Women in California have been forerunners in feminist writing, printing, and publishing of the Women's Movement of the late sixties and early seventies and libraries in the UC system have been instrumental in collecting and preserving these materials. The Bancroft Library has collected fine press titles for many years including all the works of Kelsey Street Press, a women-owned press located in Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections has collected the works and archives of Her Books, Papier Mache Press and Shameless Hussy Press. These archives contain first editions, manuscripts, correspondence, etc.

However, no one library in the state was collecting comprehensively the output of all the California feminist press publications and as publishing costs kept rising, many feminist publishers and feminist bookstores were forced to close and their archives lost or given to repositories outside the state.

Seeing a critical need to collect and preserve these materials, the UC Women's Studies Consortium, consisting of UC Women's Studies librarians, began in 1994 the California Feminist Presses Project. The main goal was to identify existing California feminist presses and to develop a plan for the collection and preservation of these materials. Eighteen presses were identified including several from the Bay Area: Aunt Lute Books, Down There Press, Feminist Book-store News, Frog in the Well, Kelsey St. Press, Post-Apollo press, Third Woman Press, and Woman in the Moon Publications.

To ensure that students and scholars would have access to all the publications of these presses Consortium members next assigned each UC campus responsibility for acquiring a circulating copy of all publications of presses assigned to them. The Bancroft Library along with UC Santa Cruz Library accepted responsibility for acquiring the archival copy for the output of the northern California feminist presses while UC Santa Barbara became the depository for the archives of feminist presses from the southern part of the state.

All the publications added to the collections are listed in the Melvyl catalog as well as local campus catalogs with an added entry under "California Feminist Presses Collection" so that researchers studying the history of feminist publishing can readily find a list of all those titles published in California. This exhibit highlights items from Bay Area feminist publishers which are a part of the California Feminist Presses Collection. More information about the project and a complete list of the presses can be found at:

http://gort.ucsd.edu/ek/ushist/consort/consort.html

Copyright © 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.
Document maintained on server: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
Last updated 02/14/2005. Content owner: Elizabeth Sibley.