“We fell in love with ideas and ideals and out of love with anyone who wished to constrain us. We understood there’d be no human rights without race and gender justice. We understood that exploiting people or the planet was a violence that we could not tolerate. We were anything but quiet.”
We are deeply concerned that much of the writing to date (2026) about The Women’s Press has been drawn from disputed media reports, unverified personal “memories”, or previous academic articles that used only those same inadequate, trivialising sources. There is an evident lack of understanding of how “political” The Women’s Press was – for that time and any time. Or for what “political” meant in terms of addressing multiple “intersections” of disadvantage and marginalisation, while simultaneously celebrating and amplifying the courageous, various, seldom-heard (then) voices of women boldly challenging the status quo.
A quick glance at the catalogues that we will display on this archive website shows that long before the term “intersectional” began to shape and drive the most effective feminist politics, intersectionality was the clear basis, foundation, motivation and reason for existence of the London-based, global feminist publishing house, The Women’s Press.
There was never any illusion about The Women’s Press skating by with “feminism lite”. Witty, yes, Stylish, yes, yes. Highly original at its intermittent best. But the catalyst was at least an embryonic sense that change to be meaningful involves many factors – and perspectives.
“From climate disasters hitting hardest in the poorest communities, to a sharp rise in racism and discrimination, to the spread of online misogyny and anti-rights rhetoric – it’s clear that equality is still out of reach for too many. The world can feel overwhelming and stacked with overlapping injustices. So how do we make sense of it all and how do we fight back? Intersectional feminism offers a way in. It helps us understand how different types of inequality – like racism, sexism, ableism, and classism – don’t just exist side by side but often collide and compound. [12 June 2025]”
https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/intersectional-feminism-what-it-means-and-why-it-matters-right-now
Societal and structural change requires looking way beyond your own experiences, as valuable as they are, to also ask, “How is life for you?” (And isn’t that the miracle of intelligent reading and writing? That we can ceaselessly discover, How is life for you?)
Commenting on and understanding the political why of The Women’s Press, and its impact, has been shamefully omitted by academic observers to date. As it builds, this archive will amply demonstrate that “why”. We will also foreground the intellectual achievements that enabled more effective advocacy and activism.
“Feminism is not a monolith. Like any large political or social movement, powered by passion and coloured by the real life experiences of multitudes of women, it has its internal schisms, divisions, factions and splits.”
But what did I know when, in 1977, I left behind my version of a hard-won “brilliant career” in mainstream publishing in London to start and run The Women’s Press? After all, publishing was a career that had given me access to some of Britain’s most exciting authors, to work that allowed me a far healthier sense of achievement and self, and to security in a profession I adored and had landed in at the age of 22, after six years of working in jobs in New Zealand and the UK I had uniformly wanted to escape. What did I know?
The challenge was not “having my own publishing house”. It was never “my own”, after all – as painfully as well as positively identified with it as I immediately became. For The Women’s Press to succeed under my leadership, I had to have the confidence of my closest, smartest, most politically active friends. Before there were any finished books to sell, and income from them, I had to have the trust of Naim Attallah who had so impetuously and impulsively decided on the basis of my very-young-person-star-status in publishing to back me.
Out there on my own, I had to believe that I could attract and commission not just “good writers” but some who were brilliant by any measure. I had to trust, too, that I could do them justice – even without (and this was the terrifying part) – the teams of highly competent professionals every established mainstream publishing house could offer.
As founder and first MD of a publishing house that was to be explicitly “political” yet had to be commercially viable (no trust fund in sight), I understood from the breadth of my experiences as a child living in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Samoa, then much later as a very young adult in Israel, then in (West) Berlin, as well as for a decade and a half in a fast-changing Britain, that it would never be enough to think about “gender” as though it were an homogenous experience for half (at least) of the human race.
Nor could I ignore the other “identities” that impact every human being collectively and individually.
The most obvious of these are race, social or economic class, and – arguably – sexual orientation. They also include culture, including but not limited to religion.
Within those frames, the variations of birth-to-death conditioning on individual human beings are immeasurable. In religion alone, the effects not just on identity but on a person’s deepest sense of self may reflect the intense male control, misogyny and homophobia that characterises all forms of religious fundamentalism, including within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Or it may reflect the equally obsessive ideological conditioning that’s characteristic of authoritarian states. Or of those nations where dehumanising of “others” is normalised, along with militarism and what James Hillman called, “A terrible love of war.”
“We must ask ourselves equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit should not be the height of our ambition.”
The logic of a thoughtful intersectional perspective is that it takes for granted (or should) that “gender-based violence” – men dominating or controlling women – is neither universal nor inevitable in interactions between people. It is, however, hugely serious where it does occur, profoundly affecting children, too. Trauma from any form of dominance – including state-sanctioned abuse and military violence – has powerful psycho/social and moral consequences. What’s more, they are intergenerational, as any First Nations person can testify.
Economic power, too – or its absence – is experienced in ways that cannot any longer be reduced to a gender binary. More obviously still – or it should be – how an individual exercises their economic power (and their right to vote, or to identify and act from their political priorities), is never predictable on the basis of gender only.
In preparation for the February 1978 launch, I wrote, In preparation for the February 1978 launch, I wrote,
“The Women’s Press reflects one of the most exciting continuing changes in society this century: the progress of women towards a position of equality. We are not only asking for the same rights as men, we are also actively reassessing the society in which we are to play an equal part. We are examining history to find our place there and, while demanding power, are questioning where the distortions of power lie. The Women’s Press is a new voice of this change.”
That “the personal is political” is a truism that we attempted faithfully to reflect in our publishing. I would suggest, and I write this sadly, that it was arguably better reflected through the published writing than in the actions and decisions of those who worked there over the decades. (Not “dozens”, certainly, and laughably, not “hundreds” either, as one academic naively suggested.)
No one is undeserving of praise; no one is free of fault. In reconsidering power, however, from any position that evokes “feminism”, to trivialise or entirely “disappear” foundational work seems indefensible.
“Be prepared to be enlightened, enraged, amused, engaged, and above all provoked.”
Writing here as I am doing in 2026, the marked gaps that I see now in work practices in a publishing company where political ideals varied were frequently in interpersonal skills that accepted the reality of an inequality of responsibility and accountability. There were marked gaps, too, in professional expertise and publishing experience. Commercial realities are tough in any industry. No trade publishing house – beyond academic houses subsidised by a larger institution – will survive the publishing of worthy publishing choices that cannot find readers. Vision is translated only by skill and excessively hard work in any start-up (another word unknown then). Idealism and reality are not always the lion and lamb, or lamb and lion, lying
down together.
Among the books I am proudest of commissioning and publishing in my most active years are those by Dr Lucy Goodison alone, plus In Our Own Hands: A Book of Self-Help Therapy, that Lucy wrote together with Sheila Ernst. Like Dr Joanna Ryan (to whom with Lisa Alther I dedicated my 1995 international best-seller, Intimacy & Solitude), Lucy and Sheila were members of a loose collective, Red Therapy, aimed at democratising and making genuinely accessible much needed insights from psychotherapy. This was more than “another area of publishing” anticipating the massive cascade of “self-help” that would come much later.
Practising “intersectional politics” is a whole-of-life choice. It’s not an easy one. As theory only, “intersectional politics” is embroidery. Naming power abuses, identifying disadvantage, listening to experiences beyond your own, refusing the temptations of unethical self-interest, judging the effects of your behaviours on others, owning your power that others may not have, owning your power to change: these were all addressed by Lucy, Jo, Sheila, Marie McGuire and others.
This was another innovative, plausible and highly effective “intersection” between psychoanalysis (available to few), psychotherapy (then and now still inaccessible to many), and socialist feminism. The books and writing that came out of that time, including on disability, made essential insights widely available AND shifted the parameters around which individuals viewed their emotional and somatic distress. And their search for belonging and meaning.
This pioneering writing contributed to structural and social change around mental health and showed decisively how inextricable it was from personal wellbeing.
Years later, in 2022, esteemed social historian Sheila Rowbotham would write in Daring to Hope of 1970s socialist feminism (which continued/continues way beyond the 1970s):
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.
And you have to do it all the time.”
The term “consciousness raising” from the Second Wave of the women’s liberation movement, is entirely relevant here. An intersectional sexual politics challenges us to “raise” our awareness of the complexities of disempowerment. It also demands not greater power and sense of individual and collective agency only, but a rigorous examination of what that power (choice, control, voice) is wanted, fought for, and – in the large and small conscious choices that shape character as well as a “life – used for.
It is important to note, however, that there wasn’t any uniformity of analysis demanded from or expressed by the variety of women whose writing was published by The Women’s Press.
From 1977-1985, 64 books were contracted or commissioned for The Women’s Press by Stephanie Dowrick, with some authors – Janet Frame, Lucy Goodison, Alice Walker, Joanna Ryan, Joan Barfoot, Toni Cade Bambara, among them – continuing with the Press long beyond that time.
Of those writers, radical feminists, particularly leading writers from the US, were published alongside socialist feminist writers, largely though not exclusively British, European, New Zealanders. Black feminism was strong from the earliest times. Stephanie Dowrick had contracted Toni Cade Bambara, Patricia Grace, Alice Walker when those extraordinary writers of immense talent had been declined by mainstream publishing houses on the basis that “British readers were not interested in reading Black women writers.”
From 1983 until 1990 when she left her role at The Women’s Press to set up Open Letters, Ros de Lanerolle, a white South African strongly committed to anti-apartheid politics, published a significant range of new voices, including a number from Africa, as well as exceptional writers like Joan Riley from Britain.
Gender politics were of course not forgotten.
“We live in an intensely sexist society which denigrates women publicly and makes it very difficult for them to be a mother, while at the same time sentimentalising the idea of motherhood. The archetype of the mother is one who makes up for all the cruelty, competitiveness and hostility in the outside world – and remains unaffected by it. She consoles everyone for all that they’re feeling while maintaining her own presence; and if she fails to maintain this presence, she is reviled. I think this is asking too much of women. We go into motherhood needy, having been imperfectly mothered ourselves (naturally, because we have been mothered by human beings, not goddesses). We have been imperfectly fathered. And we’re supposed to know how to make up for all that for everyone else. We can’t.” Stephanie Dowrick, quoted in, “Intimacy and Solitude, An Interview with Stephanie Dowrick”, Carol Alexander, One Earth, Winter, 1992/3.