“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.” – “The Personal Is Political,” by Carol Hanisch, 1969
I do not remember how I became familiar with the saying, “The Personal Is Political.” I must have picked it up from an anthology, or perhaps from my friend’s feminist mother, a Women’s Studies professor, because Doris Lessing, my favorite writer, never used this jargon; nor was it the kind of thing we said at our short-lived (two meetings!) consciousness raising group in high school. And yet the slogan was around, as was “Tell it like it is.”
I have always admired the alliterative quality of “The Personal Is the Political,” a radical saying coined in the 1960s . The sound and meter are not to be underestimated. I would not mind having it on a button (though it would be a crowded button).
Women were speaking out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “telling it like it is,” lobbying for legal abortion, free day-care, and equal pay for equal work, only one of which demands was ever met, legalized abortion, but now that has been taken away, too. So telling it like it is and The Personal Is Political were powerful ideas but do we dare talk about them nowadays? It’s a bit awkward in a red state.
Still, the feminists made strides in the twentieth century. One of the most important offshoots of the Second Wave was the founding of women’s presses and publishing companies. In 1970 in New York The Feminist Press was established. It began by reprinting neglected women’s classics like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy (SF), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. Nowadays The Feminist Press has expanded its list to publish Barbara Ehrenreich and other non-fiction, as well the entertaining Femmes Fatales series, which includes pulp classics like Laura, Stella Dallas, and Now, Voyager.
The Feminist Press had a leftist political agenda, so it cannot quite be compared to the women’s presses that sprang up in the UK. Still, something was simmering in England, too. The writer Carmen Calil founded Virago in 1970, and soon began to publish neglected women’s classics. And much later, in 1999, a rival women’s press, Persephone, dedicated mostly to publishing interwar women’s books, was founded by Nicola Beauman.
Virago has the more “intellectual” list of the two British women’s presses. Several of the books in the Virago Modern Classics series are really, truly classics (Mrs. Oliphant’s absorbing Chronicles of Carlingford, Elizabeth Taylor’s beautifully-written novels and short stories), while others were published because of their historical significance (Storm Jameson’s intelligent novels. Vera Brittain’s political novels), still others capture the zeitgeist of the ’60s (Nell Nunn’s Poor Cow, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado). On this impressive list, you will also find titles by Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Barbara Comyns, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Penelope Mortimer, Dorothy Baker, Kay Boyle, and Stevie Smith. Over the years I have read but then prudently weeded several Viragos, not without regret.
And then there is Persephone, founded in 1999, not a direct descendant of Second Wave feminism, or not that I know of. I am less familiar with Persephone, but its charming interwar women’s novels strike me as “cozier” than Viragos and Feminist Press titles.
Nicola Beauman, the founder, is a literary scholar of interwar fiction, and her company in the early years seemed to have a brilliant marketing strategy: it appealed to women’s nostalgia by publishing adult books by the writers of children’s classic, two by Frances Hodgson Burnett, one by Noel Streatfeild, and one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. And then loyal customers bought her more literary novels. I was won over by two novels by Monica Dickens, one of my favorite writers, especially The Winds of Heaven, a classic about the fate of an older woman. (A. S. Byatt wrote the introduction, or perhaps it was an afterword.) And it was a stroke of genius to reprint the once popular Dorothy Whipple, whose character-driven novels reflect deep insights into marriage, women’s wounded psyches, and the terrifying meaning of a dysfunctional family.
Persephone’s publication of Dorothy Whipple represents the difference between Persephone and Virago, or so Carmn Calil told the Guardian. She said that Virago never crossed “the Whipple line,” implying that Whipple was an inferior writer. And much as I enjoyed my recent reading of a novel by Dorothy Whipple, I do understand the concept of “the line.” Yet Virago and Persephone often overlap, both publishing books by Penelope Mortimer and Rachel Ferguson, for instance. And in recent years Virago has indeed crossed some kind of line by publishing Angela Thirkell’s light, humorous Barsetshire series.
It is a rich age for women’s publishing. I can lose myself in modern feminist theory or Stella Dallas from the Femmes Fatales series from the Feminist Press, a Virago edition of a favorite novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. or an intelligent, entertaining novel by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone), whom, by the way, I read with enthusiasm.
Nice summary!