This study recovers the history of a continuum of feminist presses that emerged from the Australian Women's Liberation Movement and demonstrates that in Australian feminist publishing, feminist activism is linked with book publishing at the site of cultural production. The study also assesses the contribution of independent (Australian-owned) presses to establishing a 'female presence' in Australian fiction and non-fiction and to publishing women's and feminist projects. Finally, it examines the feminist presses that operated in the 1990s in the context of a changing publishing industry, and argues that it is in the merging of commercial and political imperatives that an adaptive or hybrid model of feminist publishing emerged in Australia.