A Woman's Place was founded in 1970[1][2][3] by a collective of eight women[4] who had previously been selling feminist publications on the street.
[5] An outgrowth of the Bay Area Gay Women's Liberation, it was one of the first two feminist bookstores in the United States.
[2] The founders of Old Wives Tales, a feminist bookstore in San Francisco, were former members of the collective at A Woman's Place.
[4] In 1982, a disagreement within the collective involving racism as well as lesbianism versus feminism with acceptance of male allies[3] culminated in two[7]: 599 or three[2][3] older and white members locking out the others from the bookstore, leading to arbitration.
The four members who were locked out (Darlene Pagano, Elizabeth Summers, Jesse Meredith, and Keiko Kubo) described themselves as "one Italian, one Jewish, one Black, one Asian".