Yesterday I visited Housmans, a wonderful radical bookshop just around the corner from Kings Cross Station in London. I was looking specifically for Penny Red by Laurie Penny, a collection of her writing about politics and dissent, with a focus on her reportage from the protests of 2010/2011. I wander in and head straight to the largest section in the store, Political Thought. If they have the book, I'm pretty sure this is where it'll be, alongside other books on the same subject such as Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. I find a pile of Mason's tome but no sign of the Penny book. I search the P section carefully, then the surrounding shelves, but no luck. I really want this book, and I want to buy it from an independent, and preferably radical, store, so I do something I almost never do: I ask at the counter.
The bookseller searches his computer and finds that yes, it's in stock. I'll find it in the Feminism section. Now, this is a little weird, because although Laurie Penny is a vocal feminist and one section (out of five) in the book is a collection of columns about feminism, the remaining four-fifths of the book are general politics. But fair enough, Penny has written other, explicitly feminist, books, so maybe they just shelve them together? However, then it gets weirder. The guy behind the counter and the woman working with him explain that women writers are usually placed in the Feminism section*. I'll repeat that. Women writers are placed in the Feminism section. Never mind the content of the book: if you're a woman, it's off to the Feminism shelves with you.
Now, I'm a believer in the need for Feminism sections in bookshops when they contain books that are explicitly feminist, but in this case I found it intensely problematic. By putting all books by women into Feminism - in this specific case, a book that would fit perfectly into the Political Thought category - the store seems to imply that men can have political thoughts but women, we can only have our women's issues.
The ghettoisation of women writers is an issue that has been much debated recently. Shelving books based on the author's gender rather than the content of the book is, like the packaging of novels by female authors with 'girly' covers regardless of their content (implying that anything written by a woman is for women-only, while men's books are for everyone), is all part of an insidious cultural climate that marginalises women and the female experience, treating us like a minority rather than like half of the population. Not only that, but categorising books this way isolates the women writers and limits their readership. Because let's face it, even the progressive and politically engaged men I know don't generally look at the Feminism section in bookshops.
Most worrying to me is the fact that this is happening in a radical bookshop: a shop with a fantastic range of books, a wide selection of genuinely feminist texts, a place that you might perhaps expect a more clued-up approach to categorisation. I wish I didn't have to criticise Housmans because I think it's a vital and rare resource and one which I value greatly, but how disappointing to find that a store which should be an ally is part of the problem.
* They also, to their credit, said they'd recently discussed whether this was the right thing to do.
