Women into print: Feminist presses in Australia

‘The freedom of the press belongs to those who control the press’ was one of the enduring slogans of the second-wave women’s movement. Reflecting the belief that the printed word could incite social change, feminists asserted their position in the public sphere of publishing, as authors, in print production and through the establishment of feminist presses. Reclaiming and celebrating women’s writing was a defining characteristic of second-wave feminism, and feminist literary and cultural historians took up the literature of Australian women writers from the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century.1 The Australian second-wave women’s movement emphasised cultural forms; it was a catalyst for feminist writing, in the form of journalism, autobiography, short fiction, novels, poetry and plays, as well as feminist history, political theory, gender and sexuality studies. These texts, in turn, form a body of cultural memory that informs how feminism marks its own past, providing a narrative for individual and collective remembering.2