Women In Print Movement : Secondary Sources

Agatha M. Beins’s Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity, is the first analysis of the relationship between periodicals and the development of a collective feminist identity in the 1970s. Beins’s work is based on the life and legacy of five major, and geographically dispersed, feminist periodicals during this time: Distaff (New Orleans, Louisiana), Valley Women’s Center Newsletter (Northampton, Massachusetts), Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Ain’t I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa), and L.A. Women’s Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister (Los Angeles, California). Based on the discourse within these sources, Beins examines the formation of the American feminist identity and collective consciousness.

Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South is a seminal anthology in the examination of lesbian and gay life in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Within the anthology, Saralyn Chestnut and Amanda C. Gable co-authored the chapter, “‘Women Ran It’: Charis Books and More an Atlanta’s Lesbian Feminist Community, 1971-1981.” In their chapter, Chestnut and Gable examine the particular role of Atlanta’s Black lesbian feminists in not just WIP but in the second wave feminist movement more broadly. In doing so, Chestnut and Gable illuminate the role of race in WIP and second wave feminism.

Harker’s book studies networks of southern lesbian feminists and their contributions to the conceptualization, formation, and proliferation of WIP during the late-twentieth century. In doing so, Harker’s work tells the previously marginalized story of southern feminists within WIP and subsequently resituates these southern lesbian feminists as central to not just WIP’s history but also southern studies, feminist history and theory, and queer theory. In particular, Harker’s attention to the producers and consumers of southern feminist lesbian culture highlights the intersection of geography, gender, sexuality, and politics not only within these women’s lives but in the WIP generally.

McKinney’s work investigates the history of American and Canadian lesbian feminists during the late-twentieth century and their contributions, as both individuals and organizations, to information and media history. In particular, McKinney devotes significant attention to the technologies these individuals utilized in the formation of their lesbian feminist communication networks, databases, and digital archives, all of which created a decidedly woman-driven and feminist media atmosphere. From this perspective, McKinney argues that lesbian feminists were both central and active historical agents in pioneering the use of novel media technologies to create media spaces for their own communities and, later, to preserve the materials produced by these communities for future users to access. While McKinney’s discussion of WIP is relegated to the beginning of their work, it nevertheless illuminates the formative role of early feminist lesbians in the movement as well as their technical contributions to WIP itself. McKinney’s work is particularly helpful for situating WIP within the broader lesbian feminist movement that began in the post-World War II era and within the transition from paper to digital archiving that also occurred during this time.