Women’s History Month: Sheba Feminist Publishers

Sheba Feminist Publishers (Sheba) was founded in 1980 by seven women and, over a fourteen-year period, published a range of feminist fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Sheba consciously differed from many other women’s publishers of the era (such as Virago and the Women’s Press) as they were formed as a workers’ collective, were independent, and focussed on publishing new writers. Most importantly, Sheba was a political project, publishing works which originated within the struggles and activism of the women’s movement, and with an emphasis on class and race. As writer, filmmaker and Sheba collective member Pratibha Parmar stated in 1986, this way of working meant that ‘some of the feminist publishers see Sheba as a conscience of the feminist publishing industry’ (Menika et al, p.22).

The independence of Sheba’s publishing model gave the group the freedom to select and publish titles that meant something to and reflected the members of the collective who, by the mid-1980s, were predominantly Black women*. As a result, Sheba was the first in the UK to publish important and influential works and writers such as four texts by Audre Lorde and Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables. Sheba’s decisions were prescient: Namjoshi’s book was later published by Virago, and Lorde’s works are currently published by Penguin amongst others. Many Sheba titles are long out-of-print but some, such as Charting the journey: writings by Black and Third World women (a recommended text during the 1988 Feminist Book Fortnight), continue to inspire younger generations of feminists via sharing of library and second-hand copies.