Fonds 10-012 - The Women's Press fonds

The Women’s Press (also known as the Canadian Women’s Educational Press) was founded in 1971, by a subgroup of the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement, one of the first feminist political organizations in Toronto. The initiative for a feminist press grew out of a dissatisfaction with the mainstream publishing community which had rejected Women Unite!, the first compilation of Canadian contemporary feminist writing. Their mandate was to provide an alternative means of making feminist ideas widely accessible and continue their involvement in the growing Canadian women’s movement. The Canadian Women’s Educational Press, more commonly known as the Women’s Press, was started officially on a grant from the Toronto Local Initiates Project (LIP) as a socialist feminist collective publishing feminist fiction, non-fiction and non-sexist children’s books.

In 1988 the Women’s Press began public discussion of an internal dispute regarding a proposed anti-racist policy. The discussions ended in a split within the Press with some original members departing to form the ‘Second Story Press’.

Women’s Press is Canada’s oldest English language feminist publisher. For over forty years, Women’s Press has played an integral role in the proliferation of high-quality Canadian writing in the fields of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies