Announcing a historic gift from FP author Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The Feminist Press is proud to announce that we have received a landmark gift from FP author Shirley Geok-lin Lim, the largest personal gift in the Press's history. Below, Shirley shares the news of her gift and her history with the Press, in her own words.
Dear Feminist Press community,
The wish to honor Florence Howe with a gift to the Feminist Press rose from my recognition of our shared mortality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg defeated cancer thrice. Why not us, when we may be similarly challenged? But COVID-19 for women of a certain age mocks our confidence in our strength, so hard won, still so marvelous when we think to rest on our laurels. Locked down, unable to march or be heard, I decided to use the free speech of action available to me, the act of donating my mustard seed to support the free speech of future feminist writers.
When I called Florence a few days before her ninety-first birthday, she wondered at the happy coincidence of the gift coming at the fiftieth anniversary of the Feminist Press. I wondered in return that this remarkable anniversary of the Feminist Press—a historical, national agent in transforming who and what today is published, reviewed in journals and newspapers, read and studied in schools, universities, and book clubs, and included in a range of canons all over the world—had not yet raised similar gifts, that Florence was overcome with gratitude at my simply remembering what I owed her.
In 1993 Florence found me, a writer who did not believe the United States would ever be ready to hear her voice. She published Among the White Moon Faces, my memoir of a life before and after “country and nation” hardened into identities. Feminism, as Florence professed in her editorial decisions, is the uncommon identity for all who know that silence will not save them, and the Feminist Press broke the multicivilizational, multicenturies silence of a host of US and international writers.
Surely—I mused to Florence during that first long-distance call—the many women she had reached, who had moved from their first essay or book published by the Feminist Press to fame and fortune with corporate publishers, would fund, as members of a Feminist Press Writer’s Circle, that same opportunity for future generations. Surely, women of a certain age like me will flex their accounts to benefit the press whose books have opened doors to imaginations, stories, histories, and perspectives, which, in turn, have opened their and their children’s entry into universities, professions, corporations, businesses, and more, thus transforming lives that only a century ago were corseted.
When I discovered that mine was the first large donation to the Feminist Press, I said I preferred not to publicize my name. I am lifting that sanction in the hope that this gift, modeled on those of women before me, will be followed by many more donations. That a Writer’s Circle will grow to support the press that Florence raised as the fabulous daughter for all readers. That a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Fan Club will be formed to honor another woman, defeated by mortality, but undefeated in history, if we can keep her work alive in books. That the readers whose paths were illuminated by such books will honor Florence Howe’s life by buoying the Feminist Press through these hard times.
In solidarity,
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is the author of Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands, winner of an American Book Award, as well as Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, and several other books. She is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
