Smedley's Bookshop, 2nd location - 307 W State St

In 1984, the bookshop moved from 119 East Buffalo Street to 307 West State Street. Under Zahava’s ownership, Smedley’s was not only a bookstore, but served as a gathering place, information center, and haven for all kinds of women. In addition to books, the small store sold every women’s periodical available at the time, women’s music, and featured a community bulletin board that acted as a vibrant women’s communication network.

Cornell students often learned about Smedley’s from Biddy Martin, then an out lesbian assistant professor in the German department, who started a gay and lesbian studies reading group. Lisa L. Moore, a PhD student in English Literature at Cornell during the 1980s, remembers Smedley’s vividly:

"On Friday afternoons I made my way down the infamously steep Buffalo Street hill—trudging if I was lucky, slipping on the ice and sliding down the precipice on my butt for half a block if I was not—to face a quiet weekend. Smedley’s Bookshop on State Street was my rest stop. The store was located in an 1860s wood-frame house like so many in that part of town. The owner, Irene “Zee” Zahava, lived upstairs, and she was always there. I don’t remember ever seeing an employee. I would come into the warmth of the store from the biting wind and freezing temperatures, stomp the snow off my fleece-lined boots, loosen my face-shrouding hood and drop my giant pink down-filled coat in the entryway. Thus unburdened, I would browse for an hour or so. I usually bought the papers in order to get the news about my new lesbian world: Sojourner, Off Our Backs (and later On Our Backs, its naughty younger sister), and Gay Community News for the Alison Bechdel cartoons. If I had some cash I might buy pleasure reading: novels like Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah or Andrea Freud Loewenstein’s This Place, an anthology of lesbian poetry called Naming the Waves."

The feminist community that formed around Smedley’s helped nurture the political career of Roey Thorpe, an organizer and doctoral candidate in U.S. women’s history at SUNY Binghamton, who in 1994 became the first openly gay person elected to the City of Ithaca Common Council. Thorpe also taught a course on lesbian history geared towards community members, opposed to an academic audience, at Smedley’s. Her approach incorporated both social history and works of literature including The Well of Loneliness, Stone Butch Blues, The Price of Salt, Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker novels, local author Claudia Brenner’s memoir Eight Bullets (published by Firebrand Books), and writings by Joan Nestle, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Thorpe describes the influence literature and books had on her life as follows:

"When I came out in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s, it was like a kind of silence. It was what it’s like to move through the world and have earphones on. Cover your ears and there was nothing. It was so hard to find any connection. And the only connections that there were were through music because there were some lesbian music labels. And there were books. It was really books and literature that made me feel there were other people out there like me, and that gave me a connection. For me, it wasn't only the affirmation of, yeah, there are lesbians. But it was also that there was a lesbian political analysis. There was a way of seeing the world in a transformative way that gave me a framework to understand the things that were happening to me, and also how I could react, and what I could say, and how I could think about myself. When I came out, the thing that was hardest for me was, I couldn't imagine a happy life. I didn’t have any role models for what a happy life might look like. It was still hard, even through literature, and through movies, or anything like that, to find anything that depicted a happy life. Not even Leslie Feinberg was going to do that. Nobody did that. And you had to make that. You had to make yourself, but at least there was the idea that I might be able to live a life. That I might be able to survive. The idea that there was something more, and that there was a way to understand what was happening to me was so important. There was also the courage of the people who were doing the writing. There were people that were willing to take that chance and put it on the line, and it made me think, “well, maybe I could do that.” I never was good at being closeted. It's just not my nature. It's not that it's courageous. It's that some people can keep a secret that way, and I just couldn't. Having a way to see other people and what they did with that was really, really important to me. I think literature gave me that."

Smedley’s regularly hosted events featuring notable feminist writers who spoke at Cornell and then gave free community readings at the bookstore. As Zahava remembers of the poetry readings she hosted, “the poets who would come from out of town [to do readings at Smedley’s] were like rock stars. It wasn’t a poetry-being-shunted-off kind of thing. And especially Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. The poetry was very elevated.” Several of these writers, including Dorothy Allison, Cheryl Clarke, and Audre Lorde, were published by Firebrand Books. The local relationship between Firebrand and Smedley’s (Firebrand published authors whose books Smedley’s would then sell) was a microcosm of the larger Women in Print Movement. Feminist publishers, like Nancy K. Bereano, relied on women printers, distributors, and booksellers, like Zahava, to support their work.

Smedley’s closed in August of 1994 with plans to transition the business into the Emma’s Writing Center for Women. “When Smedley’s first opened,” Zahava told The Ithaca Journal, “it really was the only source for a lot of things. Now you can get almost everything I carried at other bookstores in town.”

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