Hello! And no, we haven’t forgotten about this website, or our readers. Neither have we been going through one of those “I’m so busy/bored with blogging/tapped that I can’t bring myself to blog” phases. Well, I suppose the “busy” part is accurate, but it’s only part of the story.
I’m gonna have to go backwards in order to ‘splain this one, so bear with me.
We started Soapboxgirls, the e-zine, in August 2000, a few months after we started Raised Eyebrow. That was another age, internet-wise; Soapboxgirls was part of a Canadian feminist site network called Moxie.ca (thanks to Carly for bringing us on board), which was at that time only one of many riot-grrl-inspired, third-wave feminist networks out there. (ChickClick was probably the most famous one, with dozens of members at its peak.) But a couple of years later, the network disbanded, mostly due to the decline in ad revenue — without that cash, it wasn’t viable to market ourselves as a group.
We published monthly (or near-monthly) issues of the e-zine until July 2002, when we awoke to the fact that our business was simply too time-consuming (read: successful) to continue to spend hours writing, editing & publishing an e-zine.
It had also dawned on us that we wanted to try our hand at another kind of writing: the offline kind. So it was with ambitions of finding more time to write that we closed down the e-zine and converted Soapboxgirls.com to a blog.
At that time — hard to believe it was nearly four years ago! — we had the seed of an idea, but we didn’t want to make it public because we knew it would likely take years to come to fruition. As it turns out, it took years for us to clear our plates enough to even get started.
But now we’re on track, and we’re excited to begin the show-and-tell process.
The idea is this: We want to talk business. The kind of business we do, that is to say, small, sustainable, woman-run, and values-driven. Not to mention fun.
We’ve been working on a book, and we now have a complete first draft. (Okay, I need to just take a moment to be a spaz about that, because it’s HUGE. WE HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK! Okay, thank you. Game on.) We are putting the final touches on a book proposal and a query letter, and when that is done, we’ll begin the process of shopping it around to agents.
We’re calling it Boss Lady.
Boss Lady — the book, and the website (which I’ll get to in a moment), is about running a business that feeds you both literally and figuratively. It’s about doing it with creativity and style, and with a hefty dose of individuality. It’s about how you can stay true to yourself while running a successful business — and how running a successful business can help you express your own values, goals, and sheer way of being.
Many business books (and courses, and leaders, and and and) send the message that in order to succeed in business, you need to fundamentally be someone you’re not. The ones aimed at women will often tell you ridiculous things, like that you should never order spaghetti during a lunch meeting because god forbid you should make a mess in front of a prospective client. (Because that would surely indicate an inability to do your job. Gah.) Or they spend a lot of time talking about “work-life balance” (because hey, we are the only ones who have families, after all). Or they focus on women’s business ventures as though every single one of us had the ambition to sell homemade soap at craft fairs. (Which is, you know, nothing against all you fabulous soapmakers — ‘cause we love y’all, and your soap! — but it’s just not the only option.)
We feel like maybe we need to get people talking about how women are really running businesses. That is to say, women entrepreneurs like the ones featured in our Buyer’s Guide, and in magazines like Bust and Bitch, in Inga Muscio’s fabulous Cuntlovin’ Guide to the Universe, at Another Girl at Play, and so on and so on. There are huge numbers of women running small businesses, and succeeding, without avoiding spaghetti or sacrificing family. And we want to talk about how that works.
Meanwhile, there are so many things we want to share with you, our favourite internet-people in the world.… our Soapboxgirls readers. We know some of you may not be as fascinated by the world of business as we are, but maybe you’ve used the Buyer’s Guide, or it’s crossed your mind that one day you might want to sell some of those vinyl purses you’ve been making in your spare time. Or maybe you’ll just give us a chance to show you how business looks when we do it, which we believe is a little more engaging than the way the folks in the grey suits in the financial district work it.
But in order to make room for all that, we need to pack up the old stuff and clean out our room. And that means that Soapboxgirls is going away soon, to be replaced by Boss Lady. We will be archiving Soapboxgirls, e-zine and all — and building a new playspace for Boss Lady. In many ways it won’t be a dramatic change, because we’ll still be blogging — and it’s still me and Emira. But you can expect a small, sideways shift in subject matter.
We hope you’ll stick around, and test the waters when Boss Lady launches. We’re pretty darn excited about it, and we’d really love for you to be a part of this journey.
And without getting too nostalgic, thanks for being a part of the journey until now. It’s been a fun ride, and we’re excited to see what’s around the next corner.
