New Course:
Feminist Business History and Heritage:
Learning from our Foremothers
Feminists have created many successful businesses, businesses that were explicitly feminist.
Few people know that these businesses ever existed, and even fewer remember what they were about, what practices and strategies worked for them, and what led to their closures— or their longevity.
Without knowing feminist businesses’ history, we can’t learn from their mistakes. Worse, we can’t build on their achievements.
Starting in February 2023, we will reconnect with the legacy of feminist business, and draw from their experiences some shared principles and guidance for current and future feminist businesses.
Initial Schedule (to be revised with participants’ input):
Class Session #1, Tuesday, Feb 7, 4:30-6 pm ET:
Welcome and Introductions. What’s a Feminist Business and what do we know about them?
Office hour: Friday Feb, 10, 11 am -12 pm ET
Tuesday, Feb 14: Contribute your Reflection #1
Class Session #2, Tuesday, Feb 21, 4:30-6 pm ET:
Feminist Businesses’ customers, products, services, community connections
Office hour: Friday, Feb 24, 11 am -12 pm ET
Tuesday, Feb 28: Contribute your Reflection #2
Class Session #3, Tuesday, March 1, 4:30-6 pm ET:
Getting stuff done: organizing themselves, understanding power, authority, and coordination, conflicts and feminist challenges
Office hour: Friday, March 4, 11 am -12 pm ET
Tuesday, March 8: Contribute Reflection #3
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Overview
In this class, we will collaborate to create a shared understanding of feminist business history, and to draw lessons and unanswered questions from the stories we gather. We will produce a file/living repository of resources on the businesses we consider. We will create a document that identifies feminist business practices and challenges from history, along with citations, that we can all use as a resource. We will decide together how to share this document with other feminist business folks.
At the end of this course, we will have created a cohort of feminist business advocates who can teach others about and continue to develop knowledge of our shared feminist business history. This cohorts’ knowledge will support feminist business coaches, mentors, and practitioners who want to build on rather than repeat the lessons of feminist business.
At the end of this course, you will be well-versed in the history of a particular feminist business or sector, able to explain this history to another interested feminist business person. You will have developed some wisdom from the experience of earlier feminists that you can use in designing your future business activities.
As a facilitator and active participant myself, I expect that our shared work will help me lock in what I’ve learned from my independent reading in feminist business history. Our work together will also help me examine and expand my definitions of feminist business and help me develop better criteria and tools for guiding feminist businesses.
This class will prototype a collaborative format that we can put to use as we build a learning program for feminist business practitioners, mentors, coaches, and teachers.
Together, our work will advance feminist business practice.
How We’ll Work Together
We will read stories/ books/ articles/ academic pieces about early feminist businesses (“early” meaning between 1960 and 2000 c.e.), and:
Summarize the arc of their stories
Discuss what they prioritized
Examine how they were ‘political’ (e.g., within their societies’ politics, but even more in their everyday actions)
Consider the ways they were “feminist”, and what they came up with as feminist business praxis (aka practice informed by theory)
Identify what issues became chronic problems
Look for how they connected with — and created— a feminist community
Analyze what they did that helped them succeed for as long as they succeeded, and
Consider other questions that emerge.
We will also pursue the questions that come up for you, personally, about what feminist business history can tell you about yourself as a feminist and your approach to business.
You’ll co-create knowledge in a range of ways, including by:
Reading analytically and preparing for conversations
Participating in conversations
Reading/reflecting and writing up your personal insights and responses to questions, to share with the group
Reading/ reflecting and writing in response to insights in the group file
Bringing in your own research to expand the pool of knowledge
Building a collective, group document that catalogues examples of different feminist business challenges and practices (using a template from CV)
Together, we will:
Review the stories I’ve gathered and ones that you contribute (recognizing that these stories are limited and also that they are what we have)
Look for commonalities and differences
Draw conclusions from their histories
Summarize these conclusions in a document/ file we can share with our community
Share some reflections from our class with our feminist communities (e.g., with a co-written blog post in the Feminist Enterprise Commons)
As the course convenor, I will:
Create a syllabus with carefully curated readings
Facilitate class conversations and offline work
Share my own business perspectives and academic frameworks
Establish themes and questions for each of our three live class conversations
Develop reflection assignments
Develop preparation assignments
Manage the back end of the class system
Generally, act like a professor who’s using feminist learning practices to create a learning space for motivated folks who have limited time but unlimited curiosity
You will:
Receive a reading list of books, articles, and (where possible) pdfs.
When you can, purchase new editions of the works published by the historians whose work we will be using, as a way of supporting them.
Practice good feminist citation — noting the authors of the work we draw from and citing this particular class as a source for your knowledge & opinions going forward.
Commit to learning about one segment of the businesses offered in our reading list and becoming well-versed in their history, by:
Preparing to prepared to summarize that selection of material (verbally) for the group,
Expanding our file of resources available to learn about this business segment (by doing your own independent searching)
Adding specific examples, citations, and questions to our collective document on Feminist Practices from Feminist Business History
Course Management
We will host the conversations on Zoom, where they will be recorded so that folks who miss a session can catch up.
We will host our class information in the Mighty Network of the Feminist Enterprise Commons, where all our documents will be stored and where we’ll conduct online conversations between class sessions. Each participant will have access to the course area and a one year membership to the entire Commons as part of their tuition.
Tuition: The reference tuition price for this class is $200, roughly equivalent to the cost of an online class at the Night School Bar, NC (link) or to the cost of a short intro course with Kimberly Johnson, PhD, of The Feminism School (link).
Students who participate in all three sessions and who also complete their contributions to the collective document will receive a $50 rebate on their tuition at the end of the class (making their total tuition $150).
The tuition goes to support my active real time work during the course (approximately 40 hours of new, active time), as well as the decades of experience that provide a foundation for this course.
Class Schedule:
Over the course of six weeks, we will have three “in person” classes, and three read/write/reflecting sessions (that you will contribute to by a specific deadline, that you can react to on your own time once everyone has contributed.) I will also offer open ‘office hours’ when folks can drop in to discuss questions informally.
Classes are (tentatively) scheduled to begin in Feminist February, on Tuesdays from 4:30 - 6:00 Eastern Time (3:30 -5:00 Central, 1:30 -3:00 Pacific). The first date/ time is firm, so that we can meet together to discuss what timing will work best for the group. Other times/ dates are tentative because I expect to adjust the times, days, and weeks we meet based on class needs.
Class Session #1, Tuesday, Feb 7: Welcome and Introductions. What’s a Feminist Business? What’s generally known about Feminist Business History?
By Tuesday, Feb 14: Contribute your Reflection #3 to the course site, and comment on others’ contributions
Office hour: Friday Feb, 10, 11 am -12 pm ET
Class Session #2, Tuesday, Feb 21: How did Feminist Businesses understand their customers? How did they craft and produce feminist products and services? How did they understand their connections with and responsibilities to their communities?
By Tuesday, Feb 28: Contribute your Reflection #2 to the class site, and comment on others’ contributions
Office hour: Friday, Feb 24, 11 am -12 pm ET
Class Session #3, Tuesday, March 1: How did feminist businesses organize themselves? How did they understand power, authority, coordination? How did they get stuff done? How did they struggle with differences and conflicts amongst themselves? How did they try to address classic challenges of feminism (e.g., racism, homophobia, profit vs politics)?
By Tuesday, March 8: Contribute your Reflection #3 to the course site
Office hour: Friday, March 4, 11 am -12 pm ET
Our Feminist Pedagogy
I could organize this class like a regular graduate seminar, where the professor assigns readings which students complete and asks questions which students answer, and where the professor remains the sole expert on the topic. Instead, I want to shake things up with a different format, a more feminist format that invites you participants to develop your own expertise by becoming co-creators of the class.
This means that we’ll use a class format that’s often called the “flipped classroom”, where participants read and imbibe information before a class session, and then share, investigate, critique and draw consultations about this information collectively through group conversation during a class session. This structure helps to de-center the professor as the ‘only’ expert and also positions participants as co-creators of shared expertise. I will also follow other principles of feminist pedagogy (see this document on What to Expect in Workshops with Me).
I will coach participants in how to read the materials to find the information we need to lift out, and share some possible strategies for helping you capture your own insights and emotions as you read about these feminist business pioneers. I’ll do this not only by helping you shape your approach to the readings (e.g., where you focus, what you prioritize) but also by offering you some frameworks and templates to help you corral your learnings.
Know in advance that the published record of feminist businesses is not large and does not consistently follow conventional historical formats. Expect to read materials across a variety of genres, including and not limited to memoirs, academic books, newspaper interviews, business school cases, contemporary non-fiction books (historical but not academic), masters theses, pamphlets, and republished archives.
You will also be encouraged to gather additional information about the businesses you chose to focus on. For example, if you choose to focus on feminist book publishers like Kitchen Table Press, you could search for interviews of employees or authors, find a podcast interview of Barbara Smith, reach out to someone at their spin-off community for Black women writers, Kitchen Table Literary Arts or select a poem that they published to give us a sense of their work. I want you to look beyond the materials on the syllabus to add new readings, podcasts, visuals, or whatever else you find to enrich your (and our) learning.
Businesses and Industries We Can Focus On
With folks who express interest in the class, I will share a list of businesses and industries and related readings that we’ll use to focus our shared inquiry. The feminist business segments and specific histories we can choose from include and are not limited to:
Bloodroot Restaurant (cooperative)
Kitchen Table Press (book publishing)
Adam’s Rib Magazine (periodical)
The Body Shop (bath & beauty products)
Olivia Records (music)
Feminist Bookstores
African-American Beauty Parlors
Feminist Credit Unions/ Feminist Economic Alliance
Participants are encouraged to suggest other organizations and segments if they can come up with enough resources to compose a history.
Readings and Reading Strategy
If this were a university class and we all were full-time students, our reading list would not only be long but also would be something we were expected to complete. However, where “adult, activist learners” have families, communities and jobs, we have much less time to read and thus more pressure to skim readings superficially (or even skip some altogether). So, while I offer you a full syllabus with a full set of readings, we will not expect every participant to complete every reading.
Instead we’ll practice “collective enoughness” (a concept from Hildy Gottlieb), where each participant chooses a particular business, a type of organization or a market sector (e.g., The Body Shop, restaurants, publishing). Each participant will complete the reading for that slice of feminist history with the intent of sharing what they learn with the rest of the group.
I’ve organized the reading into clusters on subtopics, where the clusters will have approximately the same amount of content. Each participant will choose where s/he wants to develop personal expertise by choosing a cluster of readings that s/he’ll read closely. While I hope that we can cover the range of clusters I’ve identified, if more than one person wants to cover a particular cluster we’ll just have more than one perspective on that material!
You’ll become well-versed in your chosen space of feminist business history and conversant across the other spaces. I think this strategy will offer you more intellectual nourishment and more potential wisdom than what a more surface level, scattershot tasting menu might provide. And, as we all contribute what we’ve learned about our own area, we’ll create a broader range of shared knowledge.
You will receive the reading list as soon as you sign up, so that you can get a head start on your reading, on purchasing your materials from a feminist bookstore, or getting them from interlibrary Loan, etc.
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Note that this class will focus on businesses, broadly defined as organizations that intend to support themselves through the sale of goods and services, whether these organizations are for-profits, not-for-profits, cooperatives, or shareholder-owned. It will not address the history of feminist organizations oriented towards electoral politics or legal policies (such as NOW, National Coalition of Black Women, Ms. Foundation, etc.) even though these political organizations have a lot to tell us about how feminists work together.
This class is designed for:
Feminist Business coaches, mentors, consultants, and teachers who want to build on the wisdom of feminist businesses past and present, as they support feminist businesses of today and tomorrow
Feminist thinkers who want to explore how feminists put their ideas into commercial activity and practice
Feminist business people who want to connect their own work with the wisdom of a feminist business community