Founding and brief chronological history of The Women’s Press, London (1977-2003)
The Women’s Press (TWP) was founded in 1977 by New Zealand-born Stephanie Dowrick, then Editorial Manager of Triad Paperbacks (owned by Cape, Chatto, The Bodley Head, with Granada Publishing), with conditional financial support from Palestinian-born Naim Attallah, then Chair of Namara Ltd and of Quartet Books.
[From Wikipedia quoting Naim Attallah: “It was set up with a
hundred £1 shares, with me holding fifty-three percent and Stephanie the balance of forty-seven per cent […] to begin with Stephanie was the only full-time employee and the whole operation was started in her living-room [in fact, the kitchen!] in her house in Bow.” ]
Naim Attallah had impetuously and with characteristic ebullience and enthusiasm offered Stephanie Dowrick the chance to “have her own publishing house” on the basis of recognising a fellow visionary – and hard worker with first-class publishing experience and global contacts.
To finance the company – always run on a shoestring, despite the elegant, polished, witty “look” of the books – Naim agreed to back the necessary overdraft for which Stephanie as MD was solely responsible, as she was, also, for the editorial/political direction of the Press and its continuing viability.
The Women’s Press came about through a meeting between Stephanie Dowrick and Naim Attallah arranged by William Miller and John Boothe, two of the original “quartet” of founders of the progressive Quartet Publishers, which had been the original home for Virago.
At that meeting, Stephanie dismissed the idea of commissioning a list of “feminist books” for Quartet Books – recently acquired within the Namara Group. Naim suggested – reflecting a potent moment in UK publishing and in the still emerging Women’s Liberation Movement – that Stephanie may instead like to take up the challenge of creating and running a distinct publishing house, within but totally independent editorially of the Namara Group.
“The Women’s Press gave my words a home across the Atlantic when mainstream publishers didn’t know what to do with a Black woman writing about the American South.”
The distinctive “iron” iconography that “branded” TWP was devised by brilliant Canadian artist Donna Muir. It immediately attracted bookshop support.
From the outset, there was a creative strength across all areas of publishing that would be the hallmark of those founding years.
The emphasis on lively commissioning and contracting, plus design skill and wit, set The Women’s Press apart and contributed immeasurably to the initial acceptance and interest from media and the book trade.
This was brilliant “branding” before that was a thing. The distinctive “iron” iconography that “branded” TWP was devised by brilliant Canadian artist Donna Muir.
Stephanie was the daughter of a mother who was both “an excellent writer and emerging painter at the time of her early death” (also a gifted teacher). She was also influenced by her earlier years living in and visiting Germany and France where an understanding of the power of “culture” was central to a wide-ranging political analysis.
“For women, then, poetry—or art—is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
Art is, yes, a commodity and “entertainment”. It also tells profound truths about time and place and culture. It dramatically affects our self-perceptions, even when that’s subliminal. By commissioning brilliant original work (like the portraits done by Jacqueline Morreau), and featuring then-unknown women artists, Stephanie made “art” a radical and liberating feature of the evolving feminist landscape.
She did this also through the initial strong design of book covers, through art calendars (for which she had to find European allies in a highly competitive market), and eventually the annual Women Artists Diary, worked on initially also by Suzanne Perkins, the principal cover designer for some years. As well, TWP produced a bourgeoning range of postcards, and other memorable media including badges. But it’s for the “iron” in its many manifestations that TWP’s graphic contribution is best remembered.
Why the “iron” iconography was such a master stroke
The ultimate “reclamation”: Donna Muir and Stephanie Dowrick took a ubiquitous household item used by women in the domestic sphere with little thanks or recognition, and repurposed it into a symbol of unstoppable, forward-moving collective power.
The “iron” pun: It brilliantly played on the word “iron” – shifting the meaning from a dreary “not-fun” domestic chore to “iron will” and industrial, locomotive strength: “red hot”, “don’t be oppressed”, “steaming ahead”!
Subverting the “steam”: The steam from the iron no longer represented smoothing a man’s shirts or ironing “his” underpants (if it ever did!!); it became the exhaust of an engine driving women’s literature, politics and liberation fast forward.
“ . . . the central reason why books have meant so much to me . . . is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also – thank God – of the light which continues to struggle through.”
TWP and the wider book trade world
To succeed as an editorially independent publisher and to offer the best-possible publishing opportunities to established as well as emerging writers, The Women’s Press had to be trusted by and of interest to the book trade in the UK particularly. Fast developing opportunities in other markets, especially Australia and New Zealand, despite their far smaller populations, were also critical.
London publishers, agents, booksellers at that time were both “self-important, cynical, cliquey – and intelligent, fun and creative”. says Janie James, a prominent publicist in that era.
In an interview in Publishing News (UK), 25 July 1980, Patricia Miller describes Stephanie Dowrick “…transfixing more than a hundred people…at a meeting of the Women in Publishing Group which had run up a healthy store of interest from all over the book trade.” To a charge of elitism, Miller reports Dowrick making clear that “…while she keeps her speaking and publishing controversial, she intends [for the writers’ success] to reach a general audience and has no interest in being a missionary.”
Of the Shoreditch office, ”in [then] less-than fashionable Shoreditch High Street [!]”, Miller writes, “Up the ratty stairs is the typical airy, white room, the typical makeshift bookshelves and the typical plants. Untypical are the handsome feminist posters, postcards and calendars, all sold by the Press in addition to their books. The emphasis on design is not incidental. ‘Interfering’ in the graphics is the purest pleasure the Press has given me,’ says Stephanie Dowrick.”
American Sibyl Grundberg was an early director (until 1979) and part-time worker, and later co-edited the internationally best-selling anthology, Why Children? with Stephanie Dowrick, that was soon translated into multiple languages.
The slogan that came in 1979, “Live authors. Live issues” – devised by Stephanie Dowrick as central to the branding – indicated the intention of The Women’s Press to commission and/or publish books that explicitly and boldly challenged the status quo.
This was particularly emphasised during the publishing period from 1978 to 1985 when prominent authors included Lisa Alther, Marge Piercy, Alic Walker, Michèle Roberts, Janet Frame, Kate Chopin, May Sarton, Dr Lucy Goodison, Dr Joanna Ryan, Dr Mary Daly, Dr Michèle Barrett, Dr Helen Taylor, Cora Kaplan, Gillian Perry, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Cade Bambara, Patrica Grace, Colette, Monique Wittig, Paula Weideger, Leonie Caldecott, Nor Hall, Louise Bernikow, Verena Stefan, Shulamith Firestone, Phyllis Chesler, Joan Barfoot, Marie Cardinal, June Arnold.
These – like all TWP writers – wished to reach readers! Working cooperatively and knowledgably across all sections of the book trade, and actively supporting the efforts of enthusiastic book sellers, demanded skill, and also unwavering confidence in the value of what TWP was publishing.
Years later, then MD Kathy Gale could say with pride, “We put the authors first.” Ensuring the professionalism of TWP publishing, and the efficacy of the publicity, marketing and “repping” into bookshops, was fundamental to that.
“Every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.”
Throughout its 25-year history, The Women’s Press was notable for enabling pioneering brave, brilliant lesbian and what’s now called “queer” writing.
TWP also pioneered genuinely intersectional writing, looking deeply and freshly into entrenched profound – but too easily ignored or trivialised – disadvantages of poverty and race, along with issues of gender and sexuality. We offer much more on this on the “Sexual Politics” page.
While TWP largely chose books for their informed and informing excellence, Stephanie Dowrick and later Kathy Gale personally drew on their publishing experience to work intensively and collaboratively with new as well as experienced authors. They similarly worked co-operatively innovative European publishers, including Sara (the Netherlands), Frauenoffensive (Germany), Les Editions des Femmes (France). (Articles on some of their most innovative commissioning are forthcoming.)
Both MDs also juggled with awesome success politics and publishing survival.
“I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years old. And I was writing all the time.”
– Nawal El Saadawi, TWP author
1998: A year of celebration
The first TWP books were published in February 1978.
The 20th birthday celebrations – in 1998 and under the leadership of Mary Hemming and Kathy Gale, with Stephanie Dowrick as TWP Chair on a prolonged visit from Australia – included reprints of some of the extraordinary writers who had been with the Press from the earliest years. Prominent among them was Janet Frame’s “An Angel at My Table” trilogy, filmed by Jane Campion and still available on streaming services. (Our Janet Frame dedicated page is forthcoming.)
Dowrick’s motivation for founding The Women’s Press – and supporting it in a variety of roles through most of its history – was political AND professional. In Tribune, 16 July 1986, Stephanie is quoted as saying,
“There is a myth that the reason The Women’s Press came into existence was that it was difficult for women to get published. In fact, this was not the case. It has always been possible for women to get published, and for women to be successful writers. But we have to look at the differences between being a writer who is a woman and a writer who is struggling with ideas that are [legitimately] feminist. We were looking at the idea of having a publishing house that would respond to the theoretical ideas that the women’s liberation movement was developing.
“It was also important to develop a feminist publishing house because there were women who would take strong exception to being published in a mainstream publishing house alongside books which were offensive to them, or which were marketed in ways they found offensive.
“Another reason for having women’s presses is that if a woman is trying to say something that reflects an experience that isn’t mainstream, and that is challenging of the sexist status quo, then she’s probably going to produce a much stronger kind of work if she works with editors who share her politics. So, the existence of the feminist publishing houses, and particularly The Women’s Press, is a statement that there are other kinds of writing which have been marginalised, misunderstood, or simply had not been enabled to come into existence.”
(In Dowrick’s previous publishing role, a joint owner of Triad Paperbacks was Chatto & Windus – which incorporated The Hogarth Press – founded in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. This association led to the publication, in 1979, of Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing by distinguished Woolf scholar, Professor Michèle Barrett.)
From 1982, following Stephanie Dowrick’s initial move to Australia, anti-apartheid activist Ros de Lanerolle had been appointed as Managing Director, with Sarah Lefanu in a senior role and Suzanne Perkins continuing as principal book cover designer. Sue Gilbert also worked part-time over some years in various roles, from 1979/80, both for The Women’s Press and The Book Club.
As founder, Director and co-owner, Dowrick continued, until 1985 or later, to offer constant support, encouragement, and editorial and financial guidance to de Lanerolle. Copious correspondence attests to this, whether she was in the UK or Australia. (This correspondence will be available to serious researchers.) Dowrick also kept a close eye on matters concerning The Women’s Press Book Club, set up to support The Women’s Press and ease the ever-present cashflow pressures.
Founded in 1980, The Women’s Press Book Club contributed a great deal to the visibility and success of a wide range of women-centred books, while adding to the financial stability during the strongest periods of Women’s Press publishing.
Writing in Resurgence, May-June 1981, Léonie Caldecott noted, “The Women’s Press, in spite of an overdraft guaranteed by the Namara Group, is constantly struggling to make ends meet, due to the necessity of selling small print runs at prices they feel women can afford. The recession and high rates of interest have made this even harder. In order to deal with this problem, they have started The Women’s Press Book Club, which in six months has acquired around 1500 members . . . As they’re choosing from amongst many lists, as well as their own which for the number of books on it is admirably varied, they have the potential for reaching a wide cross section of women and those interested in women’s issues.”
The TWP publishing story took another turn when, in early 1991, Stephanie Dowrick was impelled to become more involved again – this time to support the survival and then the revival of the Press she had founded, following a three-year period of accelerating and eventually unsustainable financial losses.
(The revival did indeed occur, resulting in TWP stability, survival and a further 13 years of publishing. See Kathy Gale’s first-hand account in REVIVAL.)
Only months earlier (1990), and while still TWP’s MD, Ros de Lanerolle sought unsuccessfully to set up an alternative feminist publishing house, Miriam Books. Her stated plan was to take “key staff” with her.
Events of this period are covered in detail in CORRECTING THE HISTORY (LINK). They include Ros’s later efforts to achieve a management buy-out at TWP (1991), then later still (1992) efforts to set up Open Letters – none of which eventuated. TWP did survive – and continued to publish for 13 more years, making 25 in all.
The three-year dramatic collapse in TWP fortunes – blamed first on a general recession, then on “corporate interference” – is an all-too familiar story of ignoring the basics needed for survival and needed even more so when editorial independence is politically essential.
At any publishing house committed to professionalism – and to paying authors at least modest advances and standard royalties – it is necessary a) to select, publish and intelligently market books for which there are sufficient buyers; b) to “cost” each title realistically on the basis of informed sales projections, no matter how passionately you “love” it; c) to curb lavish freelance and other expenses that cannot support the survival of the publishing house as a whole.
“The work that was being done at The Women’s Press was very radical, very ground-breaking, very innovative and courageous….” Stephanie Dowrick, writing in The Saturday Paper, March 2021
Ros and her team had inherited from Stephanie Dowrick an established feminist publishing house, enviable brand recognition, and a remarkable group of writers – as well as books commissioned or contracted to appear into the mid-1980s. Those authors included Marge Piercy, Joan Barfoot, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, May Sarton, Sally Belfrage, Andrea Dworkin, and both Alice Walker and Janet Frame, who greatly benefitted TWP via wildly popular movie adaptations of their work.
While there were some unquestioned successes during all the 25 years of TWP publishing, there was in the 1985-1990/91 period too little vitality or renewal, despite a greater emphasis on so-called “popular genres” which delighted some readers but could not be mass-marketed.
“Genre writing” – sold in mass market editions – is frequently promoted by publishers to support riskier but serious non-fiction or literary writing. At a feminist publishing house dependent on brand loyalty, as TWP always was, this worked only with some lead crime writers, and less so with SF writers. Those who did best could additionally offer “literary” interest, just as early authors Marge Piercy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Monique Wittig, and others had done. Newer “cross-genre” writers, including Octavia Butler, Suzy McKee Charnas and Joanna Russ, continued to be published from 1991 to 2002/3.
New and unknown writers can be successfully published by an enterprising publishing house and always were at TWP. But “brand marketing” and “brand loyalty” are part of making that work and in that mid-late 1980s period of TWP history, the figures demonstrate (see Correcting the History) that much of that vital brand loyalty was lost.
Flair, wit, strong graphics had all boosted TWP’s launch and rapid take-up by reviewers and readers. But now there were serious problems with publishing choices, book covers, and marketing – all of which had been TWP’s stand-out strengths.
The cover of Sally Belfrage’s Flowers of Emptiness, published by Stephanie in 1981 and shown here, features a deservedly wonderful quote from super-star writer, Jessica Mitford, way before such endorsements were commonplace.
Sally Belfrage was already a superb writer with literary admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. All writers, though, early or relatively early in their careers need care and flair, plus interest from media to alert potential readers to their existence.
TWP, perhaps even more so than Virago, originally trod a fine line between “mainstream” – with strongly creative marketing efforts to reach as many readers as their excellent writers deserved – and “alternative” in an equal determination to blast assumptions that limited women, played down their varied strengths, or failed adequately to celebrate (and sometimes excavate) their achievements.
Working with Quartet Books (and also Pipeline) as their UK distributors, TWP avoided what we would now call publishing into a silo. That meant working intelligently and cooperatively with mainstream as well as alternative bookshops and media, taking for granted that public culture can be influenced by writing from feminist authors whose analysis could provoke new thought and, ideally, a new depth of humane care whether this was for people, the planet, special groups – or coming generations.
“We were not standing by. Or just publishing reactively. The Women’s Press was actually setting the agenda on an astonishing range of topics. And was doing so with energy and conviction – not assuming that we had all the ‘answers’, only that we were willing to pursue tough or enlightening questions.”
Revival 1991-2002
We cover the REVIVAL from 1991 onwards thoroughly. It cannot be overlooked though in this ESSENTIAL HISTORY.
Within six months of taking up their joint MD roles, Mary Hemming and Kathy Gale had revived The Women’s Press sufficiently, both editorially and in sales, to bring it back into modest profit.
This was an extraordinary achievement after a combination of unsustainable publishing choices, limited sales, and excessive outgoings had led to three years of very significant losses and brought the Press to its knees. During this period, they brought to The Women’s Press and skilfully republished a range of high-profile established and new authors, including bel hooks, Beatrix Campbell, Dionne Brand, Drusilla Modjeska, Shay Youngblood, Charlotte Watson Sherman, Sue Woolfe, Charlotte le Favour, Kate Cann, Marcia Muller and Manda Scott. They wooed authors who had left, or who were being approached by the large publishing houses, to write books for them, including Val McDermid.
They republished – against publishing trends – highlights from the backlist, plus excellent new books from existing Women’s Press authors including Alice Walker, Joan Riley, Mary Daly, May Sarton, Caeia March, Stevie Davies, Angela Davis, Patricia Grace, Marie Cardinal and Val McDermid, Joan Barfoot. New outstanding successes included three of Stephanie Dowrick’s own books that were simultaneously published in the US by W.W.Norton, later by Penguin (USA). They gave steadfast support to The Women’s Press most beloved authors, giving extra support also to the Livewires list for young women.
They combined publishing acumen with political focus, successfully publishing a widespread range of writing on race, gender, disability, childhood sexual abuse, psychology, literature and the arts. They rebranded the books, achieved widespread publicity coverage, a range of national and international rights sales, including to leading newspapers and magazines, while maintaining The Women’s Press Book Club. Above all, they worked calmly and professionally to restore The Press during and beyond the long period of antagonism and turmoil that followed the departure of the previous team, enabling The Women’s Press to continue for a further 13 years.
“We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life.”
Following the resignation of Kathy Gale in 1999 to become a director of Simon & Schuster, and Mary Hemming soon after, Elsbeth Lindner was appointed MD. However, the need for a specialist publishing house had changed. Stephanie Dowrick was less involved. The publishing industry itself was changing fast.
The Women’s Press lives on.
The Women’s Press ceased independent publishing in 2002/3, having published upwards of 5-600 titles. Its continuing influence on the publishing industry, on writers and writing, and on what readers expect and demand, is immeasurable. When in early 2026, Stephanie first alerted potential users to the development of this website, the response was large-scale and wholly positive.
2027 will be the 50th anniversary of TWP founding, and the catalyst for an even greater depth of understanding – and heartfelt celebration.
The power to “publish” is a privilege – and responsibility. Even more so when much of what is published overtly represents a strong push against conventional views and the powerful institutions that uphold and support such views.
From small beginnings, but with high ambitions and ideals, women’s achievements in writing and publishing at The Women’s Press continue to influence well beyond their quarter century of active existence.
Steaming ahead still? Arguably, yes.
