At once practical and creative, this book was feminism’s Whole Earth Catalog
Originally published in 1973, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in just five months, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog, mapping a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s.
Grimstad and Rennie set out on a two-month road trip in the summer of 1973, meeting and interviewing a range of organizations and individuals, and gathering vital information on everything from arts groups to bookstores and independent presses, health, parenting and rape crisis centers and educational, legal and financial resources. "These projects express a rejection of the values of existing institutional structures,” Grimstad and Rennie wrote, “and, unlike the hip male counterculture, represent an active attempt to reshape culture through changing values and consciousness."
Arranged in themed sections on art, communications, work and money, child care, self-help, self-defense and activism, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog provides crucial insight into feminist initiatives and activism nationwide during the Women’s Movement. It includes a “Making the Book” section that details the publication’s production.
Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie are the coeditors of The New Woman’s Survival Catalog and The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975). They went on to cofound Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture, published out of the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles from 1977 to 1981. Grimstad is currently Co-Chair of Undergraduate Studies at Antioch University, Los Angeles; she is the author of The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (2002). Rennie taught social sciences at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, worked as a women’s health activist and now lives in Venice, California.
A spread from 'The New Woman's Survival Catalog.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Renée Reizman
...unearthed the breadth of women declaring their independence across the country
Bookforum
Kaegan Sparks
...a directory of feminist resources, including women-run presses, radio shows, clinics, daycares, rape crisis centers, divorce co-ops, credit unions, and liberation schools.The book, just republished, testifies to the breadth of community initiatives spawned by the women’s movement.
BOMB
With a title like The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, it’s hard to understate the resonance of this 1973 feminist publication that gathered collective and self-help resources into one big, beautiful book. Primary Information’s 2019 reprint captures the exhaustive, enraging, and influential original...The New Woman’s Survival Catalog still overflows with pertinent information and inspiration.
ARTnews
Editors at ARTnews
both intensely inspiring and depressingly disquieting to look at now...from a historical age that seems so distant. But then, of course, that age ...remains ongoing. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more awash in the sense of history being alive...than I am when flipping through these pages.
VICE
Anna Merlan
Two feminists climb into a rental car, drive 13,000 miles, and walk into a bar. They also walked into communes, bookstores, a round barn built by an all-women’s farming collective, a cooperative devoted to non-sexist children’s literature, an IHOP, and several dozen impromptu house parties. By the end of it, they had a book, the New Woman’s Survival Catalog, which doubled as a sprawling, energetic, joyful map of the feminist movement of the early 1970s.
Huck
Sara Rosen
A grassroots guide to surviving the patriarchy from the ground up.
BOMB
Carmen Hermo
a crystalized network of second wave feminism's how to's and hopes
New York Times
Meg Miller
The culmination of a six-month, 12,000-mile road trip in which the authors attempted to document a nationwide network of feminist alternative culture and resources. Reading it now feels nostalgic, voyeuristic even — all that travel and communing — but also inspiring. It’s an example of resources readily shared, of helpful social connectivity.
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Featured spread is from Primary Information's monumental new 10.5 x 14.25 inch facsimile edition of The New Woman's Survival Catalog, the 1973 "Woman-made" survey of second-wave feminist projects, collectives and businesses across the US, reviewed this week in Vice. "This book is a tool for women whose rising expectations are running into the wall of patriarchal privilege: the women who are aggrieved at the discrepancy between their expectations of expanded choice and room to grow and the reality of male resistance," authors Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie wrote in their 1973 Introduction. "Whether women wish to file job discrimination complaints, equal pay suits or start their own separatist venture, this catalog presents answers, aids, tools produced by the feminist movement in battle against sexism." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 10.5 x 14.25 in. / 210 pgs / 403 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $30.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $45 ISBN: 9781732098671 PUBLISHER: Primary Information AVAILABLE: 10/22/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ASIA
The New Woman's Survival Catalog A Woman-made Book
Published by Primary Information. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad, Susan Rennie.
At once practical and creative, this book was feminism’s Whole Earth Catalog
Originally published in 1973, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in just five months, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog, mapping a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s.
Grimstad and Rennie set out on a two-month road trip in the summer of 1973, meeting and interviewing a range of organizations and individuals, and gathering vital information on everything from arts groups to bookstores and independent presses, health, parenting and rape crisis centers and educational, legal and financial resources. "These projects express a rejection of the values of existing institutional structures,” Grimstad and Rennie wrote, “and, unlike the hip male counterculture, represent an active attempt to reshape culture through changing values and consciousness."
Arranged in themed sections on art, communications, work and money, child care, self-help, self-defense and activism, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog provides crucial insight into feminist initiatives and activism nationwide during the Women’s Movement. It includes a “Making the Book” section that details the publication’s production.
Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie are the coeditors of The New Woman’s Survival Catalog and The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975). They went on to cofound Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture, published out of the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles from 1977 to 1981. Grimstad is currently Co-Chair of Undergraduate Studies at Antioch University, Los Angeles; she is the author of The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (2002). Rennie taught social sciences at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, worked as a women’s health activist and now lives in Venice, California.
