Literature and Politics

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was notoriously difficult for women writers to break down the barriers of the male-dominated publishing industry in order to be published. With a few notable exceptions, major Australian anthologies still rarely included the voices of many women, and male authors continued to dominate the publishing landscape generally. It was against this background that from the mid-1970s onwards feminist and independent publishers began to commission and publish feminist anthologies.

By way of example, the feminist anthology, Frictions: An Anthology of Fictions by Women (Sybylla Press, 1982), edited by Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson, offered ‘a new adventure in writing and reading’. (Susan Sheridan, 1982) The commissioning process brought in over seven hundred samples of writing by women, most by previously unpublished authors. The final collection comprised fifty-two stories; many of these authors have since become renowned. In the late 1980s, feminist anthologies began to reflect the realisation that some of the most disenfranchised women were from other cultures. By this time, too, ‘multicultural fiction’ had gained recognition. Edited by Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing (UQP, 1988) featured the writing of forty-eight non-Anglo-Celtic women selected from the one hundred who had responded to a national advertisement. Some of the new writers in this collection went on to publish their own books.

This paper highlights the diverse range of feminist anthologies released in Australia in the period 1975–1995. The paper argues that by providing women/ writers with an accessible publication platform, feminist literary anthologies actively supported the creation of a ‘female presence’ in Australian literature, and more generally that an analysis of the publication trajectories of these feminist anthologies also offers a useful illustration of some of the cultural and political imperatives of publishing.