When I walked into Women & Children First, the feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding feeling I experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn't because Chicago was having a late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books stacked on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the handwritten recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves, everything feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children's section. Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children. The literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of photography collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines as diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its current location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a large population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has since evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse range of locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe house, and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become as much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has become popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as likely to be made up of men as women.

Still, books related to women and women's issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store's focus. Such lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie Leibovitz, and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane Hamilton got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children First has a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known writers themselves. So on any given night you'll be as likely to be sitting next to authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara Paretsky, Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak from the podium.

Like co-owner Bubon, Women & Children First doesn't take itself or its mission too seriously, despite its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front windows facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front counter; and tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater performances and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black, scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red, orange, and cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for their comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit, Bubon took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour. Women & Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one large open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as well as journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds to its coziness.

But nothing captures the laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden kitchen table that sits in the back, near the children's section. Around it are four unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it seems a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place. Several times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her and I was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself politely to help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn't reach. But never did these interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the course of our conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb and flow of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made me feel more welcome.

When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both getting a master's degree in literature, and we became very good friends.

Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our class and the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a business together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one local chain at the time, Kroch's & Brentano's, and there were probably sixty or seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of Chicago.

That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores. It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all thought of ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough readers to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after five years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store, two blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.

Did you decide from the beginning that you wanted to specialize in books for women and children?
Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and in our politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the Newberry Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked us to join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The Reproduction of Mothering had just come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, "Oh, my goodness!" because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group of academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen. These were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch's & Brentano's or Barbara's Bookstore, I wasn't finding. Similarly, as an academic, I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for Virginia Woolf and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs. Dalloway. Or A Writer's Diary. But we envisioned a store where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would be there.

It's interesting to hear you describe these authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up they were people I was reading from the beginning.
Oh, back then you had to go lookin', lookin', lookin', lookin' to find these writers. And they certainly weren't being taught. Alice Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian had come out. But all the stuff that you think of as classic women's literature—Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling writers. It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian literature. None. I mean, it just didn't exist. We put a little sign on the shelf that said, "If you're looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf's Orlando, May Sarton, Willa Cather...." You know, writers who historians had discovered had had relations with women. [Laughter.] Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight inches apart.] Now, thirty years later, it's incredible to look back and see the diversity of women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that's being published.

I still think women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in getting critical attention. So there's still a need for Women & Children First and stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that time, we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of this one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a challenge to find enough serious women's literature to stock the shelves. Because we didn't want to do romances. And it's not that we didn't have a vision of a bookstore that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and eventually a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there would be this renaissance in women's writing. That it really would happen. That women would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I would finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and American or British. I mean, the internationalizing of women's literature has been very exciting, I think.

What precipitated the move to 
this neighborhood and this bigger store, then?
In those first ten years we had double-digit growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don't think we even made returns until we'd been in business three years. We were just selling. I had no ordering budget. "Oh, new stuff by women?" I'd say. "Great! We need it." Business was growing.

Was that because nobody else was selling this type of literature?
Yes, and because women's studies was developing as a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but interesting stuff.

So like the first store, you outgrew the second one.
We outgrew it. Our landlord had also sold the building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed any more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that we'd been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to Chicago. You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side, off the highways...yet we couldn't really afford to stay there, and we couldn't find a new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here by the Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to Ravenswood. They literally came to us and said, "The people in our community would love to have a bookstore in that neighborhood. There's a lot of spaces that are being renovated, and we wonder if you're thinking of opening a second store, or if we could encourage you to."

This happened by coincidence, while you were already considering a new location?
Yes! And we said, "Well, you know, we need more space. We'll come up and look." At the same time, there were two women who were opening a women's arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, "It doesn't matter where you're located as long as you're next to or on the same block with Women & Children First." So we came up to Edgewater to look, and they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was being renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, "We want the corner and we want this much space." The arts-and-crafts store opened next door. They stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997, we took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20 percent the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year people came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, "Thank you for coming to our neighborhood." It was just great.

But the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy volunteers. Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people moved every book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day. We organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, "Okay, you have the Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them ‘Bio,' pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to the new space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up." We had other women who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the volunteers. We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really officially closed for one day. And women still tell me, "I remember helping you move." They'll come in and they'll say, "That's my section; I put this section back together."

Have readings and events been a part of this store from the beginning?
They've been a huge part of the store. Getting to meet all these wonderful writers whom I've read—in person—is also something that's kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of discovering a new writer is always great.

We have a lot of local politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support Barack Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here. She asked if she could use our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support behind him in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, "If we can just get people to not call him Osama." I mean, that's where we were at that time. Nobody knew who he was.

So the store has been important for the community in many ways.
A political gathering place, and a literary gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read sometimes. We've developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy discussion group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you'd see twenty to thirty preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it. I just love it. It's absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background in theater and oral interpretation, so it's just so much fun for me.

Has that grown over the years as the neighborhood has developed?
Grown, grown, grown. For many years I would have nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five years ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty to thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That's why everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I sit here. For regular readings, it's the opposite—authors read from the stage and we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a hundred and fifty people in here.

A year and a half ago, we started Sappho's Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an evening of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it's open mike; sometimes it's acoustic music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her girlfriend, Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up little tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We've even had strippers. [Laughter.] But right from the beginning we conceived of having a weekly program night. Author readings weren't happening much, so we decided we'd have discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of teachers from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the process of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a presentation on an idea.

Then we conceived of having a topic for each month. For example, "Women in the Trades." So every Tuesday night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would come and talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering, or what kind of discrimination she's experiencing on the job and what her recourses were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was on the subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or ninety women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn't have chairs and stuff like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints discuss the issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time, and people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or not. Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one pamphlet available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because you would put a handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what your sexual proclivity was.

It's amazing how subtle the coding had to be. It was so discreet.
I remember the first time I saw two women walk out of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later because somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I cried. Because it was so rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each other's hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they'd come out of this atmosphere in which it was okay.

At our thirtieth anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women's History Conference recorded people's memories of Women & Children First. They had a side room at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go in and talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when they saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that when their daughter told them she was gay and they didn't know what to do about it they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And that's going to be part of our archive too.

This celebration was also a benefit for the Women's Voices Fund, which you started five years ago. Can you talk about its mission?
Several years ago, Ann and I were looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn't enough money coming in for the expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some extra money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us said, "People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep your programming going." So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print and mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the programs, and then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty thousand dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, "If there's a way to remove that expense from the budget and use people's donations to fund that, that would be a smart thing." So that's what we did. Now anytime we have an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women's Voices Fund.

So the store's not a nonprofit, but it has a nonprofit arm.
It's not a 501c3 on its own. We are a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can send Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for the Women's Voices Fund.

Few people realize how expensive readings and events can be.
Occasionally there are readings that are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice turnout of twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books. Maybe five or six. But it's not paying for the program. And from the beginning we didn't want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to make money: "If we have this author we gotta sell ten books or we're not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the freight." No. Having the fund means we pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty dollars. But sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty thousand dollars at this benefit.

But obviously something changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn't have had to hold this fundraising event. You said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had double-digit growth. What happened?
Well, the rest of that story is that a year and a half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next year, they fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a store that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in the suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this hit us, Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the south of us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in Evanston. Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is just a mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles. More recently, B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced over two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.

They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to downsize, Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in Uptown. And, you know, we'd almost gotten past the point where the chain stores were affecting us, because they've had to stop widespread discounting. But the month this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over the year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5 percent. But, you know, it's been an underperforming store. They put it in between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more economically depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.

Do you think five years from now they'll be gone?
I do. I do.

Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe, Barnes & Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put stores in locations where there's actually a need, and to close stores down when needed and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times since 1990. I just don't see how they are going to survive. When I go in there now all I see is...sidelines. Candy.

I think what's been particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have developed a reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a real base in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, "Oh, but the Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that's a better location."

Why does that happen?
They don't always realize that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind of clientele. And I've seen situations where we'll have a local author—one who we have a close relationship with, and who's done every launch with us—whose publisher will now say to her, "You know, two thirds of your books are sold in the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store." But those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra business.

The author tour itself seems to be waning. I don't blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an author's travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event. But people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.
Right. Because I've read the book, and so has one of my coworkers, and we'll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We're going to keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we look at our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost always written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here, they've done an off-site event that we've been in charge of. Those books turn out to be our number one sellers for the year.

So what does the future look like for you?
I'm a bookseller, but I'm a feminist bookseller. Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I'm not sure. Sometimes I think, "What will I do if the store is no longer viable?" And I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a general bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist reading series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my life is getting women's voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about their lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls' and women's lives. Sometimes we're abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we take the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we're discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these things. Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not stopped. We don't have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we did.

The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women's lives. We have to continue to evolve and change if we're to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.