Women's music is a type of music "by women, for women, and about women."
Women's music focused on topics of feminism, including the unfair treatment of women by society and their families. Its lyrics focused on women's individual power, women's solidarity, and community, including lesbians.
As an offshoot of the feminist movement, the genre was referred to as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement and included the women's labor, civil rights, and peace movements. The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near. Women's music is not only associated with female performers but also all female workers in the industry, including studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers.
History
Roots At the beginning of the 1970s, as second-wave feminism began, feminists did not fight for lesbians. While the Stonewall riots in 1969 became the cradle of the gay liberation movement, political feminists felt the danger of their past efforts and that their activities may be negatively labeled. They were often hostile to lesbians. Further fragmentation between straight women and lesbians during the era was caused by the National Organization for Women (NOW)'s rejection of lesbians. The first NOW president Betty Friedan labeled lesbians as the "lavender menace." A series of movements against the gay and lesbian communities began, with the central figures labeling gay liberation as counterrevolutionary and bourgeois. The rejection of lesbians led many politically-concerned women to join lesbian feminist collectives, and it sometimes led to lesbian separatism.
Women's music bands, such as Deadly Nightshade and the Chicago and New Haven Women's Liberation bands, were initially capturing the feminists' central point. They broadcast feminists' positions but did not highlight lesbians' points of view.
Origin In 1963, lesbian American singer-songwriter Lesley Gore recorded and published her song "You Don't Own Me" expressing the threat of emancipation, as she says to a lover that they "don't own" her, that they are not to tell her what to do or what to say, and that they are not to put her on display. The song's lyrics became an inspiration for younger women and are sometimes cited as a factor in the second-wave feminist movement.
Development In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, some critics and musicians perceived that there were few "positive women's images within popular music" and a "lack of opportunities for female performers".; They viewed women as having a disadvantage in the field because of their difference in gender. At the time, major US record labels had only signed a few women's bands, including Fanny, Birtha, The Deadly Nightshade, Goldie and the Gingerbreads, and the band that evolved into Isis. In reaction to this perceived lack of inclusion of women in the mainstream, some feminists decided it was necessary to create a separate space for women to create music. Lesbian and feminist separatism were then used as a "tactic which focused women's energy and would give an enormous boost to the growth and development of women's music."
The genre, which first came to be known as "lesbian music", has its roots in certain musical contributions of the 1960s and is defined by the artists and labels in the 1970s who built upon this foundation in order to foster a lesbian-oriented musical movement.
Out of the separatist movement came the first distributed examples of music created specifically for lesbians or feminists. In 1972, Maxine Feldman, who had been an openly gay performer since 1964, recorded the first overtly lesbian record, "Angry Atthis" (Atthis was a lover of the ancient Greek poet Sappho). Feldman had been performing the song since 1969, and its lyrics were specific to her feelings and experiences as a lesbian. In the same year, the feminist all-woman bands The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band and the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band released Mountain Moving Day. In 1973, Alix Dobkin, flautist Kay Gardner, and bassist Patches Attom created the group Lavender Jane, and recorded an album entitled Lavender Jane Loves Women, the first full-length album for and by lesbians. These early recordings relied on sales through mail order and in a few lesbian feminist bookstores, like Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C., as well as promotion by word of mouth.; In May 1974, the women who would go on to form the first European women's rock band performed at a women's music festival in Berlin. They formed the German women's rock band Flying Lesbians and released one self-titled album in 1975.
Social/political impacts Goldenrod Music Distribution, founded by Terry Grant in 1975, has been credited by Lauron Kehrer as a major influence in the launch of the women's music movement. Kehrer noted that although the organization was founded on the premise of helping women and lesbians, it was unable to work around the contradictions surrounding the company's ethics and place in a capitalist society.
In the later period of women's music, the focus became lesbian separatism. Most women's music festivals used either private land or one-time event contracts in order to ensure that they could exclude men from the space. Certain ones either excluded men above a certain age or did not even allow men. The most controversial shows were at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The radical ideas from musicians crossed over into their music and their performances, which contained discrimination against other groups.
Purpose and influence There are common European classical semiotic codes that have been used throughout centuries to express femininity. These musical gestures changed over time as the meaning of femininity changed from the image of a beautiful woman gazed at from the male point of view to a woman's view of herself full of strength and inner charm, but they always kept to their purpose: truthful expressionism.
Feminist musicians aimed to show a positive, proactive, and assertive image of women that not only critiqued the rifts in regards to gender, but also demonstrated the goals of the feminist movement in terms of social justice regarding gender and the right of privacy concerning abortion and birth control. With the goal of breaking down the gender divide and level the gender differences, some women in this genre of music "adopt[ed] male dress codes and hair styles". Women also voiced their opinions and the goals of the feminist movement through lyrics. In "I Am Woman", Helen Reddy sings, "I am woman/hear me roar/And I've been down there on the floor/No one's ever gonna keep me down again." Reddy creates a feeling of "girl power" that reflected the ambitions of the feminist movement.
Lesbians found ways to express themselves through music. Ethel Smyth, a composer, encoded her lesbian life experiences in her music. The genders of composers, writers, artists, and more have a lot to do with how music is perceived and interpreted. Cues such as tempo, articulation, and other dynamics signify many different types of meanings – they are not standard. Each musician uses these cues to suit their music and expresses themselves through song.
Additionally, as lesbian musicians expressed themselves through music, they broke the isolation of lesbians in North America. They let lesbians form a group identity and another possible coming-out process, such that they are able to hint about their identity to their families and friends by sending them recordings of lesbian musicians' work.
Decline in popularity
Label on musicians The women's music classification is based on the identity of musicians such as women, feminist, lesbian, etc. This label gave the lesbian community chances to break their isolation from other communities, in that they can use women's music to hint at or show their identities as lesbians to others. However, due to being labeled as women's musicians, they may limit people's imagination about their music abilities. Some musicians are likely to give a more specific classification for their music based on the genre, thus expanding their listener base. Some musicians did not want to show their identity to the public due to the marketing aspect.
Fission in the community
Discrimination During the later period of women's music, white female performers promoted ideas that led to discrimination against other groups, such as people of color, straight women, men, transgender people, even lesbians who had children and who had relationships with men before. The ideas that performers infused into their music caused audiences from those communities to get angry, which limited the listeners.
Separation between new and old lesbian separatists Old lesbian separatist ideas, such as the exclusion of transgender women, were often more rigid and tended to dominate later women's music. The new generation of lesbians were more inclusive of transgender and other lesbian identities, leading to division between the two groups. For example, the transgender sound engineer Sandy Stone, was forced to resign from Olivia Records due to a group of women who threatened to boycott the company because of her identity as a transgender woman. This led to a series of movements during the era to protest the exclusion of transgender women from women-only spaces.
Financial and social issues Due to the specialty of the purpose of women's music, creating a women-only space, and the shocks to traditional patriarchal society, it is difficult for the companies that focus on women's music to gain any financial success through it under a male-dominated and capitalist society, because male-dominated companies refuse to collaborate with them. Additionally, it appears clear that as women's music record labels tried to finance themselves, rarely anyone took the risk to invest. Thus, most women's music record labels shut down.
Record labels, distributors, and publications
Olivia Records, the first women's music record label, was created in 1973 by a collective, including artist Meg Christian. Starting with a single that was successfully sold by mail order, Olivia was able to release Meg Christian's I Know You Know and Cris Williamson's The Changer and the Changed. The Changer and the Changed was "one of the all-time best selling albums on any independent label" at that time, and was also the first LP to be entirely produced by women. Changer is the all-time best-selling album to come out of the women's music genre.
Several other independent labels were created by artists, such as Kay Gardner with the record label Wise Woman/Urana, Margie Adam with the record label Pleiades, Ani DiFranco with the record label Righteous Babe Records, and Holly Near with the record label Redwood Records in 1972. Redwood Records expanded the scope of women's music recordings to include women of color by recording Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group of African-American singers founded by Bernice Reagon in 1978.; ; As these record labels grew, so did the music genres represented, and the ethnic and social diversity of the artists expanded. Several other labels were also formed by artists; Berkeley Women's Music Collective, Woody Simmons, and Teresa Trull were distributed by Olivia through their network.