At its peak, the transnational feminist bookstore movement boasted 130 stores; the US and Canada alone had ninety-six such stores in 1978. Kristen Hogan's book The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, provides a compelling account of those who made these stores their vehicles for feminist politics – people Hogan calls “bookwomen.” From their booming beginning in the early 1970s, through their interventions in the larger book industry in the late 1970s, to the ways in which they “endangered their legacy as a central site of the formulation of lesbian anti-racist feminism” (147), bookwomen carved a history, Hogan argues, that offers crucial lessons regarding accountability and relationship building for feminism today.

Hogan traces the development of the feminist bookstore movement to the early 1970s and marks 1976 as a watershed year that saw the first Women in Print conference and the creation of the Feminist Bookstore Newsletter (FBN). Indeed, bookwomen were not simply those who staffed bookstores but anyone who advocated the radical potential of feminist books. They created the FBN as well as booklists that were used to create “alliances … that could transform the spaces of feminist bookstores across the nation” (39). Booklists, the FBN, and the bookstores themselves, Hogan claims, were feminist first and money-making second. More important were the alliances based on race and sexuality that these institutions could enact, particularly in solidarity against the mainstream publishing world – what was often referred to as the literary industrial corporate establishment (LICE). Often led by FBN’s intrepid editor Carol Seajay, they pressured feminist publishers to issue children's books that portrayed lesbian mothers, boosted publicity budgets for feminist authors by inflating advanced orders, compelled big publishers to keep books in print or to release them in paperback, and exposed illegal deals between publishers and chain bookstores. Along the way, Hogan posits that bookwomen created “a new reading and relational practice” she calls the “feminist shelf” (xxi). A compelling framework, the “feminist shelf” is less about a particular list of books and more about the variegated politics behind feminist books – a way of understanding the reading of feminist texts as producing subjects for whom “reading became relational, a call to accountability that required action” (109).

Hogan depicts a feminist bookstore movement that crosses borders – particularly between the US and Canada – and goes from strength to strength in the 1970s and 1980s. Bookwomen made gains on LICE, developed strategies for accountability in their institutions (including greater leadership by feminists of colour), and generally made the movement a force that the mainstream publishing world had to reckon with. But Hogan's is also a tale of a movement losing its way. She maintains that during the 1990s – a decade that saw a third of feminist bookstores in the US close – bookwomen sacrificed their political ideals to influence the “war between independent bookstores and chain stores,” as Seajay put it (148). For instance, Hogan asserts that in the 1990s feminists of color such as those at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press held fast to the intertwined issues of accountability and antiracism, viewing them as crucial to the press's survival. Yet concern over the financial health of feminist bookstores led a “largely white group of feminist bookwomen” to turn their efforts, if not their attention, away from structures of accountability within the feminist movement and towards mainstream institutions (149). The difficult work of building conversations and a movement dedicated to notions of accountability and antiracist feminism was, thus, left behind, Hogan contends.

Hogan's book is a welcome addition to women's liberation movement historiography, which has spent a decade rethinking the ways that race shaped the movement. She shows that race-based inclusions and exclusions were at the forefront of some bookwomen's minds. Even while she acknowledges that “most feminist bookstore collectives did not, over time, consist of an ethnically diverse group of women” (12), she highlights a long-standing conversation that started with representation on shelves and, at its best, sustained “lesbian antiracism” – “analyzing and mobilizing against … violent interlocking oppressions to envision a just future” (72). Within bookstore collectives and in the pages of FBN, some feminists discussed anti-Semitism in the movement, challenged each other to think more deeply about race and labor in the movement, and developed multiracial coalitions. These actions resonate with the shifting priorities, ideas, and battles of 1980s feminism writ large, yet Hogan often neglects this wider context. More attention is paid to mainstream publishers’ relationship with chain bookstores than is given to the impact that a growing sphere of feminist publishing had on bookwomen. Surely a reflection of Hogan's interest in how feminist bookstores and the book industry impacted one another, such an emphasis nonetheless creates a history in which the larger women's liberation movement often feels like an absent parent.

Still, Hogan provides the first full-length exploration of feminist bookstores, along with the lesson that feminist success must be defined within a framework of accountability. For this, her text is a must-read for both historians and practitioners of women's liberation.