Search Results for: business

The Business of Being a Feminist Bookstore

IFC

“This is a top-selling author. Do we want top-selling authors in here?” says Candace to Candace as they consider inventory for Women and Women First, Portlandia’s fictional feminist bookstore.  “No,” says the other Candace, ” we want bottom-selling authors.”

For seven seasons, Portlandia has filmed inside the In Her Words bookstore, which last year severed its relationship with the show for being “in every way diametrically opposed to our politics and the vision of society we’re organizing to realize.” If the business of running a bookstore is hard enough, the business of running a feminist bookstore is deeply entwined with a collective spirit and political agenda, and money can serve as the beginning and end of those problems. (Portlandia, the bookstore noted, also didn’t pay the store to film there.)

At LARB, Stephanie Young looks at Kristen Hogan’s history of the feminist bookstore, which details the divisions in the movement within the business of selling feminism. In a review of the book from last year, Laura Tanenbaum writes that “In focusing on survival, bookstores, like many other feminist institutions, found themselves professionalizing and turning away from antiracist and political commitments and utopian spirit.”

The financial and political woes of A Woman’s Place in Oakland is the flashpoint of Hogan’s narrative, a business which grew by two thousand percent in nine years, from 1973 to 1982, and served as the livelihood for the six employees who worked there. The group eventually fell out over management of the bookstore, which had “gross sales over $250,000 operating without a budget or financial analysis.”

Nearly every aspect of the store was locked in generational disputes. The older women were staunchly separatist, and resisted the younger four’s desire to host some events which would be open to anyone interested, including men, or only for more particular groups (disabled women, women of color, parents). Pagano, Summers, Kubo, and Meredith wrote that Wilson and Lando hoarded power like bosses, with ruinous effect on financial decision-making. The group regularly failed to reach consensus on basic operational processes. Covering vacations and work shifts was an ongoing source of irritation. Wilson’s notes from a 1981 meeting register this frustration: “Jesse had another fit about lack of substitute policy.” After the lockout when the store was ordered to reopen, a receiver’s report showed dangerously high inventory. Apparently the group couldn’t agree on how to cull books for return to publishers, nor on who should do the work. High inventory limited cash flow, a significant problem given their high expenses, the largest being salaries for six paid collective members.

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The Business of Being “Jane Roe”

Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) and her lawyer Gloria Allred on the steps of the Supreme Court, 1989. Photo by Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, on February 18th, Norma McCorvey — aka “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion — passed away. Four years ago, in February, 2013, Vanity Fair published this fascinating profile of of her. McCorvey, who wasn’t able to actually have the abortion she fought for because of the timing of her pregnancy and the drawn-out case, famously had a change of heart many years later, becoming a pro-life activist. Through most of her adult life, regardless of whether she was fighting for or against women’s reproductive rights, McCorvey managed to monetize her position, not only publishing two memoirs, but forming one sketchy foundation after another, on either side of the argument. Author Joshua Prager had to write around the subject — whom he and all those interviewed portray as mercenary — because she refused to be interviewed without payment of her $1,000 speaking fee.

Young Norma McCorvey had not wanted to further a cause; she had simply wanted an abortion and could not get one in Texas. Even after she became a plaintiff, plucked from obscurity through little agency of her own, she never did get that abortion. McCorvey thus became, ironically, a symbol of the right to a procedure that she herself never underwent. And in the decades since the Roe decision divided the country, the issue of abortion divided McCorvey too. She started out staunchly pro-choice. She is now just as staunchly pro-life.

But in truth McCorvey has long been less pro-choice or pro-life than pro-Norma. And she has played Jane Roe every which way, venturing far from the original script to wring a living from the issue that has come to define her existence.

“I almost forgot i have a one thousand dollar fee,” she texted in August in response to a request for an interview. Told she could not be paid, she texted back: “Then we wont speak.”

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The New Cover of Bloomberg Businessweek Reminds Us: Businesses Can’t Thrive Amid Chaos

The reason the U.S. is a good place to do business is that, for the past two centuries, it’s built a firm foundation on the rule of law. President Trump almost undid that in a weekend. That’s bad for business.

-From a scathing short column by Matt Levine about businesses waking up to a harsh reality under President Trump.

 

Longreads Best of 2016: Business & Tech Reporting

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in business and tech reporting.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2016