Print culture and the alternative press were fundamental tools in the US women's movement. The role of periodicals in asserting a collective feminist identity and providing mass communication amongst movement members has invited the critical interest of scholars such as Laurel Foster and Kate Adams, who centre the alternative press in the feminist and lesbian movements of the 1970s. Agatha Beins's Liberation in Print is a compelling intervention in current scholarship, focussing on five key feminist periodicals from the period: Ain't I a Woman? (Iowa City, IA), Distaff (New Orleans, LA), Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, MA), L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter (Los Angeles, CA), and the Valley Women's Centre Newsletter (Northampton, MA). Beins uses the periodicals to plot the women's movement across the US, rather than the other way around, and so is able to explore geographical avenues that have previously been overlooked in broader examinations of the North American feminist movement. This method reveals the far-reaching capacity of feminist periodicals at the time, and emphasizes how multifaceted print culture networks provided the foundations for the women's movement.

Structuring the book into five chapters, Beins analyses print culture in terms of process, form, language and intertextuality, and emphasizes the human process of the practice while offering a thorough examination of the “gaps” in history (11). By mapping the similarities, repetitions and disparities between each periodical and each edition, she is able show how the movement maintained coherence over time and where it showed evidence of variances, complicating the idea that 1970s feminism was simply “ethnocentric, heterosexist, racist [and] woman-centered” (146). This repetition includes the use of imagery relating to women of colour, the ubiquitous use of the term “sister,” and a resistance to mainstream media and patriarchal publishing, all of which complicate the monolithic ideas of feminism that have come to define the period.

Throughout the book Beins shows that feminist periodicals are pervasive, and she substantiates this argument by detailing her own engagement with print materials, from the poster in her office to the archives in which she researches. This personal exploration centres the feminist archive in Beins's research as a site for historicizing and “doing” feminism. By spotlighting the archive, her approach allies itself with Kate Dossett's work on “Feminist Archives, Feminist Futures” which relates the role of archives to the practical enactment of feminism. This method not only prioritizes the primary materials in plotting the movement, but also contributes to Beins's theory of articulating feminism through practice, where the vision of what feminism should encompass and represent is articulated through action as well as content and ideas.

Beins offers a compelling insight into how these five periodicals helped advance and shape the feminist movement in the US and the book will prove useful to scholars interested in women and gender, print culture, protest literature and the women's movement. Her discussions of space are particularly engaging as she argues that periodicals gave the movement an “existence” (46). The creation, dissemination and consumption of the periodicals not only gave feminism a material, textual form, but also established an ideological presence through the formation of a collective identity. Where geographical distance can limit the reach of an ideological connection, periodicals act as a uniting resource, overcoming spatial limitations and offering a location for performing feminism. Similar arguments have also been made for zines by scholars such as Alison Piepmeier and Stephen Duncombe, and more recently in relation to modern technologies with blogs and online networks. All of this research posits print culture and its digital equivalents as central to the formation and maintenance of a movement and the correlating collective identity. It would be interesting to see these theories come together in the future in a collaborative project that maps how identity in the print culture of the feminist movement has developed over time, and analyzes the interactions of feminist print culture with other minority publications, such as lesbian and transgender print.