Howe, Florence

HOWE, FLORENCE (1929-2020). The founder the Feminist Press and profound advocate of women’s studies, Florence Howe restored women’s voices to the literary canon and curriculum. She held positions as an English professor at Goucher College in Maryland and the State University of New York at Old Westbury. Best known for her publishing enterprises, Howe published several books of her own in the fields of women’s studies and education. In 1970 she chaired the Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession. Highly respected for her life-long efforts to advance women and women’s scholarship, she received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

Florence Rosenfeld was born in Brooklyn to Jewish working-class parents. She attended the prestigious Hunter College High School and then received a BA in 1950 from Hunter College, where she studied English. She went on to receive a Master’s degree from Smith College and then in 1951 entered the doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She married three times and took the surname of her husband, Ed Howe.

In 1957, Florence Howe partnered with fellow academic Paul Lauter, and together they followed out the political movements of the 1960s. Since her undergraduate days, Howe had been drawn to anti-racist activism and, after moving to Baltimore, became involved in anti-segregation protests. In 1963, she became a Freedom Summer volunteer and traveled to Jackson, Mississippi. She immediately took special interest in the welfare of Black children and, with the help of a half-dozen college students, ran a Freedom School in a church basement. By the end of the 1960s, Howe and Lauter had become anti-war activists. By this time, Howe had written several major essays on the political significance of race in education.

In 1970, Howe, along with Lauter, founded the Feminist Press, which, after leaving Goucher College, was supported for many years by SUNY-Old Westbury. Focusing at first on publishing women’s studies curricular materials, Howe moved into a major project: reprinting out-of-print books by women that mainstream presses ignored. She brought together a group of pioneering scholars in US women’s history and literature to review and introduce a stellar series of books by such then-forgotten authors as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Willa Cather, Paule Marshall, Meridel Le Seuer, Agnes Smedley, Margery Latimer, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Ann Petry, Dorothy Wet, and Zora Neale Hurston. Many of these early publications proved invaluable to the first generation of women’s studies educators, serving as nearly the only paperbacks available for course assignments. That race, class, and gender figured prominently in these selections put the Feminist Press squarely on the path of its unending mission. By the late 1970s, the press expanded by acquiring new scholarship and published original books in its “Women’s Lives/Women’s Work” series focused on labor and working-class issues. In 1984, Howe resigned her teaching position to run the press full time at the City University of New York and, in the 1990s, enlarged the list to feature an international spectrum of women writers.

Howe went on to edit several collections, notably The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers (2000). This volume collects first-person essays by scholar and teachers in the first years of academic women’s studies in the 1970s. What is remarkable about the reminiscences is a common denominator: a political background in civil rights, anti-war activism, and the New Left/Socialist Feminism of the 1960s. These “mothers” carried their ideals, as did Howe, into their life-long dedication to and vocation in women’s studies. Florence Howe died at age ninety-one, two years after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.

Howe, Florence. A Life in Motion. New York: The Feminist Press, 2011.

Florence Howe Website. http://www.florencehowe.com