The two documents — the note and the exhibition card — aren’t isolated examples; on the contrary, they are part of a whole field. Publishing was very important for the feminist movements of the years 70-80, in general and in the artistic practices linked to them. The Woman’s Building (founded in 1973 by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, art historian Arlene Raven) and its book workshop, and the project Heresies, A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977-1992) are two of such examples of feminist publishing practices in the arts.

This research project interrogates the influence of this history for contemporary feminism and independent publishing, and the and the intersection thereof. Despite the oblivion in which these practices seem to have fallen, we can see an echo between the feminist practices of the years 70-80 and contemporary editorial practices. They share issues of representation (of communities, for instance); protocols of collective work and participative propositions; the questioning of the traditional creation structures (structured around the figure of the Author, individual genius, concealing the ecosystem and the chain of production which it is part of); the highlighting of relational questions through the emphasis on distribution and sharing; the commoning of tools; the blurring of boundaries between art and activism.

At the same time, some contemporary practices put new imperatives on the table: the need for publishing to be intersectional (crossing questions of gender, race, class, age…), queer and post-colonial, free and open-source, hybrid — these are important paradigms, that need to encounter the feminist approaches and questions seen before.

This project will make the two documents meet — the note and the card — to deploy their histories, and re-open the discussion around the questions they still ask today.

The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is an amazing project published in 1973, in a moment when the second wave of feminism in the United States was accompanied by the development of new structures — women-run spaces and publishing initiatives.

This big book documents and indexes women and feminist initiatives all over the United States at a time when the internet didn’t exist. The different projects, groups, tools and methods documented are spread throughout the nine chapters of the book: communications, art, self-health, children, learning, self-defense, work and money, getting justice and building the movement.

The form of the publication and its title are inspired by another counter-culture catalog of the time, the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972), itself inspired by mail-order commercial catalogs like the Sears Roebuck Catalog (1888-1993).

Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, the initiators of the publication, travelled for two month around the country to meet feminist groups. Each group not only contributed knowledge and ressources but also recommended other groups, which made the project grow in a rhizomatic way, ending up after five month only into a $5 red-covered paperback book of 223 pages and 32.3 x 27 cm.

The last pages contain a section entitled Making the Book, which documents the process of making the book, in a sharing and Do It Yourself spirit: collaborative, with twelve hands; nomadic, a trip of over 12’000 miles around the country; and urgent, made during a period of five months. The book reflects feminists’ ideas, emphasising on the collective and DIY methods. As opposed to other counter-culture projects, which remained very patriarcal, as the cover states, the New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a “Woman-made Book”. The insistence on women-owned means of production is important, since it was never the case before in the history of book-making, in which the writing, printing and publishing roles were very rarely accessible to women.