When Kathryn Welsh opened Bluestockings Women's Bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1999, feminist bookstores across the country were closing, succumbing to the financial pressures of an increasingly competitive market. When the then-twenty-three-year-old visited independent book retailers looking for advice, the response was mixed. "Most people were pretty incredulous that I was doing this," she says. "I got a lot of support and a lot of raised eyebrows."

Now, four years later [in 2003], many of the bookstores Welsh visited have gone under. Bluestockings itself has new owners and a revamped mission that defines the storefront as a radical bookstore and activist resource center--but not specifically a women's space. And Welsh has plans to go to Harvard Business School; Bluestockings has left her $40,000 in debt.

It's no secret that the number of independent booksellers has dwindled over the last decade with the growth of deep-discount bookstore chains and online book marts. Feminist bookstores have fared no better than their peers: In 1997, there were 175 in North America; now there are 44. Charis Books & More in Atlanta, Georgia, will soon have a large chain book retailer as a neighbor. Chicago's Women & Children First, one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country, has held its own against Barnes & Noble by attracting big-name authors for events, but there is now a Borders scheduled to open in a new development a mile away; W & CF's owners are wary of the anticipated effect on their fiction sales. Ten-year-old Boadecia's Books, which recently became the oldest women's bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw its sales suffer last year when a Barnes & Noble opened a half mile away.

Although some feminist bookstores report steady sales and customer support despite the omnipresent chains, escalating costs are punishing many independents whose profit margins have always been slim. Now that sales can no longer support the community activism, events, programming, and workshops that have historically made feminist bookstores so much more than retail operations, the survivors are facing hard choices.

In 1987, when Mary Ellen Kavanaugh opened My Sisters' Words in Syracuse, New York, there were feminist bookstores in nearly every major city. "In those days," she writes in an email, "if one had a whit of business sense and a love of literature, one could open a store and be fairly successful." Susan Post, sole owner of BookWoman, remembers when her collective's income sharing supported the store--members with jobs would pool their salaries and effectively fund the otherwise-unpaid work of other women in the collective. She laments that bookselling can no longer generate the kind of income that people feel they deserve. "There are very few young women going into feminist bookselling," she says. "I'm fifty-six; there's no way I can retire. But I've been thinking for the last three or four years, Is there going to be someone I can mentor? Will someone come along who wants to do this?"

Following the formation of women's presses in...