Items

• Circles on the water : selected poems of Marge Piercy
  Marge Piercy (1936-) is perhaps best known for her speculative feminist tale ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ (1976), although she has authored many other novels, short stories and poems. This book collects in one volume 150 of Piercy’s poems from seven titles published between 1963 and 1982. As a result of the twenty-year span, the poems reflect Piercy’s developing ideas and changing themes including her involvement in the USA activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), her enjoyment of growing fruit and vegetables in Cape Cod, her involvement in second-wave feminism and her Tarot poems. The book has been continuously in print ever since its first publication by Alfred A. Knopf.
• Cross sections from a decade of change
  Elizabeth Janeway (1913-2005) was a novelist, pro-abortion campaigner and prominent second-wave feminist. In this book, which has minimal LGBTQ+ content, Janeway discusses the process of social change regarding women’s personal and public lives and rights in sections entitled ‘History’, ‘Work’, ‘Sexuality’, ‘Literature’ and ‘Dailyness’ (which she describes as “the homely details of ordinary life”). Published in 1983, the book is an unillustrated collection of Janeway’s writings, including essays and reviews, with one piece – a review of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel ‘Lolita’ – dating from 1958. A book named ‘Cross Sections’ was listed, minus author and publisher, in a Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles. It is likely it was this book.
• Feminism in the 80's : facing down the right
  A Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles lists a book called ‘Feminism in the 80s’ but with no other identifying features. It is possible, but not certain, that the title is that of a series including two works authored by Charlotte Bunch (1944-) and published in the years preceding the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids – ‘Facing Down the Right’ (1981), shown here, and ‘Going Public With our Vision’ (1983). These pamphlet publications are based on speeches given by Bunch who was a member of the Washington-based lesbian feminist group The Furies. Bunch was also a writer, journal editor, and active in education, and is now a professor at Rutgers University, focussing on feminism, women’s rights and violence against women.
• Look me in the eye : old women, aging, and ageism
  This book focusses on women and ageing via several essays previously published in journals such as ‘Broomstick’ and ‘Sinister Wisdom’. Barbara Macdonald (1913-2000) and Cynthia Rich (1933-), the sister of poet Adrienne Rich, who were a couple and active in the women’s rights movement, write from different stages in the ageing process. Macdonald uses her introduction to reflect on the repressive environment she encountered growing up, which forced lesbians to become “other”, an otherness she now equates with being an older woman. The copy displayed here is the 1985 reprint edition. The first edition, and likely the one seized during the raids, was published by Spinsters Ink, a feminist press founded in 1979 in New York by Judith McDaniel and Maureen Brady.
• The book of the city of ladies
  This is quite possibly the most surprising book seized during the raids and certainly is the oldest narrative, first printed in French in 1405. Christine de Pisan (or Pizan) (1364-1430) was a Medieval Italian woman who lived in France and, following the death of her husband, wrote over twenty works to support her family. Using the device of a discussion with ladies called Reason, Rectitude and Justice, this work highlights women’s oppression, including lack of access to education and misogynistic portrayal in texts written by men, in words which have resonance for more contemporary feminist thought. As befits the times, the text is also underpinned by Christian values, and Christine spent her final years living in a convent. It is unclear which edition of the book was seized during the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids.
• True to life adventure stories. Vol. 1
  Judy Grahn (1940-) is a poet, lesbian feminist and advocate of women’s spirituality. She also wrote 1984’s ‘Another Mother Tongue’, a mythic queer history. In response to Grahn’s question, “what is a woman’s adventure story?”, this book presents stories by twenty writers which relate women’s direct experiences. Writing by working-class women is a strong feature of the collection, with an emphasis on maintaining the authors’ unedited natural language and spelling. The book was published by Diana Press, a feminist printing and publishing house founded in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik. The cover illustration is by Karen Sjöholm, who also worked at the Press. The Press was vandalised in 1977, with damage to plates, paste-ups, books and machines. It closed in 1979.
• Witches heal : lesbian herbal self-sufficiency
  Billie Potts (1940-2013) was one third of Elf and Dragons, self-described “lesbian witches”, who were a Woodstock-based women’s land collective, a publisher, distributor of herbs and part of a wider feminist spirituality movement. Women’s rural collectives were common in the USA at this time. Potts’s book is a guide to herbalism and an “access tool”, promoting self-sufficiency and encouraging lesbian women to reclaim their role as healers. The book proved controversial as its publication coincided with an acrimonious split within Elf and Dragons. Susun R. Weed accused Potts of using her work uncredited and asked feminist bookshops not to stock the book. The ‘Operation Tiger’ raids were not, therefore, the first attempts to restrict this book.
• Women and fiction : feminism and the novel, 1880-1920
  First published in 1979, this academic monograph was reissued as a Methuen University Paperback in 1981. Somewhat enigmatically referred to in Gay’s the Word’s list of seized books as ‘Women fiction’, it is one of the more unexpected items to be confiscated by Customs, who seized four copies in October 1984. Patricia Stubbs discusses the relationship between literary depictions of women and the roles and possibilities available to them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the copy on display here demonstrates, the book was also available in academic libraries. This is Senate House Library’s own copy and has been heavily marked up by studious readers.
• Women and madness
  Since publication in 1972, this feminist work on women’s psychology has sold over 2.5 million copies. Psychologist Phyllis Chesler (1940-) interviewed women who had been psychiatry or psychotherapy patients and wove their experiences into a book which explores the ways in which women are stigmatised, abused and oppressed by a patriarchal medical establishment. The book is held in multiple UK academic libraries. It is unclear which edition of the book was seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ – the Allen Lane edition is shown here – but more likely it was the 1973 version from the US mass market publisher Avon Books. Chesler sued the owners of Avon for publishing the book with differences from her original text.