>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
All right, everybody comfy?
Everybody happy?
Everybody ready for an international Women's Day treat?
I am just going to introduce myself because I want to maximize the time
that I have with all of you.
I could not be more honored and delighted to have the opportunity
to speak in the Library of Congress about my area of specialization
on Women's Day, in Women's History month at a moment when women
in Congress are on strike and marching out.
It's just a great day to celebrate feminist voices raised.
And I am going to tell you just a little bit about who I am
and what I do, about the exhibit that I have
in the Jefferson Building, thanks to Meg Metcalf who has assisted me
in bringing so much to display and exhibit.
And then I am going to play you a bunch of little samples
with this ancient item that's called a tape player from the 20th century.
And I'll explain what all the ephemera is that I schlepped
up to Capitol Hill bewildering people on Metro.
So I am a women's history professor and I am part time at GW,
part time at Georgetown for 22 years.
And my area of interest in women's history is the women's music
movement of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.
And this is a much misunderstood phenomenon
which is now just old enough to start being archived and made
into a sort of serious topic of study.
And it's a very awkward moment
because there's been critical backlash against, what are for me,
very beloved institutions like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
and a lot of interrogation of how inclusive women's music was.
It always has been and we are also in Washington,
DC very much connected to local institutions, people,
artists that made women's music the success it is.
Olivia records was founded just a few miles from here.
DC is the base of Sweet Honey and the Rock,
which just lost its premier sign language interpreter Mama Shirley
so we are very sad about her passing and I dedicate today's talk to her.
We're located near one of the best one day festivals
that was ever organized and that was SisterFire produced
by Amy Horowitz and Roadwork.
Boden Sandstrom started the first woman sound company here.
This is a really rich region for looking at people,
places and things in women's music.
And what I want to do is try to make this a more visible
and serious topic of scholarly inquiry and popular appreciation.
And I have been introducing sound tracks in my lectures
for a really long time and travelling
around the country doing readings from articles I've done,
interviews with artists, histories
of different women's production companies.
And what I have is only a tiny inch of what is in my house right now.
I have one of the best archives
in the United States of this whole subject.
And beginning at the end of January I was permitted to have a display
in the Great North Hall of a couple of glass cases showing a little bit
of the timeline of feminist music and sound.
And I am going to try and expand on that.
I brought a few more things from my house.
But, at your leisure, you can go over there and look at what kind
of begins with suffrage protest music and goes right through to punk
and there's fantastic items
from of course the Library of Congress collection.
And they include the sheet music to Loretta Lynn's, The Pill,
as well as some of the original albums by Alex Dobkin and some
of the zines that were the only media
to promote women's music, Hot Wire, Paid My Dues.
And we also have on display some recordings by the group Betty,
a DC based trio of dynamic women.
So, I am going to just start a little bit, oh my gosh,
with the origins of women's music and what I have
out on the table is pretty self-explanatory,
but I will explain anyway.
Ah, we really begin with drumming.
Drumming is one of the most ancient of the ways
that women created sound, very much like the heartbeat and the baby
that lies in the womb, but also often off limits to women
who were not permitted to join male only rituals,
celebrations, and drum training.
And that remains a very frustrating issue for many women
in different tribes globally from the South Pacific to Africa.
And in the spaces around band instrumental training,
we find women turning to the obvious lullabies and passing along
to their babies both soothing sounds and whispered information,
whispered information you know that was often in a secret language
where women even were not permitted the regular language of the men.
That was very true in my personal heritage, Jewish tradition
where in Eastern Europe men spoke of serious things in Hebrew
and women said rude things about guys in Yiddish.
And the Yiddish lullabies are filled with despair about the unreliability
of men and that was considered a women's language or the mamalotion,
and I will give you a little sample of that in a minute.
By the time we get to the Middle Ages,
what we have is a curious issue
where women are composing sacred music and it's very beautiful.
As nuns, they can go to a convent or a sisterhood
of living, different kinds.
The baekings are a different kind of convent.
They were allowed to own property and eventually leave.
But all of these women were forbidden to sing in front of men
and by really pretty early in history there's a ban
on men listening to women's voices with the idea
that it could turn them, arouse them, you know, what have you.
One of the few contemporary artifacts about this,
this is from a Hasidic community that I studied in grad school,
Rabbinic Advisory, Woman Singing.
Okay, so this would be on an album warning young religious men,
don't buy this album, there are women on it, you know.
Okay, yeah I know, so we have let's say compositions by someone
like Hildegard of Bingen.
And her recordings are available to us now, if I can find them.
Ah, here we go.
And this is a, she's obviously not really available to us
at you know DAR Constitution Hall right now, but she's reminded,
ah we have access to her recordings through compilations.
This is called Joan of Arc and it is all music that was dedicated to Mary
from the Middle Ages and it includes some of Hildegard's compositions
and other songs about the hardship of being a female.
By the time we get to the Middle Ages and a little bit after,
we also have well-known songs that are passed woman to woman
that are very much about the trauma of an unplanned pregnancy.
So many women were burned as witches, so many women were charged
with deviant, sinful behavior and burned at the stake.
And one of my colleagues and friends in grad school, Deb Symonds,
did her dissertation on Scotts Ballads
about illegitimate birth and infanticide.
And that is the book on the table that's called "Weep Not for Me."
Those songs were very much trickling down into contemporary folk tunes
and that's something that's familiar to many of you from Mary Hamilton.
Mary Hamilton's Birth the Babe and the queen says,
"Get up Mary Hamilton, get up and follow me for I'm gone
to Edinbro Town and I'm gonna tell the King
and Queen about your situation."
That is all over England and Ireland so it's indication
that women were singing about their situations to each other.
It was just rarely written down and it was a warning to younger women.
So we have you know sort of proto feminist music that's
about the reality of the body and the reality of living conditions,
in particular, all over the world.
Where there is constant warfare, there are absent men that women pine
for and then there are men who come in and invade
and they invade physically.
And those realities are captured in song.
And obviously in the American version,
what we have in the early America are slave songs and songs
of survival and struggle and escape.
And the people who have studied slave songs and work songs
of course have done enormous, meticulous research
on what was the music that was actually a map
to the underground railroad and how to navigate
to freedom by looking at the stars.
And the most famous example there is, follow the drinking gourd,
and of course that's the Big Dipper.
I always get chills when I write, speak about that.
That's such an important piece of our musical history.
So by the time we get to the Era of Immigration,
we start to get scratchy recorded music, a little bit,
and there's one group, Libana that has done a sort of recreation
of sweatshop songs by women more than a hundred years ago
and these are in Yiddish and I'll just play you a tiny sample.
A woman is singing I am so exhausted, when am I going to sleep?
This is never ending.
I am always going to be you know a tailor.
[Music plays] Okay sorry I can't do more than just a little bit.
I have so much stuff.
But I can talk about anything that you hear today that interests you.
I will be happy to go on for quite a while.
When we get to the era of suffrage, we actually have
down in the other exhibit some sheet music from suffrage songs
which are just fantastic.
And World War I is a great time to study opinionated women
because there were women who were for the war, against the war,
women who said I don't even want to talk about the war.
Let's get the vote first before I lift a finger for Wilson.
And one of my favorite songs is Who Dares to Put a Musket
on His Shoulder which was a women's complaint that without the vote
or any political input, she was having to sacrifice her sons.
Mothers were very hostile to the Great War
because it introduced three horrifying new weapons of warfare.
No one had ever seen before the machine gun,
mustard gas which was the beginning of chemical warfare,
and then the U boat, the undersea boat that could
of course sink pleasure ships like the Lusitania.
And so suffrage songs are the first sort of recorded feminist music
in terms of how we see the first wave
and the second wave, and so forth.
But a lot of that is specific to a kind of community
of activists of white women.
Over here we also have eventually the Harlem Renaissance
which is going to record very outspoken Blues
and living outside the law, songs of survival
from African American women, a lot of gay women, and people meeting
in speakeasies where they could speak easy.
So the interesting thing about prohibition is it brought black
and white, straight and gay together.
Because everyone was a criminal as soon as you wanted to drink,
and that was a great equalizer.
So one of the most marvelous things that I found is an example
of a party mix tape that someone put together and I bought from a catalog
when I was fifteen and it's called Reefer Songs.
Trixie Smith saying I'm so high.
A little contrast to Yiddish suffering,
if we could just get them together, you know.
[Music plays] I'm so high, I'm so high [Music plays].
All right, kinda fun.
This is from Smithsonian Folkway, no Rosetta Records, okay.
This is Jailhouse Blues and this is an amazing compilation
from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
It's from 1936 and this would be a woman's penitentiary
where the women were put at hard labor and a lot of the songs are
about relationships, people who sold them out and then there are songs
that are original, composed behind bars, and then there are work songs
that allow women to, like men on a chain gang or on railroad,
use rhythm and chanting to focus on repetitive tasks
that you can't say no to.
[Music plays] Alright, I really like that one.
There's a lot on here that's referential to prostitution
and the inevitability of when a woman had nothing else,
having to sell herself and so forth.
That's called, Does Anyone Here Want to Buy Some Cabbage?
And that's a song that could be disguised as a market song
but it's about something else.
Thanks for your patience.
I'm trying not to walk away from that mic too much.
This is just the beginning of a really rich literature.
Angela Davis of course is the one who produced that amazing text
of which I teach, Blues Legacy and Black Feminism.
And of course a lot of the material reminds us that very early
in the twenties, we have singing about loving other women.
And it's been a wonderful thing in the better climate of LGBT rights
for people to be able to do research on the earliest songs
about women in relationships.
Some of them are very sly and slash overtly sexual,
shocking to us today.
A very popular inner war tune
which Lillean Faderman rediscovered was called the Boy in the Boat,
a euphemism for love making and it warned men who went off to the wars
that while you are away, the women are swimmin, okay?
And then we have the very famous Prove it On Me Blues, Bessie Smith
and various other women who sang this which not only talks
about cross dressing, but the fact unless you're caught,
nobody could prove you were gay and get you into trouble with the law.
This is not the original, this is the cover version by Faith Nolan
who became a big, popular Afro-Canadian star of women's music.
Whoops, play, have to do it upside down too.
[Music plays...Must have been women because I don't like men.
It' true I wear a collar and a tie.
I like to watch the women when they walk ...] Okay,
sorry you know this is a tape of a tape
of a tape and this is what we do.
Everything else is more or less original
and of course people also send me stuff
because they know I'm interested.
Okay, this is great.
The era of the twenties series, we have women really speaking out.
They are talking about being in love with women, they are dealing
with abuse from men, they are fighting back,
how do you earn a living, how do you live outside the lie,
how do you deal with segregation?
We are all familiar with the song Strange Fruit about lynching.
But despite the inevitability of separating women under Jim Crow Law,
we actually have another moment
of very positive integration beyond drinking and illegal clubs.
That is World War II when the men go away,
so do many of the big band players
and they are drafted and women substitute.
And one of the greatest stories, of course,
is the International Sweethearts of Rhythm which was a mixed race band,
very daring, very difficult for them to find places to stay on the road.
They included a very famous trumpet player, Tiny Davis,
who was very in love with her partner,
Ruby and there's a whole video about their lives called, Tiny and Ruby,
Hell Divin' Women and they are just fabulous.
That is the subject of quite a number of films and commentary,
but I'll give you a little bit of their coolness [Music plays].
Let's get a little bit more of the whole band.
[Music plays] This is an all-female orchestra and that's Tiny Davis.
Okay, so you can see that we have not a straight line, but a wavy line
of female empowerment leading right up to
where people think women's music begins which is
with the folk protest songs of the 1950s.
And on the table I have a tribute to some other blues women.
But I also have the memoir by the recently deceased Ronnie Gilbert
who performed with the Weavers, great lady
and of course they were black-listed and investigated actually
by the House on American Activities Committee.
That was the beginning of a folk revival where many people
because of the investigation
of our government became alerted folk concerts were a great place
to meet other progressives or to dare to mix interracially.
There was not very much
of an effective gay rights movement at that point.
There was the beginnings though of a Civil Rights protest movement
that would bring people out of the house
to see difference as less frightening.
And in this era we have a couple of women who really emerge
as recognizable figures and that would include Malvina Reynolds,
Little Boxes, and she did a song called We Don't Need the Men
and a whole lot of commentary on what she saw as conformity
in the era and the need for people to rise.
And after that, the cat is out of the bag so to speak.
So where I sort of come into this history would be the beginning
of the 1960s with peace marching parents
who never stopped playing Joan Baez albums.
And through the voices of women in the house,
I came to recognize union songs, anti-war music, music about women
who had lost men to war, draft resistance.
Eventually Judy Collins, much later on, recorded a song
about having an abortion.
That was not something I heard as a kid but a lot
of those vocalizations made it possible for me to naturally
to respond to women's music when it sort of begins in the 70s.
So, what do we call women's music?
Women's music revives in the early 70s as a kind of response
to the belittlement of women in rock and roll
where many women were treated as groupies, as sex objects,
there were a lot of otherwise, you know, radical and hip male bands
that sang about women in sexually demeaning ways.
A really good example, the beloved Rolling Stones, Under My Thumb,
yes there is a problem with that.
And even my beloved, beloved Led Zepplin, way down inside,
I'm going to give you every inch of my love.
Really? Okay.
So anyhow, the response to that was that women began to compose songs
about their lives that were original
and that investigated the issues of the day.
And one of the first was Mountain Moving Day
and that album is out there.
That was 1972 and that was the New Haven
and Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Bands.
And those are a combination of songs about sexual harassment,
contraception, abuse in the home, talking back to patriarchy.
It's just thrilling.
And the title is symbolic, the mountain is awake
and women are on the move.
That followed a commercially successful all women's band, Fanny,
with June Millington who now owns a rock and roll camp for girls
in Massachusetts, as a top 40 hit.
But the feminist music begins in '72,
and then in '73 we get Olivia Records and that is the great,
great story that has brought me into activism.
The story of Olivia is that a collective of women living
in the Furies House here in DC
who were radical lesbian separatists interviewed a visiting performer,
Cris Williamson on Georgetown's Radio Free Woman Program.
And during that interview, Cris Williamson sort of turned the tables
on the woman interviewing her and said what do you do?
And the Furies said everything we do is about women.
We create institutions, we want women to be able to do things
on their own without relying on men, and on the air,
Cris said why don't you start a women's recording company?
And they did the next day.
So that was Olivia Records which was the beginning
of a woman-owned production company.
It is now Olivia Travel and Olivia Cruises where I often guest lecture.
And that was very much under the leadership of Judy Dlugacz
who is still the head of Olivia and their interest was in trying
to have concerts for women only that would be uplifting and supportive,
but also which would name the ways that women were beginning to be open
about loving one another.
And it was a very dramatic change from what existed at the time.
You had to find women to do sound and do lighting and production
and all of those skills had been off limits to women.
And eventually Boden Sandstrom Women Sound Company which she cofounded
with Casey Culver and another woman began
to do the sound for these events.
And Olivia's first album, well actually I have some
of the original forty-five singles there,
it's the rarest thing on the bench.
They recorded Meg Christian's, I Know You Know,
which is a really fantastic album.
And it was followed by Cris Williamson's, The Changer
and the Changed, which to this day is the best-selling women's music
album of all time.
This was great, but where are these women going to perform?
And who's going to review them and distribute the music?
There was no coverage in the mainstream
of this movement in the 70s.
There was no real way to promote it without putting women at risk
as soon as it was identified as something gay.
You could lose your job, your custody, your standing in church,
your role in a school, everything if you just showed
up at a Holly Near concert.
So a lot of this history has a very slim paper trail
which is very frustrating to me as a historian.
As things digitize, all
that a researcher will find is what has been digitized
so far, not the complete story.
And the complete story of these recordings is women playing
in other women's living rooms with the shades drawn.
And it's in women's scrapbooks.
It's in photos, it's in memories, it is in oral tradition
which we have to get now.
So I'm adamant about interviewing women who went to concerts
and their lives were changed.
And it didn't necessarily have to be
about the intimacy of a relationship.
A lot of what women will say "saved their lives" was
that the women's music concert phenomena was an alternative
to the bars.
So it was before Facebook, a space for the underage and the sober.
The music on stage openly named everything that radio
and news would not talk about whether it be domestic violence
or incest, or the lack of fair wages for women,
things we're still dealing with now, being an athlete,
being a mom who comes after her kids, being somebody who is poor,
learning to understand a person who's ethnicity
and race is different from your own,
being able to consider running for office.
This doesn't really sound like you could dance to it,
but actually you could, you really could, okay?
And a little bit of our local beloved,
and now missing an interpreter group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Here's an example of naming that stuff in a way you could move to.
Hang on, by the time this is over, I will figure out what button to push!
There we go.
So this is Sweet Honey in the Rock [Music plays].
Alright, that's a song for something.
Wow, so what's up with WPFW?
Well this is a great little rare thing from the Washington Blade.
Radio Free Women was kicked off of Georgetown because they talked
about contraception on the air and eventually that was not comfy
at a Jesuit Institution, one where I now teach.
But anyhow the radio station had to change so the women moved to WPFW
and that became Sophie's Parlor
which is stlll a women's music show today.
So that's really a wonderful tribute, again thanks to the power
of local organizing in facilitating the growth
of the women's music movement.
So on the bench, what I have are a whole bunch of the albums that came
out of the 70s, some of which were speech albums.
And the rare ones include Olivia Records made an album
that was poetry by Judy Grahn and Pat Parker,
Where Would I Be Without You?
So we have a black and a white poet reading their work
on the Olivia label.
There was also a March on Washington in 1979 and '87 and '93 and 2000
and there's a recorded album from the '79 March for Gay Rights
which is really the first of its kind.
There was also the first recording of a festival
and that was the SisterFire Album.
But, in 1977, Olivia also put out a very famous album
with an orange juice can on the cover, Lesbian Concentrate.
And that was in response to Anita Hill's campaign
to roll back gay rights protections.
And that was a wonderful compilation
of all the Olivia artists at the time.
That's a real collector's item now and a really fun album to play.
So who was covering all this?
Hardly anyone in the press, except for two different zines one,
Paid My Dues and then that was followed by Hot Wire, and Hot Wire,
under the direction of my friend and mentor, Toni Armstrong Jr.
That I have to go and get.
So what we have in the display case
over in the Jefferson Building is this issue.
This is my friend Sherry Hicks on the cover
who is a sign language interpreter.
And each issue of Hot Wire came with a sampler so you could hear 3
or 4 cuts, this is presuming everyone had a record player.
And you could be introduced to the music
and this would cover what was going on, uh oh there's a photo of me
and my mom at a women's music festival.
This is an article I wrote, I Brought Mom to the Festival.
Women's music festivals which began in 1974 with National in Illinois
and then Michigan in 1976 were able to bring all these artists together
and offer you, you know, a slate of performances that went
over a whole weekend and then eventually a week.
And you could hear as many concerts as came with your ticket,
relax on a blanket with your loved one, go to workshops
on fighting patriarchy or how to learn karate or compost.
There were many more, but those are kind of the archetypes.
I led quite a few on topics ranging from Jewish Women's History
to you know journal keeping.
But at festivals, many women also shared production, touring,
how do you launch a career
as a controversial person without much help.
Even if you are one of the best artists of your time,
the mainstream will not promote you.
And these conversations happened for years.
Of all the people that performed in festival culture,
four became household names and those would be the Indigo Girls,
Melissa Etheridge and Tracy Chapman.
And then others had become better known depending
if you are a Canadian or in England, Jill Sobule is a good example.
But the problem of course was that rock media was not interested
in women's music, which was considered too soft a sound
or man hating or what have you.
And even our own Ms. Magazine shocked,
shocked to say did not put Cris Williamson on the cover until 1980
with this concept, The New Stars of Women's Music.
Yes, she had a best-selling album in 1974, a little bit late, okay.
Most horrifying we get something like this Spin, The Girl Issue,
which includes some of, I know, which includes some of the women
who were performing then, all over the country,
really articulating issues of womanhood.
But they were always reduced to being as fragile
or feminine or whatever as possible.
And then you get something that's even more obscuring, TIME,
Macho Music is Out, Empathy is In
and the All-Female Lilith Festival is Taking Rocks New Sound
on the Road.
So this new sound comes 22 years
after everybody else has started a movement.
Jewel never performed in Michigan, Lilith is not the first festival.
Everything about this is forgive me, alternative facts, okay.
And I'm sorry to say we just see no end of it.
Every couple of years, somebody says the new sound of feminist music,
even my beloved Washington Post, okay.
Ouch, A Street Harassment, right, This Band has Songs
for All of That, 2016, okay.
So there's very little historic research.
There's a lot of laziness.
I finally got an article Hey Forty Years of the Women's Music Movement
and Hey Women's Music, You're Turning 40 in Ms. Magazine,
the soundtrack of lesbian feminism.
So I'm very proud of that and that only took them 100 years.
And what's surprising is that you will find terrific advocates
in the strangest places.
And indeed some of them are sympathetic men and it is great,
so Parade, that little thing that comes in your little newspaper,
you don't think of that as a hot bed
of radical insight but groove on this.
Somebody wrote in to Walter Scott's Parade, "Why are the Runaways
of recent movie fame presented as the first all-female rock group?
Wasn't that Fanny?
This is a really smart writer who knows about Fanny.
And listen to the response.
Oh yeah, but even before Fanny there was Goldie and the Gingerbreads,
the first all women rock band signed to a major record label,
Decca in 1963 and then he goes
on to give the complete history like I just gave you.
So Walter Scott, who knew, long may he live.
And likewise in recent years students have begun
to write dissertations on this movement
and it's gotten a little bit more, more attention.
Okay, just a few more things and then I'll let you ask questions.
While festival culture begins to burgeon,
it's not enough to have two.
We start having festivals in every state so that local women don't have
to pay the expense of flying to Michigan or Illinois.
So, we had by the late 80s,
festivals in almost every state including Alaska and Hawaii.
That included Camp Fest, the New England Women's Music Festival,
the Maine Music Festival, Lonestar Women's Music Festival
in Texas, WomenFest in New Mexico.
Robin Tyler had two festivals, the West Coast
and the Southern Women's Comedy and Music Fest.
There was one in Mississippi that was attacked by locals
and they were threatened violently.
I worked there for ten years, Camp Sister Spirit.
A festival in Iowa, one in the SisterSpace, Pocono Weekend
in Pennsylvania...I'm leaving things out and I'm going to be killed,
one in the Pacific Northwest.
All of them were completely run by women with lighting and sound
and one of the most beautiful artifacts I own is one
of Casey Cohen's light plots for how to light women on stage
for the Michigan Festival and that's down at the end of the table.
So, by 1999, I published the first book on women's music
and festival culture and I wanted to ask,
Why is this important to the audience?
I wanted to highlight the performers and the producers.
I wanted to give credit, but I was primarily interested
in what the music meant to the women whose lives had changed.
And starting from the mid-80s, I would go to festivals, take notes,
tape record everybody's comments at the mic, take photographs,
and I also passed around a blank book.
What does this culture mean to you?
Why are you listening?
Why are you here?
How has it changed you?
What will you remember?
And I will show you just an example.
I filled up about five of these, just passing it
around in a night stage audience with complete trust, saying,
"Write what you want to say and just bring it back to my towel
at the end of the concert.
And you know other women were like partying and making out
and having ice cream and I'm doing homework in the dark.
But, I'm really glad I did.
And on this one occasion, the very last page ended up,
"I loved everything about Michigan," Alice Walker,
sitting behind me, and I had no idea.
So yeah, careful with that one, right?
Okay, there is so much music that I could choose to play for you
and what I wanna do is just point out a few things and then I am going
to play two more samples then I will let you ask questions.
One of the things that's happened with women's music is
that it has really expanded internationally,
meaning that we have a feminist movement
with women vocalizing their concerns now
that we have do it yourself recording.
So, I have music from the Sami people who used
to be called Laplanders, indigenous to Scandinavia; a very famous album,
Stop Excision by women in Malawi about the problem
of female mutilation; and then a really important recording.
This is the Irish band, Zrazy
and I will tell you what you are hearing [Music plays].
67947 double 0, 67947 double 0, it's a phone number [Music plays].
Okay, that is a disco hit of the phone number
for abortion information in Ireland.
It was illegal to publish that phone number in print, so they made a song
that every woman would remember.
That is one of the most brilliant contemporary returns
to the oral tradition of the past, can't print the number anywhere
in a paper, illegal to share, hum it, 6794700, okay.
Likewise, a really rad band that I love, Girls in the Nose, responded.
In one particular year, there was a real series of beloved women
at the Michigan Festival who passed due to breast cancer,
so a really rad band led by Kate Turner
who is a folklorist made a rock hit out of how
to give yourself a breast exam.
And we will just wrap it up with this.
I love that I am playing this in Federal space [Music plays].
Okay so she was giving instructions on how to make a breast exam erotic.
Now you are not going to find this on you know public television.
Okay, well I have so much more but I am really mindful that some
of you might have questions.
And I want to explain a little bit about the handout everyone got
and offer a final fun thing.
I tried to type up a little take away, but I also wanted folks
to have this cartoon by Allison Beckdell
who of course now has a hit, Fun Home,
at National Theatre and on Broadway.
In... I'm sorry I have a few more.
In this panel, we see the awakening of the young woman,
what is necessary to the young woman coming out in college
at Beckdell's age, and she and I are the same age.
When you have to be reading gynecology by Mary Daily,
and you are listening to Alex Dobkin,
The Woman in Your Life, on the turn table.
So it's a really terrific expression of how the cultural material
of the time cannot be separated from the awakening experience.
And I am so sorry, pass that back to those who did not get one.
And what I would like to offer is, before you leave today,
I have this tiny rare thing, a stamp I bought
at my very first Michigan Festival, Harmony Through Women's Music.
And I can stamp your little program, if you want.
And that is something that's not being manufactured much anymore.
So where does it go from here?
I've donated quite a few items,
in particular Woody Simmons Oregon Mountains which is so great,
Maxine's Feldman's Closet Sale, some back issues of Hot Wire,
one of Casey's light plots, the Ladyslipper Catalog
which distributed through secret mail all this music,
donated a whole lot of that to the Library of Congress.
But, my whole collection is willed
to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliff.
And they came to me, which is really nice and they are now
in the business of beginning to digitize the three hundred
and eighty recordings all of which are on cassettes that I made
over the past thirty years interviewing artists
and taping sounds at festivals.
So, plenty of work ahead and I will pause there and thank you very much.
[Applause] Oh, yes.
Who has a question?
Nobody? Let me put on my professorial looking glasses.
Yes, hi. And where do you see women's music today?
Yeah, well um, the problem is as I see it,
is that before we can properly credit and praise the women
who created all this, we are in an overlap moment
where the focus is very much on trans rights.
And there is a big backlash
with if you google different aspects of women's music.
Younger women are sort of interrogating it
as it's not inclusionary.
So, there is a kind of generational dismissal.
And I think in another ten years people are going to come back
and go, Oh my God, I wish I could have gone to Michigan.
We are going to be like uh huh.
But, the thing about people who are now second generation,
Kathleen Hanna and LeTigre are still doing concerts.
They have like a little women's history spin.
Then we have women you know who are very proud to identify
as feminists on the airwaves.
We have very different versions of all of this
with different new artists.
And thank you for coming.
We have lots of different movements in different countries
that are just beginning to dare to record.
So some of the stuff I put out there, All Female Orchestra
in Afghanistan Dares to Defy the Taliban, okay.
So women are finding a way to pass along statements of change
in different means across cultures.
So there is going to be much more.
Obviously I have this ancient kind of tech so I can listen
to all my old tapes and albums and my CDs.
I don't even own an ipod.
I'm really 20th century but I'm also mindful
that many women are beginning to pass.
We've lost Kay Gardner, Ronnie Gilbert, etc. so my job is to run
around the country as energetically as possible and archive everybody
and I'm hoping next to do a book on women who did feminist radio shows.
And I have been invited by Pacifica Radio Archives
to do a book based on their material.
So I'm going to California in May and I am going
to live there for a while.
And I'm actually being interviewed on KPFK in LA Saturday night.
This is Wednesday, right?
Next question?
Yeah, hi. Women's music festivals often had controversies.
Can you talk about that?
Sure, all of them always did.
In the beginning it was should men be allowed, then boy children,
then what about smoking, then what about, you know, leather
and etcetera, what about the problem of racism, what about women
who couldn't afford to attend who tried to sneak in,
then what about keeping it safe for children
as more mommies brought babies
and other women were still desperately trying to party,
then the question of, you know, do you openly encourage trans women
or do you have, in the case of Michigan,
a primarily clothing optional festival that a lot of women went
to heal from sexual assault and didn't want
to see anyone with male genitalia.
That was written up in cyberspace in really brutal ways
which were not fair to the festival.
Other festivals always had men attending or were open to anybody
because they were primarily clothed or in a dorm or a university space.
My Dad went to SisterFire.
He took his shirt off and got yelled at
and was told hey, we can't, so you can't.
And boy, he learned that day.
My Mom went to nine different festivals with me.
That's how I ended up writing an article about mothers at festivals.
Ah, she is a very beautiful woman.
She was hit on and she had to just walk
around with her wedding ring out like this.
She went to Michigan, two nationals, two Camp Fests, two Virginias,
one SisterFire and she was able to meet Ronnie Gilbert who was one
of the few artists of her generation or older and they spoke
to each other in Yiddish which was so cool.
As fast as I can write the Wikipedia page for the Michigan Festival,
someone comes in and rewrites it negatively,
so it's a constant struggle.
And my argument in the my latest book, The Disappearing L,
is that it's difficult to keep up the pace when at the touch
of a button someone can vilify a culture and send it to millions
as opposed to the limited archives that we are trying to get online
that are really accurate which have to be vetted by people who are still
at risk of losing their jobs if they come out.
And the photos within festival culture often included nudity,
how do you get everyone's permission, what about children
of moms who are dragged to festivals against their will
and are now conservative.
I mean it's really a sort of historian's,
I don't want to say nightmare because I love it,
but it's a challenge, it's a workout.
And being fair to everyone is a constant moral test for me.
That's a great question.
Yeah, hi. Hi, can you name some of the top bands
that you feel are important in the history and also how do you feel
that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland treats this subject.
Oh my God, it's so frustrating, very frustrating.
I'm glad you asked about punk.
We put punk in the display.
Pretty in Punk is a book I have taught.
That's there.
Punk bands, my golly, everything from, okay, Team Dresh, Tribe 8,
LeTigre, hang on a second, uh, they are in that film about Seattle.
O boy, I don't have this written down in front
of me, Seven Year Bitch, okay.
A lot of them have playful names.
And you have to really go into the Lady Slipper Catalog to see some
of the rare ones, the Yeastie Girls, Brat Attack.
There's a quite a few compilations that I have.
They are amazing, but that was controversial.
That was seen as scary to a lot of women
who really wanted women's music to be gentle and sweet.
And Lynn Breedlove who was the lead singer in Tribe 8
and the title is a sly play on trabidism,
ancient Greek term for Lesbian lovemaking.
Tribe 8 had a spokeswoman who said, you know we may offend
because we're loud and angry, but we're all rape survivors
and when we jump around on stage and yell a lot, we feel better
and that's their presentation.
Their presentation allowed a lot of other women to get
up a do a mosh pit which then had to be constructed at Michigan
and that was controversial because what about the women in wheel chairs
who are right down front and they could not mosh
and the dust was getting...I mean how is everyone included?
What if you wanted to dive, do a stage dive,
and you know you were paraplegic?
We accommodate that, okay?
Um, how is everyone included?
Yeah. And the first time I dove off the stage and you know was carried
around on everyone's shoulders screaming and yelling
in my plaid flannel shirt, it was just heaven on earth.
The next time I landed on my head because people were distracted
and I realized yeah this could not be good.
But that was part of making sure at Michigan in particular,
which is really the gold standard,
every genre of music you would have salsa and big bands
and instrumental, you had comedy, you had blues, and latina and jazz
and you had in particular international groups, everyone from,
representing Maori, New Zealand to China, Hawaii.
One of my favorite experiences was a native American band Ulali
and they are just one of quite a few that played there.
So having everybody, but punk definitely.
And the latest years that would have included well a kind of combination
of rap, I would say more rap than punk, Goddess and She,
Krudas Cubensi which is from Cuba,
and then really astounding impresario performers.
Anyway, it's a great question and I have much more.
I just have to do a little looking up of facts.
Yes. Just as sort of a followup, I was thinking of asking about genre.
When you mentioned Holly Near, I mean she sort
of to most people embodies the idea of what women's music is,
but my question is, and as you have implied,
that is probably largely constructed
by the mainstream audience in certain ways.
To what extent was there any sense
of a musical taste or sound within this?
What an awesome question.
So here I have on the table Kay Gardner's,
Sounding the Inner Landscape.
And Kay was a performer, played the flute, was very popular,
also played on Alex Dobkin's album Lavender Jane Loves Women.
Kay argues as, you know, a musicologist
that there is a specific female sound and a kind
of circular sound structure in women's performance.
And she gets very academic with how if you look at ancient culture,
the sound for what is holy is both the first sounds we are capable
to make as infants and how the sacred Hebrew for God, Yahweh,
is just AIOU, Yahweh, right, and many other theories.
That is a certain kind of sound.
Women who were looking for something more physically akin
to a drumbeat often complained that you know women's music was not
for them, but then they created and added in.
And one of my favorite performers, Sue Fink, very famously said,
"I don't think we have women's music,
we have a women's music audience."
So that women would show up, the same women would show
up for very different styles once they were, you know, available.
And I think that's still true.
And the interesting thing about Holly's music, Holly records a lot
of songs about you know Nicaragua and so forth
that maybe you're not going
to play while you are relaxing in the bathtub.
Because you know they have the intention of anthems,
get up and join a work brigade you know
and in other music the performer would not be as political on stage
but also might be less verbose and more a different kind of sound.
And I eventually became friends with all these people
and became you know a biographer of my heroines,
which is a really great job, but a big responsibility.
So how everybody wants to be remembered,
they all want to be remembered as broader
in range than their stereotypes.
Yeah, Philip, hi.
I am not going to get real specific, but what was it about The Changer
and the Change that made it such a breakout hit or that made it
such a big album during its time?
Well it had all of these anthems, Sweet Woman, Rising Inside,
I mean various explicit songs about women in love with each other
and then, you know, Song of the Soul,
where everybody is singing together, we will sing this song,
stuff that made everyone both the particular,
I am in love with someone specific, and the movement,
there's a whole lot of women like me.
That I think, both the individual feeling of awakening and somebody
who was again trained as a composer and a classical pianist
who had amazing skill and still is performing.
She has got a new album out now and that was also sort of an event,
like you would then wait to go to this concert and what happened
in the audience was just as important
as what was going on onstage.
And it was like that for me.
I saw my first concert at the Bayou under the bridge in Georgetown,
it's an ice cream parlor now.
And you know, even in my first concert, I was writing in my journal
and in my latest book I talk about that.
It's rude to write through an artist's performance,
but I wanted to describe everything because what
if it stopped at any moment.
Nobody was writing about it, no one was publishing that I knew.
It could disappear at any moment,
and I write that I just wanted to bottle it like wine.
How many other people were feeling like me?
And everyone in the audience was,
so that kind of shared experience was very well captured in the sort
of harmonies that Cris created and all of the people
on that album are just stellar.
And then the critique that it was a very white band and some
of the main performers were as well was answered by Olivia which put
on a tour in '75, The Varied Voices of Black Women
which took Linda Tillery and Mary Watkins and Pat Parker
and Gwen Avery and others on tour around the Bay area and beyond.
Some of that is in the other exhibit too.
So the appeal of Changer and the Change I think is a combination
of artistry and that the lyrics speak to anybody who is coming
into what was unspeakable, following in love with another woman.
Yes, out of time.
I am out of time, what can I do?
I can stand here, thank you, and take questions personally.
Okay, thank you all.
This was a wonderful experience.
>> This has been a presentation of the library of congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov
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