And we also said farewell to W. Stephen Gilbert, who will be stepping down as editor of our newsletter SIdelights after over ten years' service. We're very grateful to Steve for his work to create such an interesting and informative quarterly newsletter for our members.

We said goodbye to Ruth Martin, who has served on Executive Board for three years to great effect, particularly in terms of her work to develop guidance for newly qualified indexers; we're glad to say that Ruth will be continuing to support the Society in other ways.

Thanks as always to Ruth, and to our friends from @the-ciep.bsky.social and @cilipmdg.bsky.social, who joined us for this session and shared experiences of cataloguing and editing feminist texts. Next month's Coffee Morning on 11 December will be on indexing games and puzzles, a pre-Christmas treat.

As indexers, we always understand that the correct indexing decision is based on our judgement - the answer to most indexing queries is "It depends" and, Ruth suggests, that "It depends" can be a space for feminist indexing.

Of course, indexers will always strive to reflect the author's usage in the text, but it's important to be aware of these dilemmas to avoid status quo thinking. Peer reviews - where a group of indexers index the same text and compare outcomes - are really useful in helping deal with complexity

How should we deal with people who might potentially be excluded from the term "women"? These areas of discomfort and difficulty are a good indicator that as an indexer you need to think more about these questions.

One topic of discussion was the status of index entries for "women". If there is not a similar entry for "men", is that perpetuating male-as-default language? If there is no entry for "women" has the indexer made it harder for the reader to find the information they want?

We may not want to go so far. But indexers will recognise such feminist language issues as male-as-default terminology, the exclusion of women or topics relating to women as passing or minor mentions, and the very different meanings of near-synonyms that vary a great deal in their impact.

We also discussed the idea of feminist indexing. Dale Spender's Women of Ideas attempted to reconceptualise the index because "conventional indexes make women's experience and priorities invisible" (quoted in Bell, Hazel K., ‘Bias in Indexing and Loaded Language’, The Indexer, 17.3 (1991), p174).

Because of the complexity and detail required, indexers will need to think carefully about the fee and the time available for the indexing project.

To index these texts, we can make use of the plurality and complexity, engaging with conceptual terms to form headings. Indexers may feel like they are over-indexing, but this can be a good strategy. Index structure is particularly important to represent a complex book's interrelated topics.

They are often complex, exploring ambiguous meanings and ideas, and questioning doctrine in all its forms. They can be difficult to understand and often explore a plurality of meanings with fluid terminology. Often this comes from the use of intersectional criticism.

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