ABSTRACT
Societal advances initiated by LGBT activists and cultural workers over the past fi fteen years have effaced a longer and deeper history of lesbian feminists and others making music and producing concerts and festivals addressed primarily toward lesbian audiences and consumers in the 1970s and decades following. This essay writes Black women into that history as performers and as “women’s music” festival attendees. In Songs in Black and Lavender , I suggested that “women’s music” is less a type of music than it is a site of women’s thinking about music, a context for the enactment about lesbian, feminist politics and notions of community. 1 While the latter is true, in that these music festivals still attract lesbian and queer women predominantly, the wider political and social context for LGBT-related popular culture is signifi cantly different from the cultural environment spawned three or more decades ago. While the differences between then and now cannot be overestimated, the fi rst instance of obvious change is in the name used to describe this community organized under the umbrella of music. Although part of this essay relates Black women’s early efforts to distance themselves from use of the moniker of “women’s music” in favor of the term “women-identifi ed,” the latter term also fell out of circulation in lesbian/feminist political circles more than fi fteen years ago. Therefore, I use the term “women’s music,” although it is instructive that the website for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (michfest.com) attributes no adjective to “music” when describing the festival on its web pages, thereby eschewing any identifi cation of the music itself as “women’s music.” This is an indication of a new era in terms of lesbian and queer cultural politics. This phenomenon adds validity to musician Sue Fink’s observation, later paraphrased, that there is no women’s music-only women’s music audiences. 2
“Women’s music” emerged in the early 1970s as part of a subculture of lesbian feminism. Proponents (Holly Near, Margie Adam, Chris Williamson, and Meg Christian, among others) described the emerging genre as “music by women, for women and about women.” 3 As women’s music festival historian Bonnie Morris writes, “For those women-lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual-whose hearts responded to any message of women-identifi ed music, the next challenge was learning how to produce and market albums outside male commercial confi nes.” 4 Feminist musician-activists sought increased opportunities for women in rock and folk music performance, sound engineering, and concert production including lighting design. In short, they sought to carve out a professional-social space in which women could give voice to lesbian sensibilities through performance. The women-identifi ed (or women’s) music recording and distribution industry, controlled fi nancially by women (Olivia Records was the fi rst), became a focal point for the dissemination of this music. 5
Understandably, even those feminist and/or Black activists engaged in movement practices from the 1970s to 1990s might not be familiar with the musical scenes this essay describes. Part of the reason lies in the contradictory nature of the enterprise itself. Writes Cynthia Lont, “Rather than directly confronting patriarchy, women’s music for the most part ignored it, and by its very existence, created an alternative culture.” 6 The alternative culture Lont describes was referred to as “cultural feminism,” distinguished by its counterpart, radical feminism, in that cultural feminism was a countercultural movement based on traits associated with traditional notions of femaleness (e.g., nurturance, softness, politeness). Cultural feminism encompassed more than the values and behaviors, which were posed “in direct opposition to the hierarchical, competitive, aggressive, and violent male world view.” 7
Cultural feminism had confl icting consequences. Eventually, the movement came to involve goods, services, artistic and intellectual work, and other cultural elements. This meant that on the one hand, women gained unparalleled opportunities to experience esprit de corps with other women as they engaged in mutual support for their artistic and creative endeavors. On the other hand, the fact that cultural feminism was in part based on essentialist notions of women served to circumscribe and, later, contain the genre of women’s music.
