Bluestockings bookstore was opened relatively recently, in 1999. It is a feminist bookstore with an intersectional scope. Bluestockings was actually named after the Blue Stockings Society, which was an English movement to promote female authorship and literary advancement in the mid-18th century. It was opened by Kathryn Welsh and a silent business partner and a group of volunteers, but went through financial distress in 2002. The collective disbanded and Welsh took over. In 2003 she decided to sell the bookstore. Brooke Lehman purchased Bluestockings and assembled a six-person collective to operate the space. The entire mindset of the business changed. In 2005, the store took over the vacated next door space..
Unfortunately, because the business is relatively new, it was very difficult to find any sources. Nonetheless, we explore any existing articles.
First, we wonder why the bookstore began to decline in success. According to data provided by the Alliance for Downtown New York, 90 percent of Lower Manhattan stores saw revenues decline for a full year after the [9/11] attacks — and 47 percent of the neighborhood’s retailers, services and restaurants reported layoffs. So it is possible that this had something to do with the unsuccessful era the business experienced. Customers really just weren’t interested in anything at that point.
The oldest source I found was from 2000, when Hillary Chute wrote, “About a year old and as unlike Barnes & Noble as a bookstore could be, the comfortably ratty Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore and Café stocks a collection of great old and new feminist-minded books of fiction, nonfic- tion (theory and politics mostly), poetry, and comics—like Ariel Schrag’s brilliant high-school epic Potential and the Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist series. And while their selection could use some beefing up (there’s a lot of valuable but familiar second-wave stuff), that’s what the clipboard on the wall is for—suggestions.” Clearly no business wants to be named “comfortably ratty,” so perhaps the physical aspect of the shop was an issue.
However we also know that Welsh opened the bookstore as a bookstore for women. Perhaps that angle wasn’t successful. In 2004, Kathryn McGrath published “Pushed to the margins: the slow death and possible rebirth of the feminist bookstore.” in Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources. McGrath notes that Bluestockings, upon reopening, has “new owners and a revamped mission that defines the storefront as a radical bookstore and activist resource center—but not specifically a women’s space.” The number of independent booksellers in general has decreased due to deep-discount bookstore chains and online book marts, and this was noticeable in 2004 as it is now. Feminist bookstores have fared no better than their peers. McGrath cites data to exemplify this- in 1997, there were 175 feminist bookstores in North America, in 2004 there were 44, and my research has shown me that there are now only 13 in 2017. Why? McGrath said that as once-radical feminist ideas have become accepted as mainstream, “the spaces that nurtured the movement that produced those ideas are vanishing.” Feminist bookstores simply don’t have as many resources or financial means, but their power is immense. Bluestockings to McGrath and many other strong feminists was just another example of a declining feminist bookstore, which if closed, would have contributed to the loss of feminist literature or literature that doesn’t have mainstream appeal. This point she makes is perhaps the reason why Bluestockings reopened without being strictly feminist, and instead took on a more intersectional scope with hopes to advance radical ideas and provide a safe space for people of underserved and underrepresented groups. McGrath argues that this overlap makes sense because, “Feminist politics, after all, have always included social justice—and many of globalization’s problems affect women disproportionately—so the overlap is hardly surprising.”
In an interview with Kimmie David, one of the six collective owners, in July 2008 (published on bookslut.com), David states that after reopening, Bluestocking didn’t stay strictly a women’s bookstore and is inclusive in not just the gender issues and the transgender issues, but with all people that are underrepresented and oppressed. So once again, we see this new intersectional approach, versus focusing on just feminism. After reopening, the name was actually shortened to Bluestockings Bookstore, had a new non-hierarchal model of governance, and “a major change in staffing which opened up the workers’ collective to include not just women, but also people who identify as transgender, genderqueer, and non-transgender men.” The store also became run by a very large volunteer base. The store is also run by a large volunteer-base.
In 2014, Senti Sajwal wrote on article on Mic which resounded with McGrath’s statement of feminism no longer being a mainstream interest. Sajwal cited how in the early 1970s, feminist bookstores began popping up across the United States as the feminist movement gained mainstream visibility. So while feminist bookshops used to fill a specific demand, “the advent of the Internet, the Kindle and competitive pricing at major retailers has made such niche materials much more accessible.” On Bluestockings, Sajwal wrote about its designation as a “safer space,” a place for like-minded people to share their views, and how with the Black Lives Matter movement expanding and issues of gender and sexuality becoming more prominent, Bluestockings has found itself as a kind of clearinghouse for tolerance and radical ideas. In fact, a customer said that what originally attracted her to Bluestockings was its “selection of black women poetry.” This reiterates that the bookstore may have not survived had it not taken other underrepresented communities, apart from women, into account.
In the past few years, Bluestockings has appeared in the NY Times for a Bystander Intervention/De-escalation Workshop, and other news sources for its decision to screen and then drop two award-winning documentary films this coming Saturday that have controversially been banned twice in London, UK, because they question the orthodox treatment of HIV and AIDS championed by the major pharmaceutical companies.
Bluestockings also turned to crowdfunding in 2015 to support badly needed repairs they were not able to fund due to rising rent. And so, it has been featured in articles as one of only 13 feminist-identified bookstores in the United States and Canada, and in local newspapers (such as NYU Local and the Bowery Boogie) as the local radical bookstore. But even before then, it was featured as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Merchant of the month.
