JUDGING GONER: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC 'STUDY OF WOM_AT AND READING SUSAN ALICE FISCHER Dissertation submitted in part fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of London Institute of Education - 1 - ABSTRACT This research project began with the aim of assessing the impact of contemporary British feminist book publishing upon female readers. While it is important for women to have access to 'positive images' of themselves, readership is dependent upon factors beyond textual representation. The first part of this work challenges the text-bound assumptions about reading. The preoccupation with textual meaning which besets most forms of literary criticism, including the sociology of literature and feminist criticism, ignores the social construction of reading. The second part examines the way the book trade orders literary relations. Most of the material for this section comes from interviews with women working in various sectors of the feminist book world. While feminist publishing has managed to enter the mainstream to a degree and has attempted to redefine the relations between readers, writers and literary institutions, its future is uncertain in view of the increasing concentration of ownership in the book trade. The third part of this study draws on interviews with three groups of women discussing their reading. The group of schoolgirls were learning a literacy of differentiation which divided them along gender, class and ethnic lines. The group of women in Further - 2 - Education were resisting a literacy of alienation which presented literacy as a series of discrete skills. Because the literacy that the group of feminist readers was developing empowers the individual to remake links between the personal and the political, I call this feminist literacy. To thrive, feminist literacy needs to go beyond personal identification and continue to participate in a larger feminist cultural and political project. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 ACKROVLEDGEMBITS 7 PART I: Theoretical Background A. Introduction 9 B. Theory 17 1.Lost in the Text 17 2. Breaking the Circle 28 Notes to Part I 39 PART II: Feminist Publishing and the Book Trade A. Introduction 54 1.Sources 54 2. Making contacts in the book trade 58 B. The Gentleman's Profession 62 1.Publishing Conglomeration 63 2. Distribution and Readership 68 C. By, for and about women: the emergence of feminist publishing 83 1. Feminist publishers 90 a. Virago 91 b. The Women's Press 102 -4 - c. Onlywomen Press 107 d. Sheba Feminist Publishers 113 e. Black Vonantalk 120 2. Promotion and Distribution 127 Totes to Part II 154 PART III: Case Studies of Vomen Readers A. Introduction 182 B. Learning Differentiation 188 1. The School 188 2. The Interviews 191 3. First Year Girls 195 a. Gender 195 b. Reading 201 4. Older Girls 208 a. Gender 208 b. Gendered Reading 218 c. Race and Reading 228 d. Obligation and Resistance: the classics and romance 237 C. Resisting Alienation 253 1. The Sample 253 2. Gender 257 3. Education and Reading 261 - 5 - D. Towards a Feminist Literacy 277 1.The Sample 277 2. The Self as Reader 280 3. Becoming a Feminist 287 Votes to Part III 318 CONCLUSION 323 Notes to Conclusion 331 BIBLIOGRAPHY 332 - 6 - ACEIOVLEDGElfEITS One of the pleasures of finishing this project is that I am able to acknowledge some of the many people who helped me. Above all, I am grateful to the girls and women who talked to me about their lives and their reading. Although they must remain anonymous, their voices populate the pages of this thesis. Without them, there would have been no story to tell. I am also indebted to the women in the book trade who took time off from their busy lives to discuss their work with me. I would particularly like to thank: Michele Barrett, Philippa Brewster, Sue Butterworth, Gail Chester, Da Choong, Olivette Cole Wilson, Beth Grossman, Alison Hennegan, Jackie Jones, Lilian Mohin, Ruth Petrie, Anne Phillips, Gabriela Pearse, Sue Roe, Carole Spedding and Menika van der Poorten. I am also very grateful to the workers at the Feminist Library and at Turnaround Distribution and to Women in Publishing. Anne Barnes and Jill Mowbray both facilitated this research project greatly and I thank them for their help. I would also like to thank Theresa Savage, Jeannie Solity and Margaret Turner for sharing their insights into readership. My meetings early on in the research with Sue Bennion, Francis Mulhern and Liz Simpson were also helpful in getting the project going. 7 I am especially grateful to Gianfranco Corsini for first drawing my attention away from the text and pushing me in the direction of readership. I also thank him, and my other colleagues, for granting me the leave of absence from my post at the University of Salerno which enabled me to begin this project. Thanks are also due to the British Federation of University Women for awarding me a scholarship at the outset of this project. I have been extremely fortunate in my choice of supervisors, Jane Miller and Xargherita Rendel, for this research. Their complementary areas of expertise were particularly useful to me because of the interdisciplinary nature of my work. I am indebted to both of them for the encouragement they gave me throughout the course of this project. I am also very grateful to Frances Tomlinson and Gregory Woods who both read drafts of parts of this study and offered me much constructive criticism. My greatest debts are personal. Michele Gregory's laughter and support kept me just this side of sanity during the very difficult time of writing up. My parents, Ann Rita Fischer and Edward I. Fischer, have always encourged me in all my endeavours. I am grateful to them for their belief in me and for the sacrifices they have had to make to enable me to complete this project. This work is dedicated to both my parents and to Michele. Without them, it would never have come to fruition. - 8 - PART I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND A. Introduction Contemporary British feminist book publishing was the starting point for this study. The original intention was to assess the 'effects' that the increased availability of feminist thought and culture in the printed form was having upon readers and to define that readership. Xuch had been written about the ways in which stereotypical images of girls and women have contributed to undermining us throughout the centuries;' now that 'positive images' were being produced by and for women, surely this must bring about some change. Years of training in 'literature' meant that my first impulse was to examine the texts being produced for a clue to the images of women they made available to female readers and any 'effects' that might be said to derive from them. While this now appears a patently misguided approach to questions of readership, it is equally evident that most studies claiming deleterious effects of sexist and other ideologically suspect books had themselves been based upon textual analysis.2 Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) indicated another - and much more direct - route. Radway suggested that if one wanted to know about the 'effects' of reading, it was worth asking the reader rather than assuming that she must be reading as literary critics had predetermined. This usually meant with the worst possible consequences, unless of course, the reading material was - 9 - 'ideologically sound': then the reader's consciousness was being duly raised. Radway's insight, coupled with the fact that very little has been written about feminist publishing and nothing about its readership, means that much of the material for this study comes from interviews carried out with women working in the feminist booktrade - publishers, editors, publicists, distributors, bookshop-keepers, librarians - in an attempt to find out how much they know about their readers and the patterns of book distribution. I had hoped to show that feminist publishing had broken down the traditional barriers of readership which, in Britain, are set up along geographical and class lines. This is not in fact demonstrable: the availability of books in print does not guarantee their accessibility. It is nonetheless clear that feminist publishing has helped to create a written feminist culture and that this has entered the mainstream to a degree. The other main source of material for this study comes from readers themselves. In an attempt to understand the relationship between reading and gender, I interviewed three groups of girls and women about their reading. The first group was made up of girls from a comprehensive school in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). The women in the second group were taking an English for Work Preparation course at a College of Further Education, also in ILEA. Finally, the third group was made up of women who defined themselves as feminists and who read feminist books. - 10 - This study therefore moves away from textual analysis as a way into the sociology of literature. Nuch of the data has shown that if we are to study the sociological implications of book reading we must first know something about the discourses that surround literary activity and how they relate to the social context. Commonplaces abound in the discussion of books, informing everyday discourse and erudite pronouncements alike. A bevy of accepted notions circulates about who should read what and what will happen to them if they do not. Rather than take sides in this endless argument, I shall look at the ways we have of talking about books and reading and the assumptions behind such discourses in order to understand the part they play in the social construction of reading and literacy. Books are indeed judged by the cover and people by the covers of the books they read.