it in a feminist setting.
There were other publishing boomlets of the time that I am confident were overindexed in feminist bookstores. Titles on women’s spirituality by authors like Starhawk (every lesbian household had at least one copy of The Spiral Dance: The Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess) and Z. Budapest were part of an entire section at Lammas, and I can only imagine the reaction a bookseller at Crown Books might have to a woman asking for a title about Wicca or goddess rituals. Alcoholics Anonymous dates back to the 1930s, but in the 1980s there was a big boom in small volumes of meditations and daily reflections for people in recovery or who grew up in families affected by addiction, and I just know that a store like Lammas, where we sold lots of copies of books like Each Day a New Beginning, were more of a safe shopping environment for these books. The same is true, of course, for lesbian novels, anything about queer culture, and also for books about what was then called “domestic abuse.” Shopping for resources on those topics was noticeably different in a feminist bookstore than in any other kind of bookshop.
I rarely see those books anymore. I imagine that a lot of that content has moved online, but I also think they represent a phase the world as a whole, and women especially, needed to go through. There is still an immense need for healing in the world, of course, and I hope there are safe places to find it these days.
COME SEE ME! I’m writing this as I prepare to head over to the Midwest for events at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis (7 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 19) with Krista Burton, and at Women and Children First in Chicago (7 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 21) with Searah Deysach, the owner of Early to Bed.
If you’re thinking, “hmm, Chicago, next week, isn’t that …” Yes, I’ll be there during the Democratic National Convention, which I did not think about when I chose the date, but I hope that there’ll still be people at the bookstore. (I think it will depend on whether Chicagoans will be willing to go out while the DNC is in town, but fortunately, Google Maps tells me that Women and Children First is a half-hour drive from the United Center, so I remain optimistic!)
RECOMMENDATIONS: R and I have been watching Murder, She Wrote reruns on a daily basis, and honestly, I recommend it.
LISTEN TO ME: I was on KQED talking about women’s spaces, and you can now catch that conversation as a podcast. On Working, I had a fantastic conversation with poet and memoirist Judith Barrington about her upcoming book Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, and about the experience of running a residential writers retreat for 14 years. (No link because I’m scheduling this before the episode goes live, but you’ll find it at the top of the Working feed.) On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I talked about my experience of being a first-time author, and on Culture Gabfest, Julia Turner, Dan Kois, and I chatted about It Ends With Us, Time Bandits, and 20 years of Yelp. You can also listen to the audiobook version of A PLACE OF OUR OWN, which got a rave review in AudioFile magazine, wherever you get your audiobooks!
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