Florence Howe, co-founder of Feminist Press who helped revive early works by women writers, dead at 91

Florence Howe, an activist, educator and major contributor to American literature and culture who as co-founder of the Feminist Press helped revive such acclaimed and influential works as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills,” has died.

Howe died Saturday in Manhattan, according to the Feminist Press. She was 91 and in recent years had been treated for Parkinson’s disease.

“Florence Howe was a visionary with extraordinary literary taste, an ear for transformative ideas, and a steely focus on feminism and social justice,” Linda Villarosa, chair of the Feminist Press board, said in a statement. “Like me, people across several generations can thank Florence for opening our eyes, uplifting our voices, mentoring us as writers and scholars, and training us to step into her shoes.”

A native of New York City and a civil rights activist in the 1960s, Howe and her then-husband Paul Lauter founded the nonprofit publisher in 1970, and dedicated themselves to introducing readers to overlooked and socially conscious works of literature by women of the past and present. The Feminist Press would prove an invaluable resource and ally for the emerging Second Wave feminist movement, and for the emerging field of women’s studies, which Howe also helped promote though chairing a Modern Language Association committee on women in education.

“A decade ago, it (women’s studies) had no name. A few academics around the country labeled a segment of their freshman composition courses growing up female or taught part of a sociology course on gender,” Howe, who had taught at Goucher College among other schools, wrote in a 1976 essay in The New York Times.

“The teaching of womens studies has several goals: to raise the consciousness of students about sexism in the curriculum and in the wider society; to compensate for the omission of women from the curriculum; to encourage research, and to recover the lost or neglected history and culture of women.”

One of the Feminist Press’ most notable releases was “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” First published in 1892 and narrated by a woman confined by her husband because of “temporary nervous depression,” Gilman’s story became the Feminist Press’ most popular book, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Another prominent release, “Life in the Iron Mills,” was first published anonymously in 1861 and brought to Howe’s attention by her friend Tillie Olsen.

“I met Tillie in the early 1970s and she handed me a dog-eared copy of Life in the Iron Mills, Xeroxed. What happened was she said to me, Read it, but dont read it at night. And, of course, I read it at night. I could not go to sleep. First of all, it makes you cry. Secondly, I kept thinking if this was lost forever, there must be more lost forever,” Howe told The Associated Press in 1995.

Other notable Feminist Press releases included Agnes Smedley’s working class novel “Daughter of Earth,” Paule Marshall’s debut book, the novel “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” and, with financial support from Toni Morrison, a volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s work that Alice Walker edited. Howe also reissued Olsen’s “Silences,” a landmark study of the books that didn’t get written by women and the working class; feminist poetry collections originating everywhere from Vietnam to Italy, and poems, prison letters and other writings by the Russian dissidents Pussy Riot.