Men and women writers have long been treated differently. The industry is riven with bias – both insidious and documented. Publishers in the 60s were taking Tom Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury to lunch and paying far less attention to the talents of Barbara Pym and Katharine Whitehorn. And The Emilia Report into the Gender Gap for Authors in 2019 studied how male and female writers in the same markets were received.

Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide: A graphic guide to lesbian and queer history 1950-2020 by Kate Charlesworth (Myriad Editions) Hungarian Women in Scottish Print: Stephanie Wohl’s Occasional Correspondence in The Scotsman (Zsuzsa Török) In broadsheet newspapers, new books by men received 12 per cent more review coverage than those by women. And comparable books published at the same time by Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris, and Matt Haig and Rowan Coleman, proved the men had widespread coverage when launched, while the women had much less.Figure 3.2. Donnington Castle Taken from a Field Adjoining the Road to East Ilsley from Newbury, William and Letitia Byrne (etchers) and J.M.W Turner (painter), 1805. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art. ←vii | viii→ Yolande Bonhomme was another prominent woman printing in Paris. She began printing on her own following her husband’s death in 1522. Estimates of her output range from 136 to 200 publications before her death in 1557. In 1526, she became the first woman to publish the Bible and she later joined forces with Charlotte Guillard to demand better quality paper from the papermakers’ guild. It was her husband, who is English, who suggested she write about her family because “they’re just so out there”. “But every time I tried, the drama hit too close to home, and I wasn’t having fun writing it, I was getting stressed out. So I thought, well, what if I leaned into making it really, really ridiculous, and just threw in a dead body and saw what happened,” she said. “It turned out that was the ingredient that I was missing.” Dial A for Aunties is set in California, around a family of Chinese-Indonesian wedding planners. Figure 5.2. Letter from Maria Edgeworth to John Murray, May 1841, National Library of Scotland, Archive of John Murray, publishers (MS.40358–9). The demographic of our workforce strongly swings towards men, mostly due to the roles on the shopfloor which have historically been done by men. I would be delighted if we could balance this out and have a more equal split between men and women, however when recruiting we are always looking for the best person for the job in question, someone who shows both aptitude and the right attitude, which makes their gender irrelevant.

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats: Dun Emer and Cuala Presses and Irish ‘Art Printing’, 1903–40 (Angela Griffith) To celebrate the launch of the book we appropriately held the launch party at the national museum of democracy, People’s History Museum. The ideas championed by many of these brave, groundbreaking women are told at the museum, which is also home to the Manchester suffragette banner; the inspiration behind the First in the Fight book cover designed by Jane Bowyer. The evening included an opportunity to see the artwork featured in the book on display as well as book signing with Helen and Andrew. Marian Keyes, Chair of Judges for the CWIP Published Novels Prize, says: “I am absolutely delighted with our longlist. The range is glorious – everything from lighthearted commercial fiction to literary fiction – it’s a demonstration of all the different ways in which women can be funny in print. It was a pleasure and very exciting to read all ninety submissions, and this is a list that I’m very proud of.”Leonard and Virginia Woolf likewise faced hostility from within the trade when they initially set out to learn how to set type. The ‘do-it- yourself’ ethos adopted by 1970s feminists echoed the early years of the Hogarth Press, which was set up by the Woolfs to be a small private press which they operated themselves. As the Hogarth Press output expanded and it evolved into the size of a commercial publishing operation, print production, and especially typesetting, turned out to be more time-consuming than the Woolfs had expected. Additional help was recruited through the Woolfs’ informal network of acquaintances. Nicola Wilson and Helen Southworth’s chapter, ‘Women Workers at the Hogarth Press (c.1917–25)’ explores the relationships between the Woolfs and the women who assisted them. Although print is a fairly male dominated industry, I do think there are many opportunities for women, and it is an inclusive industry. I hope that more young women will look at print as a career and be welcomed into the industry just as I was nine years ago.”

Figure 9.2. The Suffragette, 31 July 1914, frontmatter. Public domain. Image courtesy of LSE Library. The 2020 titles reflect a range of surprising heroines that made the judges laugh in different ways,” Lederer said. “From empowerment to dentistry and chip shops – it’s all here.”

Women’s Printing Society

From Print to Process: Gender, Creative-Adjacent Labour and the Women’s Print History Project (Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt) I’m really excited about the shortlist because I think this really showcases different ways that women are funny,” said Keyes, who together with judges including the comedian Lolly Adefope also shortlisted Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare, Michelle Gallen’s Big Girl, Small Town, Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl, and Abbi Waxman’s The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Texts and Paratexts: The Women’s Penny Paper/Woman’s Herald (1888–92) (Artemis Alexiou) Dial A for Aunties beat titles including Dolly Alderton’s debut novel Ghosts to the prize, for which Alderton was named runner-up. “Ghosts is a marvellously accomplished, tender, witty and human story that should speak to women everywhere,” said Harris. This award is open to all women filmmakers and content developers. The film must be an original narrative created, produced and devised by a woman, or women, although male cast and crew members are allowed.