A Woman's Place, formally known as ICI (Information Center Incorporate: A Woman's Place), was never just a bookstore. It was an outgrowth of the Bay Area Gay Women's Liberation movement, part of a broader effort by second-wave feminists to build autonomous communications networks outside the control of male-dominated publishing. The women in print movement, as it came to be called, saw bookstores as infrastructure: places where feminist presses could find an audience, where readers could discover writers the mainstream refused to carry. A Woman's Place stocked nonfiction by men but carried fiction and poetry only if it was written by a woman. The collective also made a deliberate effort to carry books reflecting Third World and working-class perspectives, a commitment that set it apart from bookstores that catered primarily to white, middle-class feminism.

The numbers told a story of remarkable growth. In 1973, the store's gross annual receipts totaled $24,244. Within nine years, that figure had climbed past $200,000, a growth rate exceeding 2,000 percent. The store became a gathering place, a resource center, and a training ground for the broader feminist bookstore network. Carol Seajay, who would go on to found the influential Feminist Bookstore News and open Old Wives' Tales bookstore in San Francisco in 1976, got her start at A Woman's Place. The store was proving something that skeptics had doubted: there was a market for feminist literature, and women would seek it out if given a place to find it.

The collective that ran A Woman's Place eventually broke apart over the very tensions it had tried to address. In 1982, the store entered receivership after an internal conflict that split along lines of race, generation, and class. Three older, white members locked the others out of the store, forcing the dispute into arbitration. The four women who found themselves on the outside, Darlene Pagano, Elizabeth Summers, Jesse Meredith, and Keiko Kubo, described their group with pointed clarity: "one Italian, one Jewish, one Black, one Asian." The irony was sharp. A bookstore founded on the principle that women's voices deserved to be heard had silenced the voices of its own members of color. An arbitration agreement was reached in 1983, the store reopened under new management, and the collective was formally incorporated. But the damage had been done.

A Woman's Place closed its doors in 1989, after roughly two decades in operation. The feminist bookstore movement it had helped launch was already contracting; by the end of the century, chain bookstores and the internet would finish what internal divisions had started. But the store's influence outlasted its storefront. The archives of A Woman's Place are held today by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, preserving the records of a collective that had helped prove feminist publishing could sustain itself as a business, not just an ideal. The women who sold books on Oakland's sidewalks in the early 1970s had built something larger than a store. They had built a model, flawed and fractured and eventually outgrown, for how a community could use literature as a tool of liberation.