Jennifer Baumgardner
Some people find the analogy of mothers and daughters to describe intrafeminist generational tension annoying and inaccurate, but not me. Chapter six of Manifesta, my book with Amy Richards (2000), is titled “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother” and ends with an open letter to “older feminists,” the theme of
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022
Magazines used to be valuable—an important medium to read, to write for, in which to be covered. This past week, I counted how many magazines I was sent despite not being a subscriber—Time, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, People, Wired, and National Geographic—all of which, pathetically, wind up in the recycling
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2
MAY/JUNE 2022
A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022
- Redux
Florence Rice Florence Rice had an abortion in the 1930s. I was sixteen when I had my daughter. They put her in my arms and she looked at me like, If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you either! You know, she just had that look, and I
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022
- Timeline
At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have”
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2
MAY/JUNE 2022
- Timeline
with assistance from CATHARINE STIMPSON, SHANE SNOWDON, BARBARA SMITH, and ANDI ZEISLER 1790–1792 In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft anonymously pens A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It’s all rave reviews and hot sales until her name is added to the second edition and, overnight, the text is derided as overly
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022
- Close Encounters
A detail from Stella Waitzkin: These Books Are Paintings. © Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. Photo by Jennifer Baumgardner. IN THIS ERA of compulsory eyeball luring, saying no to self-promotion looks courageous to me. Perhaps this is why a deceased, somewhat-obscure modern artist named Stella Waitzkin so captured my curiosity recently.
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023
- Primary Sources
The generic-looking typescript (around two hundred pages of printer paper, bound with a rubber band) living in my office at Feminist Press predated me by many years. In 2015, when I excavated it from a drawer, I might have tossed it in the recycling bin but for the sticky note
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2
MAY/JUNE 2022
- Talk
AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING feminist in the early-nineties recession, I hit the job-jackpot: Ms. magazine. I’d grown up with the magazine. I’d internalized its references to back- alley abortions, men who “just don’t get it,” and workplace discrimination. The fact that nothing we published was by or about feminists of my
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 3
FALL 2023
- Talk
A.M. Homes. Photo by Marie Sanford. When A. M. Homes was growing up in Washington, D.C., her teachers were skeptical that she’d successfully write a check, much less a book. She dropped out of high school and eventually found herself at Sarah Lawrence, where she met Grace Paley. Homes’s books—The
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 5
WINTER 2022