by Zoë Rodine 
Dr. Paula Rabinowitz’s office on the second floor of Lind Hall at the University of Minnesota has been transformed into a study space for undergraduates in the years since her retirement from the English department, but when I first stepped into the space as a newly minted graduate student, the room was lined floor to ceiling with books, each shelf double or triple stacked. As we were discussing a project for her class, she did that awe-inspiring thing seasoned academics all seem to have mastered: she pulled just the right book off the shelf, locating it instantly in what I mistakenly took for clutter. “Oh, keep it,” she told me, as I tried to return the book at the end of our meeting.
Much of her generous collection now lives at the East Side Freedom Library, curated and arranged so that even those of us who are not seasoned academics can have the joy of plucking just the right book off the shelf. The Rabinowitz collection is impressive for both its breadth and depth of feminist texts. You’ll find essential works of second wave feminist thought from various theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds—texts like Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism and Christine Delphy’s Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression—but also a collection of photographs documenting the atrocities of the 1980s civil war in El Salvador and interviews with legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs and books about the politics of queer pleasure, an intersectional collection that speaks to feminism’s relevance across national boundaries, racial identities, and class. There’s feminist performance theory from Judith Butler to Sue-Ellen Case and collections of women’s writing for the stage. There’s a robust section of literary criticism and classic British literature by women, ranging from Austen to Gaskell, Eliot to Woolf. There’s a 1982 edition of Heresies Magazine called “Racism is the Issue,” archival proof of an instance where a collective of white anti-capitalist feminists published an issue devoted to the work of women of color in response to critiques about their blindness to race and racism. The Heresies issue features an Audre Lorde essay called “Sister Outsiders,” published two years before her groundbreaking collection of the same name. And as student myself, I was delighted to find a copy of Rabinowitz’s own dissertation, Female Subjectivity in Women’s Revolutionary Novels of the 1930s — her early scholarship a generative reminder of the wealth of feminist thought that has come before and the space it opens for future feminisms.
Zoë Rodine is a faculty member in English at the University of Minnesota