Wellesley Women's Review shuts down
After 21 years and more than 200 issues, the highly regarded Women's Review of Books, published at Wellesley College, will suspend publication after the December issue. Editor in chief Amy Hoffman, who took over the review in 2003, cited falling subscriptions and advertising, as well as increasing costs, for the demise of the literary monthly.
"It's very sad," said Susan Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, which hosted the review's editorial operation, "because it is one of the last publications of its kind, focusing on women's writing and women's voices, reviewing books by large publishers as well as smaller presses, and providing opportunities for intellectual experiences and exchanges in a setting where women's voices were at the center."
"It's awful. It's a huge loss," said Cynthia Enloe, professor in women's studies at Clark University. "It's one of the media outlets that helped create the field of women's studies, nationally and internationally. I was a guest professor at a university in Tokyo, and they read the Women's Review of Books. It came out every month, whereas most academic journals in women's studies come out maybe four times a year. The Women's Review was much more timely and gave people a sense of the conversation going on internationally in women's studies."
In its tabloid-size newsprint format, much like The New York Review of Books, the Women's Review focused on fiction and nonfiction by and about women, and used female reviewers. It also published literary essays, letters, poetry, and classified ads. Hoffman says its subscription base sank from about 12,000 in the early 1990s to 5,500 at the end.
In the past few years the review, founded in 1983 by Wellesley philosophy professor Linda Gardiner and edited by her for 20 years (she is now based in Paris), was helped over funding crises by the Wellesley Centers, but as Hoffman explained in a letter in the November issue, "Our debt to WCW . . . is now over $200,000, which we cannot repay, and they can no longer carry."
Hoffman said the review was self-supporting until the early 1990s and relied about half on subscriptions and half on advertising, "but the last 10 years have been hard, as they have been on a lot of small publications. It was a combination of factors: We started losing subscriptions, direct mail was working less well, and institutions like colleges had less money for subscriptions. Also, with
"It was one of the last truly lively feminist publications I can think of," said Watertown author and reviewer E.J. Graff, who wrote often for the review. "I think of it as part of the loss of room for feminist discussion. A lot of us are upset about the shrinking of media space, print and broadcast, for ideas that put women's lives at the center instead of as a footnote."
Reviewers and readers expressed sadness at the news. "It was a blow," said Margo Culley of Wendell, professor of English emerita at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Every time I received an issue, it was like meeting old and new friends. Major publications that review books overwhelmingly review those by men, and about men. There should be a much broader spectrum. The Women's Review was a venue for the most prominent women scholars in the country."
Its loss is also a blow to university presses, which must increasingly rely on ads in review sections to publicize books in the women's-studies field, since they seldom get shelf space in commercial stores. Hoffman says she hopes a new source of support may be found so the review can be restarted.
"We've had some inquiries from people who want to know what would be involved in taking it over or collaborating," said Bailey. "We're pursuing all possibilities, but we haven't found the miracle cure. We've gotten wonderful letters from people who said they are very sad, and more than one said, 'I used to subscribe.' That is the problem."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
