I am jumping out of the South End to Watertown - Watertown?! - to start a section on Persephone Press, a lesbian-feminist collective that published books from 1976-1983, when it was sold, interestingly, to Beacon Press. (I have to wonder if my former boss and mentor Joanne Wyckoff was involved in this deal as I believe she was at Beacon Press at that time and involved in a lot of their amazing feminist publishing - not to mention famously buying paperback rights to Octavia Butler's Kindred, which is unrelated but she should get credit!). I'm interested in Persephone Press as it was a collective, like South End Press, and I'm really drawn to that model, with the full understanding that there are serious challenges with it (as one can see in the short life of this important publisher).
This press should not be mixed up with the still-thriving Persephone Books in the UK, whose beautiful newsletter I still get after i stopped into their former store-front years ago in London. As they say on the site:
Persephone Books reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century. All of our 153 titles are intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written. As well as novels we also publish short stories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, gardening books and cookery books; each title has an elegant grey jacket and a patterned endpaper, along with a matching bookmark.
It's a sidebar but I recommend checking them out. I love their edition of Flush by Virginia Woolf - a "biography" of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel!
Persephone Press, on the other hand, was started in 1976 (same year the good folks at South End Press started their efforts) by Pat McGloin, Gloria Z. Greenfield, and Marianne Rubinstein. This was an age of real feminist power in the Cambridge area (I think of Watertown as in the area as it's right next door), as recounted beautifully in Kristin Hogan's The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. I need to revisit this store with Persephone in mind, to see what is said of them in that book. Ok, but the three founders:
How I came to this press will get me back to another press that may be a brief entry only because I don't know how strongly I can identify it as a Boston area press, and that's Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, famously started by some folks involved in the Combahee River Collective, which *is* considered a Boston institution (I believe). Kitchen Table was started by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith, along with Demita Frazier, had founded the Collective. I discovered Persephone Press when I was looking into This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, now in print with SUNY Press. I thought Kitchen Table had published it, and they did publish an edition but only after Persephone originally published this book, in 1981. As part of Persephone's closing, they sold this and a Black feminist anthology to Kitchen Table, and Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a Biomythography (somehow now a PRH title) and Michelle Cliff's unpublished novel Abeng (PRH again!) to Crossing Press in California. (Ah, it seems Crossing Press got sold to Ten Speed Press, which became part of PRH in 2009, which was a time of many closings and acquisitions - which we covered in my previous blog in real time.)
So that led me to Persphone Press, started by Jewish lesbian feminists. These are some major titles, above, published by this press. These are titles that are still seen as very important texts. So was it just the top-down economics of Reagan's America that killed them? I mean, as we struggle through a conservative period now in America, I recall thinking in Obama's America, how did the Left do it in the 80s, under Reagan? And I want to dig into that, through South End Press and others. That's not an option with Persephone so much, but it was not economic pressure entirely. We have the story conveniently in Feminist Collections: Women's Studies Library Resources in Wisconsin, and specifically, Vol. 5, no. 1, from Fall 1983. (I will forever be thanking archivists!!) In this newsletter issue, the editors talk about the closing of Persephone, after publishing 14 books. They bring up Bridge as well as other titles that may not be as referenced these days.
They then explain why it closed, quoting "founders Pat McGloin and Gloria Z. Greenfield." I'm not sure what happened to Marianne Rubinstein. They then explain the closing very much in publishing terms. The founders tried giving authors higher royalties - always an admirable effort - and then struggled to keep finances available for production, even as some titles really took off, demanding higher production costs. This is an amazing quote from the founders: “although approximately 90% of all books published do not sell as many as 5,000 copies, 75% of Persephone’s books have sold more than 5,000 copies in their first year.” They were victims of their own success. The newsletter goes on to say where some titles will go, as mentioned above. I will circle back to Alyson Publications as that was another South End publisher, at least at its start. It took on Alice Bloch's Lifetime Guarantee: A Journey Through Loss and Survival and The Law of Return.
But Greenfield elsewhere tells another messier story that may speak to the Press closing in a way that seems somewhat chaotic, and has more to do with in-fighting amongst the Left. In a statement that went up on the Jewish Women's Archive, she talks about leaving radical feminism in 1983 to focus on identifying as "a feminist Jew." She felt the Left, including radical feminists, seemed unable to shrug off historic anti-Semitism. This came to a head in her work at the Press:
**
The last straw occurred in 1983. Persephone Press, the feminist book publishing company I co-founded with Pat McGloin, signed a contract with Jan Clausen, a white lesbian-feminist author for a novel she was in the process of writing. The completed manuscript that we received months later turned out to be a novel about a stereotypical Jewish capitalist landlord who was destroying peoples’ lives by gentrifying Park Slope. Within an hour of reviewing the contract, we notified this white, gentile author that her book contract was cancelled on the grounds of its anti-Semitic stereotyping. The next day we were beckoned to a meeting in New York to meet with several of our prominent women-of-color authors to discuss the cancellation of Clausen’s contract. I began the conversation with the question, “Persephone Press cancelled the contract for an anti-Semitic novel written by a white Christian woman. Why are we here?” Their collective response was “She is a friend of women of color, so if you hurt her, you hurt us.” In this very brief dialogue between Persephone Press and the leading Hispanic and Black lesbian-feminist writers, poets, and theoreticians, it became very clear that at worst, anti-Semitism was considered acceptable, and at best anti-Semitism was considered insignificant. I had devoted many years of my life to the radical feminist movement, and at this moment I realized that I no longer wanted to contribute my life’s energy to it, nor did I want to remain a part of it.
**
This is tough reading. Though the event occurred before I had developed my own political consciousness, I can recognize some forces at work that resonate with challenging conversations today. I put it here just to show the challenge of running a Leftist press when the Left is often not a unified force. Pushing through such conversations can be awkward at best, destructive at worst. It seems like the Press could not survive such a rupture.
I would like to continue examining such rifts at other presses, with the hopes of finding success stories, too, of presses that found common ground after uncovering large cracks.
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