ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a set of songs written and performed by butch musicians in the 1970s and 1980s and considers these examples of “women’s music” alongside punk anthems by Tony Robinson and Patti Smith, written about the same time. Despite sharing all kinds of experiences of queerness, there are no cultural histories that can think about these musicians together. The anthems penned and performed by Maxine Feldman, Ferron, and others, expressed outrage with patriarchy some forty odd years ago and their authors were marginalized and cast as banal at the time. If we are committed now to hearing what politics may have sounded like within an earlier iteration of feminism, we could certainly turn to the maverick songwriting and the deep and resonant voices of “women’s musicians” who challenged the term “woman” as much as they challenged the patriarchal frameworks within which their music could be and was dismissed.
