Florence Howe changed the landscape (and so can you)
Florence Howe passed away this past week. Had I heard of her before? No. But I follow a LOT of women's history and women's rights accounts, and this was all over them. So let's talk about her!
Howe was born in 1929 (same year as MLK, Jr, for cultural context) to Jewish American parents in Brooklyn. She was an English professor in her thirties, but her presence on a more national scale ratcheted up in 1970 when she founded The Feminist Press. Remember that "feminism" as a term, while coined in the mid-1800s, took on its modern significance in this period, the second-wave. The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. The Feminist Press's described itself as "an educational nonprofit organization founded to advance women's rights and amplify feminist perspectives."
Founded in 1970, the Press began by rescuing “lost” works by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and established its publishing program with books by American writers of diverse racial and class backgrounds. Since then it has also been bringing works from around the world to North American readers. The Feminist Press is the longest surviving women’s publishing house in the world. (x)
So Howe founds this press that keeps important voices in the culture, and then she became president of the Modern Language Association. According to her website's bio, her colleagues called her "the Elizabeth Cady Stanton of women's studies," which I would take in the "really helped get the movement going" way and not the "said a lot of thoughtless and shitty things" way.
She also edited an anthology that has a now-hilarious title:
Now, in this, whatever-wave-of-feminism-we're-in, the example of her now fifty-year-old press can inspire us that we can create things that last; we can have our Big Moment ahead of us (she was forty-one when the Feminist Press was founded and went on to do more amazing things into her eighties); and we can do our part to change the landscape.
Florence Howe and the women of the 1960s and '70s moved the needle so far, that American culture and what women are able to do has been altered significantly. Let's end with a quote from her:
I don’t think of publishing either as money making for the moment or as noise making for the moment. I really think about publishing in relation to learning and consciousness over the long haul, and what is needed to make something that represents more accurately the world we live in.”