April 21st, 2024

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Call for Proposals
The Feminist Press: From The Una to Jezebel
(Deadline Extended)
We are seeking chapter proposals for a historical study of the feminist press in the United States, tentatively titled The Feminist Press: From The Una to Jezebel. By “feminist press,” we mean the range of print and digital media created to articulate and promote a variety of feminist goals.
Our goal, overall, is to better understand the feminist press across time, beginning with 19th- century publications such as The Una and moving forward through twentieth-century newspapers and magazines such as Ms. and off our backs, then on to the zines, social media, blogs and podcasts of the twenty-first.
Broad questions for the book as a whole include: What explains the continuing need for feminist media? How do the cultural understandings of feminism, as articulated in these publications, intersect with race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ issues, politics, religion, etc.? What is their relationship to mainstream media? How does the understanding of feminism change, or not, across time? How are feminist audiences constructed or interpellated? How do modes of production and/or political economic issues shape feminist publications? What might a publication such as, for example, Amelia Bloomer’s The Lily (1849-1853) have in common with hashtags such as #everydaysexism and #MeToo?
Going beyond encyclopedic information, successful proposals will promise novel research on one or more feminist publications through the lens of history and critical theory. We encourage the use of primary sources. We are particularly interested in chapters that interrogate the feminist press in relation to diversity in all its forms, including geographical diversity, such as productions from outside East Coast and West Coast cities.
Chapters might focus on, but are not limited to, any of the following:

• The meaning of feminism within a particular publication or group of publications
• A publication’s relationship to mainstream publications of the era
• Interrogations of history/historiography within a publication
• Audience construction, as evidenced through archival documents and/or a close reading of the publication
• Race and/or ethnicity, including intersectional approaches such as Black feminism, Latina/Chicana feminism, and queer theory seen through a historical lens
• Experiments in structure, decision-making, and organization and financing
• Intersection of feminism with religion and/or spiritual practices
• Political economy of the feminist press
• Means of production, including organizational publications, collectives, and publications created by a single publisher

 
It should be noted that the book is not a reference book but rather a collection of essays, each with a theoretical argument based on historical evidence. Moreover, we are not looking for studies focusing on feminist journalists’ work in mainstream media. We are particularly interested in work that emphasizes race and ethnicity and LGBTQ+ perspectives. We also seek more chapters on 18th and 19th-century publications and those from the 1960s and 1970s. Because the suffrage press has been widely examined, we prefer that scholars interested in those publications focus on other important issues of the time (such as, for example, a publication’s approach to divorce laws, property rights, reproductive rights etc.).
Proposals (about 500 words) should tell us the publication or publications you wish to focus on, your approach (research questions, theory), and the sources you plan to use. Include a tentative bibliography. Chapters may be co-authored. Please send proposals to [email protected] by May 30, 2024. Authors will be notified of our decision by June 30, 2024. Full chapters (about 5,000 words, including notes) will be due by Dec 30, 2024.
Please address questions to the editors:
Jane Marcellus: [email protected]
Linda Steiner: [email protected]
Tracy Everbach: [email protected]