Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press
by Julia M. Allen and Jocelyn H. Cohen
Print edition – illustrated in color, 100 images and 450 pages. EPUB and Open Access edition – free from Lever Press with over 400 color images, audio and video. Print edition available from Amazon or your favorite bookstores .
Book Trailer (3 minutes)
In 1973, nourished by the cultural exuberance of second wave feminism, Helaine Victoria Press, a home-grown effort of two young women, became the first publisher of women’s history postcards. Jocelyn Cohen and Nancy Poore, press co-founders, learned how to print and established a letterpress printshop in the Indiana countryside. The authors of Women Making History demonstrate that, by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory; instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile; they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings.
This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality. Scholars of gender and women’s studies, art history, media studies, and the history of rhetoric, as well as members of the public with interests in feminism, labor history, Lesbian feminist culture, postcards, fine letterpress printing, and papermaking will be inspired by this richly produced history.
Women Making History will be published in both print and EPUB formats. The print edition, with 100 images, which retails for $41.99, is available for preorder at most bookstores. The EPUB edition, which contains many more images, plus audio and video clips, will be free to download from Lever Press. Readers who wish to access the entire body of Helaine Victoria Press’s work online will be able to do so via the Open Access Lever Press link.
Authors:
Julia M. Allen is professor emerita of English at Sonoma State University.
Jocelyn H. Cohen is an artist, arborist and co-founder of Helaine Victoria Press, Inc.
Lever Press
My collaborator Julia M. Allen and I were drawn to Lever Press for their inclusive, innovative, publishing design platform. The vision of the Lever Press is to inspire excellence and innovation in the selection and presentation of scholarship; and to accelerate Open Access in the arts and humanities. Their mission is to publish exciting scholarship and make this accessible to the broadest possible audience. They are a scholarly press supported by more than 50 liberal arts institutions. They publish peer-reviewed, born digital, open access monographs at no cost to their authors or their academic institution.
Helaine Victoria Press’s images and text reveal women’s accomplishments in new ways and through new methods. Using communication media available in the 1970s and 1980s, the cofounders of Helaine Victoria Press re-centered women in the historical record, upended conventional notions of art, insisted upon women’s access to technology, and challenged cultural limits on women’s relationships with each other.