The Virago Story

Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon

Catherine Riley

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785338090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1970s witnessed a renaissance in women's print culture, as feminist presses and bookshops sprang up in the wake of the second-wave women's movement. At four decades' remove from that heady era, however, the landscape looks dramatically different, with only one press from the period still active in contemporary publishing: Virago. This engaging history explains how, from modest beginnings, Virago managed to weather epochal transformations in gender politics, literary culture, and the book publishing business. Drawing on original interviews with many of the press's principal figures, it gives a compelling account of Virago's place in recent women's history while also reflecting on the fraught relationship between activism and commerce.

Part I

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1973–83

Chapter 1

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Virago’s Hands-on Brand of Feminism

Virago was founded in 1973 in the context of an emerging feminist community, a changing publishing industry and a patriarchal cultural paradigm. Its launch can be constituted as a moment of feminist praxis: an action intended to address the context of a new women’s politics and to redress the lack of women in public and literary life. Callil describes her decision to take action as a publisher as her ‘brand of feminism’, grounded in the belief that books have the power to change lives and that controlling the means of literary production is vital.

From 1973, the year in which Virago was founded by Callil, Rowe and Rosie Boycott, to 1982 when Callil, Harriet Spicer and Ursula Owen presided over a now-established publishing phenomenon, Virago challenged the history, structures and practices of the industry in which it operated. It also innovated in its editorial and production techniques, effecting changes in the way in which publishing as a whole figured women – as business innovators but also as a ready and important market for books.

In its first ten years Virago was central to the dissemination of feminist ideology, publishing writing from important female critics such as Sheila Rowbotham and Denise Riley, and reprinting seminal texts from the United States such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes for consumption by a British audience (Figes 1978; Millet 1977; Riley 1983; Rowbotham 1983). It also innovated with the introduction of a ‘Modern Classics’ series, the brainchild of Callil and an unexpectedly huge success, and established links (which were to last) with hugely influential authors such as Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. Even more important in this first decade, perhaps, was the example the press set as a women-only business venture, as Callil and the rest of the Virago team prioritized economic success alongside changing hearts and minds through literature.

Virago acted as an inspiration for a raft of other feminist presses that followed in its wake in the 1970s and early 1980s. As the women’s liberation movement gained momentum during these years, the production and consumption of women’s writing became a vital element of feminist activism: ‘the support of women readers, along with the influence of an ongoing feminist movement, created in the seventies an extraordinary decade of continuous and impressive publishing for and about women’ (Kinney 1982, 48). This sense of a feminist community sustained, and was in turn partly sustained by Virago in its early years.

By the beginning of the 1970s, a burgeoning feminist movement in the United Kingdom was drawing away from the sexually libertarian counterculture of the 1960s in a tentative attempt to establish women’s independence and radicalism. Marsha Rowe, one of the women who helped Callil establish Virago in 1973, recalls these uncertain times: ‘all the early seventies was a desperate search. You’d talk to women who’d been in the media a long time, or you’d talk to women who’d never written before, photographers who’d never photographed . . . you know, everything was just starting, and people were learning as they did things.’¹ She describes the changes in London as women within alternative culture began to look around themselves:

What had been quite freeing to the underground press . . . sexual freedom was quite important at the time, and having a different sort of life to your parents and not thinking you just had to marry and have children and give up your job . . . all that had been rather rebounded and become over-determined so I was beginning to feel really uncomfortable with the images of the underground press. But we [women] still had no words to really say what we felt. I remember going to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 and you know there were two women performers the entire weekend – Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell – and all the rest were men.²

Against this backdrop of women’s growing alienation from and disenchantment with a radical movement that had promised much but delivered them the usual roles of support workers and soothers of male egos, the publication of seminal feminist texts further provoked women to agitate for change. In the United States, texts by Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone had begun this process, while in the United Kingdom, a big catalyst for women’s engagement with feminism was the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). This was met with a huge response – one of outrage from the establishment and of inspiration for many hundreds of thousands of women readers. Virago writer Joyce Nicholson sums up a common response to the text: ‘When I read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, I could not sleep for three nights’ (Nicholson 1977, 7). For the first time, women’s sexual liberation was being talked about. Rowe describes the growing sense of frustration that galvanized the fledgling women’s liberation movement as it gathered pace in the United Kingdom, and her own growing consciousness of women’s inequality: ‘men were just incredibly threatened and we found it very hard to say . . . I mean really we were, underneath, incredibly angry. I don’t think we recognised what a motor it was and how it affected us in our relationships’.³

Rowe recalls that in spite of the support of many men she knew and had worked with, there was a strong sense of hostility to the establishment of her feminist magazine Spare Rib from other men in the industry: ‘feminism was just derided in most of the media . . . I mean, even with starting Spare Rib, it was about four years until the magazine called itself feminist’.⁴ Condescension, incomprehension and ridicule constituted the general mainstream (for which read ‘male’) attitude towards feminist activism – most apocryphal of all, perhaps, was the reportage around the 1968 Miss America pageant, where it was falsely reported that feminist activists were setting their underwear alight.⁵ The gleeful appropriation of this myth of ‘bra-burning’ women, a term used to deride women to this day, serves as a fine (and lasting) example of the sexism and machismo that pervaded the culture into which Virago was launched.

This incident also marks a moment of continuity between events in the United States and the United Kingdom. The focus of this book is very much on the UK feminist and publishing scene, but there are many points of intersection with events across the Atlantic. Callil herself noted early on the debt she owed American feminists for igniting her ideas about women and publishing, spelling this out in some of Virago’s early publicity material: ‘many books have been re-printed here from the USA. Virago feel that it’s time an English publishing house took Women’s Liberation as seriously’.⁶

As this feminist community grew, The Female Eunuch was followed by other texts that set out to challenge women’s position within patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate, Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society, Sheila Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World and Anna Coote and Tess Gill’s Women’s Rights: A Practical Guide all constitute early examples of such feminist polemic (Mitchell 1971; Oakley 1972; Rowbotham 1973; Coote and Gill 1974). In fiction, too, feminist themes were emerging in the writing of Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Zoe Fairbairns and Cathy Porter – writers who would go on to publish with Virago once the press was established in 1973. Most of them were part of the Virago Advisory Group who gave advice and support to the press during its early years. Another member of this group was Rosalind Delmar, who wrote an introduction to The Dialectic of Sex, a text that was pivotal to the US women’s movement in the 1970s. And in addition to these writers, many other prominent feminists, including journalists (Suzanne Lowry and Mary Stott), historians (Sally Alexander and Anna Davin), academics (Christine Jackson and Elizabeth Wilson) and other authors, were part of Virago’s advisory panel.

This clearly evidences the existence – and necessity – of a strong network of feminists working together to effect change as the 1970s got underway. Harriet Spicer, who joined Virago as Callil’s secretary before progressing to the role of production manager, also notes that Virago’s geographical location was important, placing it at the heart of a London scene of feminist activism that provided support in its earliest days: ‘where we were located seems worth a mention, being part of this ludicrously eminent Arsenal women’s group which had people like Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham and god knows who else . . . Anna Davin and very close connections’.⁷ This network was crucial to Virago’s early successes, providing as it did material for the press to publish, ideas on which to commission work and a means of disseminating details about Virago’s output – it also, of course, meant there was a ready and eager audience for Virago’s books.

The sexist cultural paradigm against which the second-wave women’s liberation movement set itself saw women limited to a set of stereotypes that had historically been considered ‘appropriate’: wife, mother, sex object. The emerging feminist consciousness that spurred Virago’s women into action had only just begun to figure these stereotypes, and ways in which to challenge them, as Rowe notes: ‘it [the women’s movement] had made a big impact but not many changes had come about’.⁸ Callil’s decision to establish Virago was founded on a belief that a publishing house could act as a vital tool in this challenge, disseminating literature that addressed women’s inferior status: ‘Virago was founded to publish books which, focusing on the lives, history and literature of women, would provide some balance to dominant views of human experience’ (Callil 1980, 1001). It was also born out of Callil’s growing frustration at her – and all women’s – containment within the confines of the ‘feminine’: ‘I started Virago to break a silence, to make women’s voices heard, to tell women’s stories, my story and theirs. How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar. I remember one such occasion when I raised my fist, banged the table and shouted: “I have views on Bangladesh too!”’ (Callil 2008).

Callil’s solution was to publish books that would challenge women’s containment within feminine stereotypes (see Chapter 2 for analysis of the books published in Virago’s first decade). But she wanted more than this – she also wanted to enact this challenge herself by staking her place in the world of business: ‘we had to make it [Virago] a success so that it could take its place in the world. And that had to be business success’.⁹ In the very act of setting up their own business, Callil and the Virago team were challenging notions of ‘appropriate’ female behaviour. Making Virago a commercial success – an operation that turned a profit and made an impact in the literary marketplace – was an important feminist intervention.

Rowe recalls the cultural climate of the early 1970s within which she, Callil and Boycott were formulating their ideas for Virago. Women, Rowe noted, were not expected to work or innovate, even within the libertarian alternative community in which she lived: ‘I mostly knew musicians and painters and they were all men. I mean, there was one woman painter but you were supposed to be the muse really. My boyfriend was a painter and they didn’t want you to do work.’¹⁰ Virago writer Margaret Atwood recalls, similarly, that she was discouraged from a career in journalism by male contacts who warned that she would be limited to supporting roles: ‘I was told that women journalists usually ended up writing obituaries or wedding announcements for the women’s page, in accordance with their ancient roles as goddesses of life and death, deckers of nuptial beds and washers of corpses’ (Atwood 2005, 24).

In the year after Virago was founded, the publication of the findings of the National Council for Civil Liberties Women’s Committee on Women and Work provided further evidence of the attitudes that Rowe and Atwood describe. It found that new anti-sexist legislation had failed to affect young women’s expectations and experiences of work: ‘rarely is a child exposed to female role models who function as pilot, surgeon, accountant, carpenter or construction worker’ (Friedman 1977, ix). In addition, women were denied parity of pay even when they were carrying out work of equal value to their male colleagues, as Anna Coote (a member of Virago’s Advisory Group) and Tess Gill pointed out: ‘Women’s average earnings are still little more than half those of men. Many employees have been able to avoid the impact of the Equal Pay Act by keeping women in low-paid grades of work or transferring them to “women’s jobs” where they have no chance of comparing their pay and conditions with male workers’ (Coote and Gill 1974, 18). It was noted that the assumption that women would also be caregivers – in ways not assumed of men, even if they too were parents – contributed to the discriminatory attitudes that structured the working day. ‘Not only are there few women managers, employers and supervisors, but most women are employed in low-wage and low-status jobs, have little opportunity for training and promotion and are forced to work hours adapted to their other job as housewives and mothers’ (Hadjifotiou 1983, 24).

Working women had to overcome deeply ingrained sexist prejudices – the notion of appropriate feminine behaviour so pervaded patriarchal culture that women were figured as incapable of being good at ‘business’. Virago’s women were thus a rare challenge. Their status as female publishing executives was anomalous: ‘within major publishing houses, few women achieved anything other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. 1973–83
• Part II. 1983–94
• Part III. 1994–2004
• Part IV. 2004–17
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index