In the 1970s the universities, polytechnics, and colleges were under pressure to change and we saw as a result the rise of women’s studies, black women’s studies, and lesbian studies. In 1975 in the UK there were forty-eight women’s studies courses and by 1981 the number had tripled, to around 150.
What is striking about this is that the majority of these courses were in adult education classes—not least because there were fewer feminist academics in the universities then. Many scholars and academics came to Virago with their ideas and Virago worked in tandem with them.
Each year the Virago list expanded and in 1979 Virago published thirty-four titles (fiction, Virago Modern Classics, and non-fiction) including, with the Bristol Women’s Studies Group, Half the Sky: An Introduction to Women’s Studies. Its chapter breakdown is optimistically wide-ranging: Growing up Female; Education; Bodies and Minds; Marriage; Work; Creativity; and Setting up Courses.
And the following year came Alice through the Microscope, edited by the Brighton Women and Science Group, which looked at science as a man-made discipline, and then with the Cambridge Women’s Studies Group we published Women in Society in 1981.
The introduction to Half the Sky shows how the new courses first had to explain, even validate, their case: ‘Women’s studies comes out of research inspired by an increasing interest in what it means to be a woman . . . One part of the modern feminist movement is an increased interest in women as a subject of study . . . [The other part] is dependent on the work of earlier feminist writers . . . on completing the record . . . correcting the bias.’
Fascinatingly, the hierarchical change inherent in this new discipline is highlighted: the authors observe that the divisions between teacher and student tend to break down as all can contribute from their experiences. Everything was up for revision on this new frontier.
I recognize the late 1970s’ almost apologetic explanation of what feminism means as the authors write, ‘By feminism we mean both an awareness of women’s position in society as one of disadvantage or inequality compared with that of men, and also a desire to remove those disadvantages . . . In talking about female oppression we do not wish to imply that all women are apathetic or worn-out [sic!] or that no woman anywhere has any kind of decent life. Female oppression is . . . about how society is organised . . . [We take] two approaches to the question of inequality . . . “plain equal” or “equal but different”.’
Feminists, often, were attempting to persuade women who did not feel the movement had anything to offer them that feminism was a way of understanding all of our lives.
However, there were many women eager to learn more, particularly about women’s history. Barbara Taylor, the historian and author of Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, which we published in 1983 to awards and praise, recalls that in around 1977 she and another feminist historian, Sally Alexander, later author of our Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (1994), began co-teaching classes in women’s history and feminist theory and found a ‘host of feminist predecessors—feminist radicals like Ray Strachey, Sylvia Pankhurst, Maud Pember Reeves. Sally’s acute understanding of these women . . . probably taught me more about late nineteenth early twentieth century feminism than anything else.’
We published many historians in response to this new hunger. As well as Cathy Porter and Sheila Rowbotham we had Janet Todd on seventeenth-century professional women writers including Aphra Behn in The Sign of Angellica; Judith Walkowitz took on the morals of Victorian England in City of Dreadful Delight; Jill Liddington, with Jill Norris, published One Hand Tied Behind Us on suffrage history, and Jill went on to write books for us on the peace camp at Greenham Common, and on northern suffragettes. One most fascinating book was drawn from a decoded lesbian diary. I Know my Own Heart: The Diary of Anne Lister, edited by Helena Whitbread, is now republished in the Virago Non-fiction Classics as The Secret Diary of Miss Anne Lister. The diaries inspired the splendid 2019 television series Gentleman Jack.
Historians, journalists, and writers were realizing that the stories of ordinary lives, particularly some British lives that were hidden from the mainstream media, was where the truth of women’s experiences resided. Ursula Owen commissioned Amrit Wilson’s book about South Asian women in Britain, Finding a Voice, which won a Martin Luther King Award in 1978. In the reissued, expanded edition published by Daraja Press forty years later, the writer and activist remembers how a visit to a woman in her home gave her the urgency to start: ‘“People should know,” she said, “that we can speak, we have feelings and that we have thoughts. Write what you and I talk about, what we think.” That night I started writing the chapter on Isolation. The words poured out . . . Suddenly I knew I had to be . . . the narrator of a complex collective experience.’ She recalls that on publication some middle-class South Asian men ridiculed her book, while some middle-class English women responded with apparent feelings of guilt, and that her accounts of racism were challenged by ‘many white figures of authority, teachers, administrators, social workers’, but the overwhelming response to the book was from young Asian women who embraced it as their own. The British writer and actor Meera Syal writes of the succour it gave her: ‘For the first time, here was a book that collated the presence and experiences of Asian women in Britain with clarity, compassion and forensic care. It was affirmation that our lives mattered . . . that we were now part of the story of Britain.’
Have times changed? I think speaking about the truth of one’s community can still be dangerous. More recently, the Washington Post reporter Souad Mekhennet, in her book I was Told to Come Alone: Behind the Lines of Jihad, challenged the simple ‘black and white’ narratives. A Muslim woman of Turkish and Moroccan descent who grew up in Germany, she searches for the answers to why, for some, faith is used to encourage acts of terrorism. It is a brave and necessary book in which she shows that at times she is held in suspicion by both the jihadists she seeks out and her own colleagues. It takes courage to stand up and speak.
I think of the memoir A Woman in Berlin, by a German woman who wrote of the searing experiences of life in the city as it was sacked by the Russian Army in her diary of April–June 1945. She published it anonymously in English in 1954, and in German with a Swiss publisher in 1959. But German readers were not ready to face the truth of this period and the author was disparaged for her ‘shameless immorality’. Women were not supposed to talk about rape. The book was relegated to obscurity and forgotten until it was taken up by the women’s movement and, after her death, finally published in Germany by Eichborn in 2003; her country was at last ready to listen. I published the book with an introduction by Antony Beevor two years after that. Even though there was speculation by this time that the writer was a journalist named Marta Hillers, we honoured her original decision: the author on the cover is Anonymous. I feel sad she didn’t live to see her book recognized as a significant testimony of war.
A deeply personal story can move people to change their views, to recognize their biases.
The Art of Starvation: A Story of Anorexia and Survival by Sheila MacLeod was one of the first memoirs about anorexia. Now we are all more knowledgeable about this condition but when it was published in 1981, and became the first Mind Book of the Year, it was in the vanguard of books about the pressures on women and the female body. The author is also a novelist and her description of the moment she saw the beauty of a plum and felt she could eat once more has stayed with me to this day. It named a secret and brought it out into the open.
I would say the same about Desert Flower, the memoir by Waris Dirie that I published in 2001. Dirie, originally a Somalian nomad, lived an almost fairy-tale story, complete with tigers and bandits, ended up on fashion catwalks around the world and was one of the faces of Revlon. But she decided that she could no longer hold her secret: female circumcision, as i
t was then called. She gave an interview to an American women’s magazine and for the first time talked of the brutal practice that she had suffered at a very young age. At this time, very few feminists were addressing female genital mutilation, excepting some such as Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar. Western feminists were, on the whole, cautious about interfering with the rituals of another culture. Waris spoke out, she became a UN spokeswoman, and set up the Desert Flower Foundation to raise awareness and eradicate FGM. She told Western feminists they were wrong to stand back: FGM was a human rights issue. I went to a press conference where she was interrupted endlessly by a Somali man who we later learned was disparaging her for the betrayal of her people by speaking her truth. There is greater awareness of and action against this practice now, thanks to the huge bravery of campaigners like Waris.
Though editors and publishers are the traditional gatekeepers, deciding what gets published or, just as importantly, what doesn’t get published, in many cases publishing houses such as Virago are also closely aligned with readers; therefore peace rallies, environmental demonstrations, unjust laws such as the homophobic Section 28, women’s marches, anti-racist rallies, Black Lives Matter, reform of the Welfare State (Radical Help by by Hilary Cottam), transgender rights—all intersect with our publishing. Sometimes we feel we must put a book together at great speed to respond to a sense that something needs to be done quickly; that an urgent women’s response is required to challenge government policy or plans but also to encourage women to take a stand. Such was the case with Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb in 1983.
‘We are beginning to think the unthinkable—that there could be a nuclear war in our lifetime’ read the shoutline on the back of the book. Edited by Dorothy Thompson, a historian active in the peace movement, the collection of essays included historians, novelists, politicians, philosophers, women in the peace camps, and women working in arms factories. The introduction is not only galvanizing, as if delivered from a platform to a crowd, to wake us up to the nuclear threat, it also entreats women to step up and take responsibility for themselves, to trust their own judgement: ‘We often feel that we are unfitted by our education and training to form an opinion on questions of defence strategy and weaponry . . . [we] give in with too much humility to “experts”.’
In the same vein, we decided to hold a rally in the name of this book and its message at Central Hall in Westminster, with proceeds from the event going to the peace movement. And so on 16 April 1983, from 3.30 to 7.30 p.m., we filled a hall with 2,000 people who thrilled to the twenty-four performers and speakers on stage: Angela Carter, Julie Christie, Jill Craigie, Greenham Common Women, Harriet Harman, Diana Quick, Sheila Rowbotham, Spare Tyre Theatre Company, Fay Weldon, Susannah York—among others.
The organization of it all was, well, as I wrote in a letter in the month before, ‘absolutely thrilling, heady . . . and hell. I’ve just got to organise the order in which the speakers and performers will appear, arrange the loud-speakers, confirm the catering arrangements, arrange a first-aid brigade, help organise a staffing rota that consists of about 80 people, make up passes for the people working on the 14 bookstalls, tell the MCs what to say, publicise the event . . . We’ve sent out 8,000 leaflets . . .’ The whole office was deeply involved and it was a huge success. But frankly, it was a little ambitious for a book launch.
Virago published—and continues to publish—many anthologies. The great benefit of an anthology on a difficult, shifting topic is that it acknowledges there is no one answer, that many voices, dissenting or agreeing, is the way to tackle a subject, and it is also a way of encouraging busy, notable names to write for us. Not to say that feminists are particularly humble, but an anthology that shows differences of opinion and experiences is also a great antidote to the single, absolute, male view.
When in the early 1990s the notion and naming of dissent seemed to degenerate into sneering at ‘political correctness’ I asked Sarah Dunant, then a commentator on the BBC 2 Late Show and famous for her quick understanding and large red specs, to untangle the subject. She edited War of the Words, a collection of pieces that looks at what happens to debate when people who try to right the imbalance of power—whether in literary canons, speech, or laws—are disparaged as being politically correct.
Vehement feminist disagreement over pornography was best explored through an anthology: Sex Exposed, edited by Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh, was commissioned by Ruthie in response to the raging arguments of the time.
Sometimes the anthologies were great fun and revealing: There’s Something About a Convent Girl, edited by Jackie Bennett and Rosemary Forgan, included pieces by Marina Warner, Carmen, and Germaine Greer, who wrote, ‘I think one of the reasons why I was never properly domesticated is because I was actually socialised by a gang of mad women in flapping black habits.’
Ruthie and Ursula’s interest in psychoanalysis brought us Alice Miller, Dinora Pines, Jessica Benjamin, Juliet Mitchell, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner. I later added to this list with Susie Orbach, Kate Figes, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and Lisa Appignanesi’s book about the history of female ‘madness’ in Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors.
As well as working on the Classics and publishing frontlist fiction, Alexandra drew on her background and interest in art to publish, among others, books on women engravers, Pre-Raphaelite women artists, and Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot.
I think back to that journalist asking after Virago’s first year of twelve titles: would there be enough books? In the 1980s and 90s, as well as a young adult list we had an education list, a Virago Pioneers list (short biographies of trailblazing women), a poetry list, and a history list, alongside a small health list. A feminist publisher has many obligations, and we had huge ambitions to mirror the feminism and issues of the day. Looking back over the catalogues I can see how we editors have always picked up the mood of the times.
The leading feminist theorist Lynne Segal wrote for us on women, men, and straight sex; social and cultural historian Carolyn Steedman on working-class culture; linguist Deborah Tannen on how men and women communicate (or don’t); the late Rozsika Parker, psychotherapist, on the experience of maternal ambivalence in Torn in Two. We had books on birth—the novelist Kate Mosse’s first book was Becoming a Mother; we had books on living with Aids, on fashion, on religion, on alcohol, on friendship, on gardening, on women travellers.
Today the same mirroring is going on. Sarah Savitt, Virago’s current Publisher, has introduced feminist graphic novels and, understanding that some of the most vocal feminists are now in powerful positions, she has brought us the television writer Lauren Graham of Gilmore Girls fame with Talking as Fast As I Can. She has also tapped into the rise of smart women comedians with the spot-on The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White, who came to fame through her hugely successful podcast.
In the early days we accepted unsolicited manuscripts—the slush pile—and once a month or so the editors would attend to the teetering tower. Very little came from the pile, unfortunately, but what we have always noticed is that these manuscripts reflect a dawning of women’s new understanding about their lives. I remember in the 1980s Ruthie commenting that we were getting a striking number of what were then called incest stories. Child abuse was a secret that women were bringing out into the open. We published several books on it, one of the most striking by a Canadian, Sylvia Fraser. She wrote My Father’s House almost like a detective story as she searched through memory and evidence to uncover the secret abuse.
We try hard to look beyond our borders and lives, crucial for Western feminism, thus Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Women’s Writing, edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke; Alicia Partnoy’s memoir, The Little School, about being one of the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina; and Islam and Democracy by Fatima Mernissi. Åsne Seirstad’s book telling the truth about women’s lives in Afghanistan, The Bookseller of Kabul, became one of our all-
time bestsellers, selling over 750,000 copies. Her Virago editor, Antonia Hodgson, went on to publish Åsne’s powerful investigations of Serbia, Chechnya, and Syria.
But Virago woman is not only an activist. I think of the outrageous wit and wisdom of Stevie Smith in Me Again: The Uncollected Writings; the fabulously eccentric Acorn by Yoko Ono; the story of the famous American trumpet player Billy Tipton, a woman who lived her life as a man, in Suits Me by Diane Wood Middlebrook; Treasure: The Trials of a Teenage Terror by the late, clever humourist Michele Hanson; delicious cartoons in I’m Not a Feminist But . . . by Christine Roche; the wild and passionate story of The Bolter by Frances Osborne.
Received wisdom about some of our great women writers has been challenged, not least in the dramatic The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose and in Lyndall Gordon’s extraordinarily perceptive biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, which dismantled the sentimental legend of the reclusive poet. ‘Lit crit’ was key to Virago from the start: Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own was one of the first Virago books and opened up the very idea of a female canon.
‘Inspiring women’ could almost be a non-fiction and fiction category on its own. Maya Angelou, who was a legend in her own time, has become even more influential since her death in 2014. Her memoirs are studied; her wit and wisdom are tattoos, and her poetry, particularly ‘And Still I Rise’, is quoted by artists, singers, politicians, and sportswomen.
We’ve had some very big personalities in Virago covers.
But sometimes inspirational women are quiet—and young.
With great pleasure I have watched the fourth wave of feminism emerge. Wanting to engage quickly with what younger women were thinking, in 2015 we published I Call Myself a Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women under Thirty, edited by Victoria Pepe, Rachel Holmes, Amy Annette (my daughter), Martha Mosse, and Alice Stride with the shoutline ‘Young feminists—whether you call yourself one or not—this book is for you’.
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