Printed alongside the list was a clarion call chosen to reflect the belief that when women work together real change is possible. Quoting Sheila Rowbotham:
‘Virago is a feminist publishing company: “It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move toward the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly.” ’
The advisory women did suggest books: as mentioned earlier, Rosalind Delmar gave Carmen a copy of Testament of Youth; Sally Alexander and Anna Davin helped find titles for the original Virago Reprint Library. All were very important and much welcomed ideas as a publishing house drawing on the women’s movement for ideas and knowledge needs such voices. But Virago—Carmen and Ursula—made the decisions on what would be published; this was not a collective.
Many of the original feminist and radical organizations took to their heart the idea of doing everything in a brave-new-world way as Writers and Readers did: collectives, co-operatives, no shareholders was how some set up shop. They wanted to do business in a different mode; they wanted their companies to reflect the times. That wasn’t Virago’s way.
And yet even with this more traditional business model Virago was powered by idealism and altruism; workers and authors gave their all to the company because we believed in the larger enterprise—changing the world with women’s stories—even if it meant taking low wages and working long hours. Authors too were willing to throw in their lot with Virago for low advances. They were very much on our side from the start.
Cynicism or pure opportunism; those have never been Virago motivations, though because we are a business they easily could have been. But over the forty plus years that Virago editors have chosen the books to publish, their guiding principle has always been to ask, what does this do to champion women’s talent or what truth does it tell about women’s lives? I do know that sounds impossibly idealistic and certainly I don’t mean to say that we have done this at the exclusion of an eye to profit, but cynicism has rarely, if ever, played a role in Virago’s book choices.
But from the beginning Virago has wanted to prove that the business of publishing books by women is a profitable enterprise and that the very existence of Virago shows the world that a feminist business run by women would work. In 1993 Harriet wrote, ‘As with all publishers, books are our lifeblood, but at Virago, what we see as being of equal importance is the existence of the press itself . . . the belief that women’s writing and issues could be the foundation of an inspirational, financially viable list.’ To be financially viable you have to make a profit: this has always been crucial, because profit is protection, and Virago has almost always made a profit. When profit has been at stake the Virago directors made tough choices: about being independent, about selling ourselves, about, horribly, having to make people redundant. And now, when Virago is part of a larger publishing conglomerate, profit is still our protection—against people interfering in our editorial choices. When a publishing list does not make profit, it comes under scrutiny to find out why not.
Of course, keeping an eye on profit can mean turning down either less obviously viable projects or costly ones, but that problem—or choice—is not confined to imprints within a conglomerate. Taking risks affects both small and large houses; the difference between acquiring books as an editor in an independent and as one in a conglomerate is not about risk per se, it’s that in the latter a commissioning editor has to convince many more people in the publishing house of their belief in a book or author. In so many ways the very act of writing and publishing means taking risks.
Idealism and commerce feel like strange bedfellows, as has often been proved, and usually one of those bedfellows gets kicked out. Does capitalism always have to mean growth for an ever-increasing profit? Or can ‘enough’ profit to keep the fires burning be sufficient? Virago’s business model, with its lofty ideals, has at the same time always been rather modest. It began small. We did not ask for secretaries, cleaners, assistants. We could all type. We have always watched our outgoings in relationship to our income. We have been awarded grants for translations but not had grants to keep us going. When we did our management buy-out with Rothschild Ventures in 1987 the investors said, ‘Virago washes its own face.’ An awful expression but nonetheless we knew what they meant and were proud of that.
Growth and profit are things that Virago has had to wrestle with from the beginning. All directors and shareholders agreed that Virago needed to protect itself by making profit. So long as we achieved that any disagreements could be managed. But when we looked as if profits would not deliver—that’s when we hit trouble between us. However, even at those very low points, through our passionate rows and factions, even then, we kept to the idea that Virago must survive us. Is that not a commitment to idealism that flies in the face of cold capitalism?
Interestingly, the old Virago mix of paradoxes again: the fact that we had a hierarchy and shareholders made us take our fiscal responsibilities seriously, and indeed it also meant that whoever had the most shares could sway the choice. Undoubtedly at times it was our traditional business model that held us together, but our idealism gave us the strength to battle—even against each other—to make sure the values that propel Virago live on.
Chapter Three
The Acceptable Face of Feminism? Why Not!
There are many ways of describing Virago in a fulsome, comprehensive way, but one could simplify it as: bringing feminist ideas to a mainstream audience and championing women’s talent. From the beginning, Virago had the drive to bring to prominence voices from the margins, to right the imbalance, to show the world that we are all enriched by women’s voices. It comes from the belief—that I hold dear—that feminism benefits all people, not just women. Virago wanted to connect readers to these ideas. Today, Virago actively aims to be intersectional in a way that we recognize we had not achieved or perhaps understood before. But the conviction that feminism is not just for women has always been our bedrock.
When in the early 1980s Virago was becoming a force to be reckoned with, and one of the bridges between feminism and the mainstream—described by Harriet as ‘a market-driven company, but we are attempting to change the market’—people responded to us in very different ways. One group—many writers, eager readers, teachers, librarians, booksellers; mainly women, but men too, feminists, but also those who didn’t want to call themselves feminists—were thrilled to find the books and authors from Virago, Women’s Press, Onlywomen, Pluto, Penguin, Pandora, Sheba et al. They wrote to us, asked us to speak, wanted posters, suggested what we should publish; to them we were good news. This was by far the majority of our readers.
Then there was the mainstream press: quixotic, changeable, and unpredictable, not unlike today. We were a news story, so they wanted to know about us and some wrote genuinely good pieces about our authors; others patronized and disparaged us. ‘Paper Tigresses’ was one headline. A literary editor told me he had told his office he was going to have lunch ‘with a Virago’, implying it was an excitingly dangerous activity. People, well, men—including Kingsley Amis—would say ‘you don’t look like a Virago’. Men, and women too, wanted to argue with us: women have always been published, so why a publishing house just for them? Do we even need feminism? We have the Equal Pay Act: many women work; women can take care of themselves, can’t they? The view of writers such as Eva Figes that ‘now and in the future patriarchal attitudes will benefit no one, least of all men’ was gaining currency and today many men understand that power and patriarchy are the corrupters of private and public relationships between men and women, but back then such ideas were voiced almost solely by women and feminism was often caricatured as anti-men rather than pro-women. (For some, it still is.) Hovering over all feminists, ready to damn them, was that word only ever used to try to silence women: ‘shrill’, meaning unreasonable an
d out of control. Feminists—and their publishers—were all too aware of that. The blurb for the 1972 paperback edition of Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes, published by an imprint of Granada, says, ‘Social progress for all of us! This is the essential conclusion of Miss Figes’s intelligent, unhysterical [my italics] book.’ A quote from New Society hails it as ‘a rational text’ and it’s accompanied by a comment from Gore Vidal (that gives and takes with the same hand): he writes that women are responding to patriarchy ‘with a series of books and position papers that range from shrill to literature. In the last category one must place Eva Figes who, of the lot, is the only one whose work can be set beside John Stuart Mill’s celebrated review of the subject and not seem shoddy or self-serving.’
It was tiresome and sometimes outrageously sexist or patronizing but at the same time there were many journalists right across the political spectrum, real allies, who actively looked out for Virago titles to feature or review. We have never lacked media coverage.
Then there were the feminists who didn’t agree with us. They were not a homogenous group, of course; there were—and are—many strands within feminism. From some feminists we received grateful recognition and from others downright criticism: to be a mainstream publishing house was not something ‘good’ feminists should aspire to. Remembers Carmen: ‘Those early days of feminism were serious days, which in many ways took me back to the atmosphere of my convent. In the service of The Cause, we were monstrously hard on each other. All movements thrive on a sense of pouncing disapproval in the air.’
I believe there are so many ways to make society change and there is no one right way: a better, fairer world for everyone will come when a multitude of forces, from grassroots to established institutions, sweep in the changes. But loud voices protested that we weren’t a collective; we made our books look too beautiful; we occasionally published men; we had male designers; we had shareholders; we ‘marketed’ feminism. In a letter dated 1980 written from Virago to describe (defend might be a better word) us to a group of feminist presses in Europe one can see the stubborn justification of our position in the face of these feminist criticisms:
Feminism is still, in Britain, quite a ‘dirty’ word, still open to grotesque stereotyping, which discourages some women. We want our books to be read by these women as well as feminists. This sometimes leaves us open to the charge that we do not make our feminism explicit enough. Our policy is based on our belief that our books must ‘start where people are at’. Much of our list is therefore for a general as well as a feminist audience . . . There are some people who disagree with our policies, but many give us immense support . . . It could be argued that this support was a sign that we ‘water down’ our feminism. We ask ourselves such questions repeatedly, but at present we remain convinced of the need to publish for a general audience primarily.
And then almost protesting too much, but I understand why!
Side by side with this aim of ‘infiltrating’ feminist ideas into the book market is that of publishing books which are progressive, provocative, and reflect the consciousness of women, the wide variety of ways in which they view their lives . . . We also encourage the writing of collective books. In sisterhood, All at Virago.
‘In sisterhood’ should read as a reminder that we’re all in this together, and often it did and was meant sincerely, but I also remember really harsh, critical notes and letters that would be signed off ‘in sisterhood’. Maybe it was meant to galvanize one to better behaviour?
Harriet and I often received these accusations to our faces because we went together to radical bookshop events. I remember most distinctly a Saturday afternoon (without Harriet this time) at a large gymnasium in London packed to the roof with women for a Women and Media event. I was not speaking, was a mere member of the audience, when a woman took the mic and turned to me and said, ‘What do you say to the accusation that Virago is the acceptable face of feminism?’ I slowly looked around the hall, up and down the huge room. It felt to me that every single woman was turned to me, waiting for my answer. ‘It’s great!’ is what I wanted to say. But I knew that wasn’t the right thing to say that day, with that crowd. I was frightened, I must admit. I squeaked out something weaselly about it being ‘good to have plurality’ and slunk off after the coffee break, cross with myself—and them too.
I know now that probably many of the women in that room felt as I did, that Virago was a good thing and that there is more than one way to bring about change, but it was a lesson in the bullying tactics that go alongside radical politics; that a small group can have a punishing voice way beyond their size. Virago too has always punched above its weight, but I believe we are not advocating the idea that there is only one way to be a feminist. To my mind, a radical approach to pushing for change is good—we do need that—but it has no more intrinsic value than a moderate approach: we need them both. What I feel strongly about is the way that radicals—and this applies to women as much as men—feel they can shout down a moderate view rather than accommodate it alongside their stance. Has anything changed?
When I see, as I have, Virago described as slick, sold out, self-mythologizing—even if it is by a tiny minority—it makes me angry and frustrated. I recall when we published Maya Angelou and some people—again a minority—said the same about her. I wanted to say back to them: How many people have you reached? How many lives have you touched? Have you changed anyone’s mind? Given anyone joy? Inspired change?
At a recent book festival, a woman, a self-proclaimed Virago fan who works in academic publishing, came up to me after the talk and said (rather accusingly, I thought) that it was very disappointing that Virago was no longer independent. I don’t entirely disagree but I gave her some of the reasons—need for capital, a changed bookselling landscape, desire to grow, board disagreements—that were behind our decision to sell ourselves to Little, Brown in 1995 and pointed out that, as a result, we are here and thriving, publishing some great authors, whereas had we not done so, we would not have survived. She sniffed, not giving an inch: ‘Still disappointing.’
I heard myself reply, tersely, ‘You, who are a publisher and therefore know the economics of it all, are being romantic.’
I was a little shaken afterwards—angry with the woman, but also surprised by what was a slightly hardline response from me, not least as I do consider myself a romantic—an idealistic publisher, even!
The romantic notion of the feisty indie; the demands from radicals that a feminist company be scrupulously, politically correct; the dry, disapproving feminist academic analysis of business decisions—they are all there to haunt Virago and, to be honest, it’s because they are feminists that their criticisms and observations cut deeper than the casual misogyny of the media. But I wonder . . . are their observations helpful or productive? What do they contribute? And, hey, aren’t we on the same side? Shouldn’t we all be focusing on the bigger picture?
I understand that they feel Virago—unique in the world as a mainstream feminist imprint—has obligations to its supporters, and that is true. However deeply flattering it is that we matter that much, I guess I would wish for clearer-eyed support. We’re not a lobbying group, a charity, or a public service: we are part of the feminist movement and we are a proud feminist business which makes a profit in order to publish; we have to get our hands dirty and sell our wares. In other words, we have to compromise.
But the fact that people care, that we have the power to make a difference, that we are worthy of study and are held in esteem, that we can still publish the less mainstream alongside bestselling authors, that readers look to us, that readers still say, you changed my life—that is what matters. Always, Virago has been more supported by feminists than criticized. We have grown up alongside so many who have fought and continue to fight for a better world for us all: consciousness-raising groups, grassroots activists, politicians who have changed the law, teachers who have challenged the curriculum, lawyers who hav
e fought the status quo, journalists who have been real allies, those who have demanded change for the status of women, campaigners who have taken up feminist causes, and readers who have embraced us and our authors. We work beside and are indebted to them.
Making a change is never easy. Three of the authors we published in the 1970s and 80s, Adrienne Rich, Beatrix Campbell, and Grace Paley, radicals all, have shown me that compromise is not capitulation, that accommodation of others’ views is a way to teach and learn the truth about women and politics.
In 1973 Adrienne Rich, American poet, essayist, lesbian, feminist, won the National Book Award for her collection Diving into the Wreck, which established her as a major poet and moved her into the avant-garde of feminist thinking. She accepted the award, radically, on behalf of herself and two of her fellow nominees, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, and ‘the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work’.
Adrienne Rich wrote and talked about feminism as a way of thinking that went beyond the struggle for mere legal equality, arguing for a dramatic new way of looking at women’s experiences, an uncovering of a female tradition. She saw herself as part of ‘the long process of making visible the experience of women . . . [who are] in ignorance of their place in any female tradition’.
A Bite of the Apple Page 5