Strong of Song: The Women's Music Movement Turns 50
(there are amazing resources linked at the bottom of this article)
Strong of Song: The Women’s Music Movement Turns 50
11/22/2023 by Bonnie J. Morris
This year, we celebrate the musicians and producers who, across five decades, gave us the soundtracks and spaces affirming our lives.
Clockwise from left: Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, Holly Near and Linda Tillery.
She was a big, tough woman, the first to come along
Who showed me being female meant you still could be strong.
—Meg Christian
And you’re flowing like a river
The changer and the changed.
—Cris Williamson
We are a gentle, angry people
And we are singing, singing for our lives.
—Holly Near
I’d like to get to know you, in a special kind of womanly way.
—Linda Tillery
Amazon women, RISE.
—Maxine Feldman
Here come the lesbians! The leaping lesbians!
—Sue Fink
With the early 1970s now 50 years into the past, there are abundant golden anniversaries to celebrate: the founding of Ms., the passage of Title IX, Billie Jean King’s victory over smug challenger Bobby Riggs. What was once radical is historical, with highlights and hallmarks of 1970s feminism now introduced to millennials through film and television (Battle of the Sexes; Mrs. America). But the women’s music movement of the early 1970s is still with us a half-century later, reaching new fans through archives, cruises, exhibits, books, radio shows and, yes, live concerts. Both a product (albums! cassettes! posters!) and a destination (rallies! concerts! festivals!), women’s music fused feminist politics, woman-staffed sound production and grassroots folk traditions to create a bold new recording and performance network. When we had no rights at all, women’s music was also the sound and site of the lesbian revolution. This year, we celebrate the musicians and producers who, across five decades, gave us the soundtracks and spaces affirming our lives.
Let’s start with Olivia Records, marking 50 years since its origins as a lesbian-owned and -operated recording label in Washington, D.C. In 1973, Olivia was a radical collective of 10 women (soon reduced to a dedicated five), searching for an economically sustainable means of advancing lesbian-feminist concerns. They found an approach, and an art form, in what came to be called women’s music.
Historian Bonnie Morris interviews veterans of Olivia Records, the pioneering woman-run record company founded in Washington, D.C.
The same year saw the emergence of Holly Near’s Redwood Records label and Alix Dobkin’s release Lavender Jane Loves Women; earlier releases included the earlier Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Bands album Mountain Moving Day and Maxine Feldman’s lesbian single “Angry Atthis”; even more rare is Madeline Davis’s single “Stonewall Nation.” The early 1970s saw boldly lesbian-identified artists reach audiences not only through performance touring, but also through women’s bookshops and college radio, producing a songbook of albums that fans still treasure today. Judy Dlugacz and Ginny Berson, founding members of the Olivia Records collective, also hoped that the emotional resonance generated by their recorded soundtracks would forge political alliances across race and class: an awakened audience ready to demand change. Anti-racism work, fostered through long discussion sessions, resulted in concerts at the California Institute for Women prison, Olivia’s “Varied Voices of Black Women” tour, and collaborations such as the 1976 spoken-word album Where Would I Be Without You?, featuring the poetry of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn. The Redwood company’s work with a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock and with the D.C. area Roadwork production company modeled intersectionality as a women’s music value well before the concept was popularized by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
. . . .
In March of this year, over 4,000 women, and nearly all of Olivia’s original recording artists, boarded a luxury cruise ship for not one, but two, sold-out Olivia 50th anniversary trips. Commemorating those radical 1973 origins with the signature services and ambiance of an Olivia Travel cruise at sea, Olivia had clearly survived its flannel heyday, reinventing the lesbian path as a vacation. But panel after panel of greying artists, producers and guest speakers took the stage to explain their journey through earlier homophobic barriers, taking questions from a newer, freer generation. How had we survived—as lesbians—by creating a network of regularly occurring women-only concerts? What changed when the collective became a business?
. . . . .
To listen, now, to some of the early songs, speeches, slogans and responsive audience cheers is to ride through an auditory museum—one that voices resilience and revolution, art and justice, 50 years of women’s hands clapping to a song.
Resources
Ongoing through July 2024: The Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History’s exhibit on the women’s music movement. It’s also available online.
A huge archive of resources, interviews, and song recordings by Bay Area women’s music performers is available through Holly Near’s free online project, “Because of A Song.”
The original issues of Laurie Fuch’s Ladyslipper Catalogue, listing thousands of titles recorded by women artists, are now part of Duke University’s online collection and may be perused here.
Back issues of HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, edited by Toni Armstrong Jr, are available online.
Two Library of Congress displays on the history of women’s music and the 50th anniversary of Olivia are viewable: “Soundwaves of Feminism” and “Live! At the Library—The Olivia Records Story.”
Radio host and LGBT music archivist J.D. Doyle offers a treasure trove of women’s music interviews, images and songs on his website.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/11/22/womens-music-50th-anniversary-lesbian-love-songs/