About Staunch
Staunch is a Cambridge-based feminist zine. We publish a broad range of content - from comment pieces, interviews, poetry and prose, to art and photography - all promoting and contributing to an intersectional feminist message.
The standout feature of Staunch is how creative it is. We’ve tried to impose as few boundaries as possible on the content: no word limits have been set and the ideas are entirely the contributors’ own. This lack of restriction has yielded exciting results - the range of content we've received has been broad and experimental as well as visually satisfying. We’re trying to break free of conventional journalistic narratives; comment pieces might be written with absolute conviction but alternatively they could also be just a series of musings - someone working through their thoughts and sharing these with our readers. This sort of freedom is, for us, the most exciting thing about Staunch and we hope that comes across to our readers.
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Issue 1 editorial
by EMILY ROBB, editor
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The idea for Staunch came about in a bookshop in New York last summer. Rooting through Barnes & Noble’s magazine section in search of Ms., I realised I’d been waiting the three years since my last visit to get my hands on a copy. A liberal feminist magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes amid the surge of second-wave feminism, Ms. was revolutionary. "I realized as a journalist that there really was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women”, Steinem wrote. Thinking about this from the supposedly politically advanced position of 2017 as opposed to 1972, I felt saddened: how much had this changed? In Cambridge, a heavy disparity between male and female editors of student newspapers still stands and, as far as I could see, there was no prominent feminist publication in circulation.
So, over summer, I began tentatively trying to source possible editors and contributors for what, at this stage, was no more than a loose idea. Within days I had a list of thirty names and, over the coming weeks, it only grew; feminists of all ages, from Cambridge or elsewhere, voicing their eagerness to get involved. The editorial team was assembled and submissions began to roll in, each one representing another feminist finding a dedicated space for their creativity and each embodying more and more the ethos of the word staunch: strength, commitment, resolution. We have not imposed conventional journalistic boundaries on the content of this zine: it is a publication in which we want to encourage freedom, exploration and experimentation. None of the pieces were limited in terms of word count or theme, all were the initiative of the author or artist and the result has been an extremely diverse, exciting range of material. We are a magazine whose goal is representation and empowerment; to this end, we aim to cultivate a strongly intersectional, inclusive publication which we hope you’ll enjoy and, perhaps in future, get involved with.
“You should write about take-no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules", Gloria Steinem writes in her autobiography. So here we go. No restrictions: art and writing, fresh from the pens, keyboards and minds of feminists who care. Thank you so much to my wonderful editorial team, to all the inspired contributors, and to you, for picking up the first issue of Staunch and joining in.
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