Bluestockings Bookstore, Cafe & Activist Center

Art & Culture

Step inside the Lower East Side’s “98% radical, 2% glitter, 100% volunteer-powered” feminist bookstore!

Bluestockings Bookstore Cafe Lower East Side

About Bluestockings Bookstore, Cafe & Activist Center

 & why it made the Carpe City list

  • Bluestockings is a collectively owned, self-proclaimed “radical” bookstore that has operated on Allen Street since 1999!
  • The store carries over 6,000 titles, and hosts nightly readings, workshops, and performances, as well as weekend walking tours and morning yoga sessions.
  • If you’re looking for other radical happenings, you can check out the store’s community bulletin board.
  • And, if you’re like us, and you take your radical literature with a strong cup of coffee, then you’re in luck! Bluestockings also sports a café (but of course, it’s organic and fair-trade.)

Carpe City Trivia

Why is it called Bluestockings?

  • A Bluestocking is 18th-century slang for an educated, intellectual woman.
  • It derives from The Blue Stocking Society, an 18th-century British women’s literary salon and discussion group led by Elizabeth Montagu that promoted values like education and mutual cooperation.
  • The society itself took the name from informal dress (blue stockings as opposed to the more formal black), to show that members were more concerned with thoughts than with fashions.

By: Lucie Levine

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