#ThrowbackThursday: A Visit to Brown University
This fall, our archival intern Monika Zaleska will offer a glimpse back into FP’s collection, using correspondence, documents, and clips from our extensive archive. Monika is a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature Program, and is working with FP through a grant from Publics Lab.
You can follow her on Twitter at @myszka_mz and check out her weekly posts here and on the FP instagram.
Last month, I went to visit Brown University, home of some thirty plus years of Feminist Press papers, as well as the personal papers of our founder Florence Howe. I spent a few days going through a small number of the available boxes, which number into the hundreds, and getting a sampling of FP’s long and complex history. Above, from Florence Howe’s papers, is a homemade banner from the Women’s Studies International in Copenhagen, 1980.
Among financial records, countless correspondence, and marked up manuscripts, were documents related to touchstones in FP history such as when the press moved to CUNY or the 25th anniversary gala celebration. Of course, there were less serious documents too, like this 1986 office memo asking everyone to clean out their own coffee mugs.
Perhaps what was most striking, amidst the small office dramas, and larger pursuit of publishing great feminist books, was how many everyday women reached out to Florence Howe and FP asking for career advice, complaining about sexist bosses, and just generally voicing their support for FP’s mission. These were activists, mothers, grandparents, academics, and even camp counselors.
Despite the sexism and gender inequality we still face today, it is hard to imagine a time when a professor might write a recommendation complimenting a job candidate by saying she is neither “seductress” nor “spinster” (yes, that was a real letter I found). However, when it happened, Florence Howe and FP heard about it, and became a source of comfort, legal information, and solidarity for feminists and their allies.
Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and PhD student in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she served as fiction editor of The Brooklyn Review, and currently teaches in the English department.