Artemis Publishing was founded in 1992 by Jocelynne Scutt to 'break the silences that abound about women's lives and in women's lives' and to give the publisher more control over the production of the books she wrote or edited herself. Artemis publishes three lists: the Women's Voices, Women's Lives Series; the Artemis Crime Fiction list; and a Women's Studies list.

The Women's Voices, Women's Lives Series, edited by Scutt, features the lives of Australian women from diverse racial, political and economic backgrounds, in order to deliver the ideas of feminism to the reader through the lives of ordinary women. Significantly, Artemis has a strong commitment to publishing the voices of Indigenous women as well as women of minority ethnic backgrounds. As someone born and raised in Western Australia, Scutt also is committed to including not only the stories of women who reside in the eastern states' capital cities, but also stories by women from all parts of Australia.

The Artemis Crime Fiction series comprises feminist crime fiction anthologies that showcase a wide range of writers, as well as single-author feminist crime fiction. In 1992, a call for submissions for the inaugural Artemis crime fiction anthology resulted in A Modern Woman and Other Crimes (1994), featuring stories by twenty women. Like the Women's Lives, Women's Voices Series, the crime fiction anthologies frequently include the voices of previously unpublished authors alongside established writers, so that as many authors as possible would become 'published, read and known'. Both of the Artemis Women's Studies titles, together with a number of the titles in the Women's Voices, Women's Lives Series, have been adopted as course texts by Women's Studies courses around the country, assuring Artemis Publishing of continuing sales.