From Head Shops to Whole Foods by Joshua Clark Davis

Author:Joshua Clark Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The full title of Loraine Edwalds and Midge Stocker’s essay collection—The Woman-Centered Economy: Ideals, Reality, and the Space in Between—spoke directly to the central challenge that all kinds of feminist businesses had faced since the start of the 1970s. Feminist entrepreneurs invested more energy than any other social movement in creating businesses that sought to transform deep-seated social values, promote egalitarian labor relations, and render capitalism more humane. Yet in setting the bar for their companies so high, most feminist entrepreneurs struggled to reconcile these ideals with the daily realities of business operation. Such exuberant idealism may have made the failure to sustain most feminist businesses in the long term all the more painful and disheartening. But even if second-wave feminists fell short at times, they came closer than any other activists in the 1960s and 1970s to fulfilling a vision of nonhierarchical, nonsexist, and participatory business. And scores of new businesses established in the 1980s and 1990s suggested the resilience of feminism’s entrepreneurial vision through the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps most significantly, millions more American women started their own businesses for the first time. Even if most second-wave feminist businesses ultimately failed, they still played a meaningful role in helping to bring about the extraordinary rise of women entrepreneurs.86

Like feminists who established businesses, environmentalists and antiwar activists launched natural food stores in the 1960s and 1970s to transform Americans’ social, political, and economic values. These small retailers sold organic and vegetarian foods with the goals of promoting pacifism, spirituality, democratic workplaces, and ecological sustainability. They also hoped to provide alternatives to chain grocery stores. Yet unlike feminist businesses, some natural food stores proved to be financially successful far beyond their owners’ expectations. By the late 1970s, natural foods would attract much more ambitious entrepreneurs who sought to create their own chains. In so doing, these retailers would make the natural foods business the most profitable activist enterprise by the end of the twentieth century.

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