Women & Children First: A Love Letter to Andersonville’s Feminist Bookstore

Every neighborhood has a few storefronts that feel less like businesses and more like load-bearing walls. Pull one out and the whole block sags a little. In Andersonville, one of those is a bookstore at 5233 N. Clark St. called Women & Children First.

This is not a review. You don’t review the place that has been there for you through breakups, book clubs and one very ambitious attempt to finally read the classics. This is a thank-you note, with directions.

A store that started with a reading list problem

Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen opened Women & Children First in 1979. As WBEZ told the story in 2024, they were English grad students who kept getting assigned books almost entirely written by men. So they built the shelf they wanted to see.

It started elsewhere on the North Side and later moved up to Andersonville, where it has been part of the Clark Street furniture ever since. If you want to know exactly how far north 5233 is from the State and Madison zero point, the grid will tell you. The short answer is: far enough that it feels like its own small town, close enough that you have no excuse.

Feminist bookstores were a whole movement in the 1970s and 80s. Most of them are gone now. When WBEZ visited in 2024, it described this one as among the last ones standing from that wave and one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country, with roughly 30,000 books on hand.

Passing the keys, twice

Plenty of beloved shops close when the founders are ready to stop. This one has done the harder, better thing and handed itself down.

In 2014, Bubon and Christophersen sold the store to Sarah Hollenbeck and Lynn Mooney, two former employees. In 2026, the store announced its next handoff: Mooney would retire after 12 years as co-owner, and Raven Stubbs, who had worked at the store in various roles since 2020, would step in as co-owner alongside Hollenbeck. Windy City Times called it a generational leadership transition, which is about right.

Mooney isn’t just a name on paperwork, either. According to Windy City Times, by 2026 she had led book clubs at the store for 20 years, including one devoted to the classics of women’s literature. That is two decades of people showing up on a weeknight to argue about novels. Chicago runs on that kind of thing.

The new ownership team has said it plans to expand community programming and relaunch the Feminist Bookstore Network, according to both Windy City Times and Shelf Awareness. A store that has outlasted most of its peers now wants to help reconnect the ones that are left. That is a very Chicago move: survive, then organize.

What it is like inside

Under its current owners, WBEZ reported, the store has leaned into intersectional feminism with a focus on anti-racism, trans inclusivity and disability rights. In practice that means the shelves surprise you. You come in for one novel and leave with a history you didn’t know existed and a picture book for a kid who isn’t even yours.

It has also long been a safe place for queer Chicagoans, going back to a time when, as WBEZ put it, businesses being openly homophobic was common. The founders and the store itself are in the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, per Windy City Times. The bookstore world has noticed too: the store says it was the first recipient of the Great Lakes Bookstore of the Year Award.

And the calendar stays full. The store’s website keeps a running list of author readings, book groups, storytimes and the occasional performance. Check it before you go, because that’s where the current schedule lives, not here.

How to love a bookstore back

A bookstore like this doesn’t survive on good vibes and tote bags. It survives on people buying books there.

So here is the whole ask. The next time a book shows up in your group chat, or your coworker won’t stop talking about some memoir, don’t tap the button. Walk or bus over to Clark Street and buy it from a neighbor who can also tell you what to read after it. If they don’t have it on the shelf, ask them to order it. That’s one less Amazon order, and one more year of the lights staying on.

Then do the extra credit: go to a reading, join a book group, bring a kid to storytime. The shelves matter, but the room full of people is the real inventory.

Got a bookstore, a bookseller or a single shelf in Chicago that changed what you read? Tell us about it with #Chicago111.

Sources: Women & Children First; Women & Children First co-owner announcement; Windy City Times; Shelf Awareness; WBEZ.

Photo: Vasily Ledovsky / Unsplash