Womanbooks: A Bookstore for Women - New for May / June

New York: Womanbooks, ca. 1980s. 8 ½ x 11 in. 4 pp pamphlet formed from folding 11 x 17 leaf. Mild spotting to front cover, otherwise very good. Item #10348

A small book catalog of new titles at Womanbooks in May and June of an unknown year.

Founded by Eleanor Batchelder, Karyn London, and Fabi Romero-Oak in 1975, Womanbooks is widely considered the second feminist bookstore in New York City, after Labyris Books. Womanbooks was first located in a superintendent’s apartment in a SRO on West 92nd Street; In 1976, the bookstore moved to a larger and more visible corner store on the ground floor of an apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue and West 92nd street a few doors down from Joan Nestle’s apartment (the original site of the Lesbian Herstory Archives). Womanbooks, reaching a wider audience than its lesbian separatist predecessor, Labyris, was known as a feminist meeting place, and a destination for out-of-town academic feminists. Categories listed in this bookseller’s catalog include feminism, women’s studies/media, women of other nations, black women, childbirth/pregnancy, “private lives” and more. Womanbooks was also instrumental in shaping early Women’s Studies discourse.

Store founder Eleanor Betchelder explained that “[a]ll the women’s studies women would come in, and they would all make this pilgrimage up to 92nd Street to basically spend their book budget. They’d spend hundreds of dollars each at the store.”

A rare example of a bookseller catalog from this important feminist bookstore, representing a wide range of feminist thematic preoccupations.

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