What is a ‘woman in rock’? The answer may seem simple: a woman who plays music that could be marketed as ‘rock and roll’, or maybe just ‘rock’. But under closer examination, this definition becomes complicated. What constitutes ‘rock music’? Why do we care when women do or don’t participate? How do we know if a woman ‘rocks’, and are the qualities such a woman embodies consistent across time and place?
The phrase ‘women in rock’ and its variants (‘women who rock’, ‘girls rock’, etc.) are common. Books and articles with these titles proliferate, as well as magazine issues, compilation albums, playlists, museum exhibits, and television specials. Some of this is important and necessary feminist recovery work addressing women’s inadequate representation in history and criticism. At the same time, numerous critics have argued that the construction creates a marked category (there’s no parallel construction for ‘men who rock’) and causes us to consider women’s participation differently. Some musicians feel that existing within this category is harmful, marginalising, or just exhausting. Many bristle at the designation or claim not to think of themselves according to their gender or as doing feminist work. Editor Barbara O’Dair wrote in her introduction to Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock in 1997: ‘is it any wonder that “women in rock” hate to be characterised as such, and are often on the defensive? The responses to the subject from female artists today range from irritated to bemused.’ The irritated and bemused women quoted in her essay included Kim Deal, Tina Weymouth, and Patti Smith.1
This tension persists. In 2014, for example, Neko Case made waves online when she engaged with Playboy Magazine on Twitter after the publication posted its review of her album The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You:
@PlayboyDotCom: Artist @NekoCase is breaking the mold of what women in the music industry should be: …
@NekoCase: @PlayboyDotCom Am I? IM NOT A FUCKING ‘WOMAN IN MUSIC’, IM A FUCKING MUSICIAN IN MUSIC!2
Case followed this with an essay on her website about the label ‘women musicians’. She did not want it to be quoted out of context, but the sentiments of both her tweets and her essay struck a nerve and received media coverage and a large number of social-media shares. Some people – particularly men – thought Playboy’s tweet should be taken as a compliment.3 But Case’s complaint resonated with many women. It also resonates across eras and disciplines. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who frequently rejected the gendering of her work, reportedly stated that ‘men put me down as the best woman painter … I think I’m one of the best painters’.4
How did we get to a point where a publication known for objectifying women could draw upon the ‘woman-in-music’ trope and consider it a feminist act? Something about ‘rock’ creates a particular impulse to take note when women participate. This isn’t because women were ever absent; instead, it reflects how we think about both categories. This chapter, therefore, will focus on women and rock more than in rock. Women’s contributions to this diverse art form have been immense over the course of decades, and I don’t wish to create a biographical list of performers expected to stand in for thousands who contributed in myriad ways. Rather, I would like to consider how these categories have had their definitions negotiated and renegotiated in relation to one another throughout the twentieth century. Because rock and roll originated in the United States and American culture shaped the initial discourse on rock, I will focus primarily on examples from American rock here; however, the genre has long since become an international form, and many of the observations in this chapter can be extrapolated or further explored within other cultural contexts.
As a starting point, I will use the analytical strategies sketched out by Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Russ’s focus is literature, but she demonstrates how boundaries are moved to keep marginalised groups on the margins of an art form. She writes:
In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the ‘wrong’ groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But, alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then – since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway – develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result.5
Much of Russ’s theorising applies to music. A 2018 study by the Annenberg Foundation’s Inclusion initiative found that in the most popular music on the Billboard charts between 2012 and 2017, women were under-represented as artists, songwriters, producers, and award winners.6 The study urged examination of biases in history texts, and concluded that inclusion required changing the ‘values and strategies of the industry’.7 Russ’s work can help us to understand what those values and strategies have been. Her theory invites us to identify ways the categories ‘women’ and ‘rock’ were developed in opposition to one another.
Early Rock and Roll and Anomalousness
Rock and roll became a phenomenon in the United States in the mid-1950s, a time when we frequently think of American women as housewives who stayed home with children. Images from contemporaneous media, such as sitcoms about idealised suburban family life, inform collective memories of the era. What lifestyle could be more opposite to rock and roll than a domestic one?
Rock histories therefore frequently state that there were few, if any, women in early rock and roll. One textbook from 2013 claims, for example:
Clearly the essential conservatism of the 1950s, politically and culturally, made it a particularly inauspicious time to be seen as a rebellious and empowered young woman. The rebellious, empowered young men of early rock ’n’ roll proved controversial enough, and most teenagers of the period – male and female – were happy admiring these men from a safe distance, and without wishing the rock ’n’ roll attitude to cross the gender divide. Given the tenor of the times, an empowered black female rock ’n’ roll idol would have been even more unlikely – which is why African American women have played no part in this discussion.8
Texts like these tend to offer a small number of exceptions. Wanda Jackson – a country-turned-rockabilly performer often compared to Elvis Presley – is frequently cited in this context. The same textbook states: ‘Jackson stands revealed on [her] records as a performer who could readily go toe-to-toe (or pelvis to pelvis!) with Elvis Presley or with any of the other major male rock ’n’ rollers of this period.’9 Otherwise, we’re told that early rock and roll was the domain of wild men; women were anomalies.
Anomalousness, according to Russ, acknowledges that women participate in an art form, but insists that ‘she doesn’t fit in’. It’s a way of ensuring ‘permanent marginality’.10 Related is Russ’s concept of isolation, which acknowledges that some women did participate, but claims that they were few.11 If we’re told that a woman performing rock and roll was an anomaly, then what incentive is there to seek more like her? Russ cautions that this thinking leads to complacency; we start to see small numbers of women as sufficient representation.12 Wanda Jackson deserves her place in rock history, but when she is represented as an exception, others can be hidden.
Feminist scholars have revised some common narratives about domesticity in the post-Second-World-War era to better show that there was no singular experience shared by all women, a tactic which may help in reframing early rock and roll. Stephanie Coontz’s work demonstrates that real life in the United States was both poorer and more racially diverse than mid-century television showed.13 What feminist writer Betty Friedan described as the ‘problem with no name’ – the alienation and repression experienced by women told not to desire anything beyond domestic life – was centred on white middle- and upper-class women. As bell hooks writes in her assessment of Friedan: ‘Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change, but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women.’14 Many American women, hooks reminds us, have had little choice but to work.15 Women’s employment in the United States did drop with the end of the Second World War, but by the mid-1950s, rose to levels higher than those seen during the war. The social acceptability of working women increased too, although they received lower pay and faced limits as to the types of work made available to them.16
‘Rock and roller’ was not a typical job. Anyone making a living at it was already striving for something unusual. Though the genre was controversial, it is difficult to find evidence of consensus as to who could acceptably perform it. While some critics found rock and roll too vulgar for women, there are counterexamples of male rockers facing critique for being too feminine. One columnist claimed in 1956: ‘We live in the “sexbomb” age. A “sexbomb”, in the entertainment world, is a performer who gets by on animal allure rather than on artistic merit . … Until now, women have dominated the “sexbomb” field. Elvis Presley is the first to show it can also be a male industry.’17 The performing conventions of rock and roll, therefore, weren’t always seen as too controversial for women: they could also be seen as unremarkable because they were performed by a woman. Maureen Mahon writes, for example, about how black women, including Big Mama Thornton – who created sounds and gestural vocabularies central to rock – are frequently silenced while Presley is held up for the ‘sexy masculinity [that] comes into being in part as he draws on Thornton’s confrontational black femininity’.18 Thornton, who recorded ‘Hound Dog’ before Presley, once said: ‘I’ve been singing way before Elvis Presley was born, and he jumps up and becomes a millionaire before me … off of something that I made popular. They gave him the right . … [N]ow, why do they do that? He makes a million and all this jive because his face is different from mine.’19
Both supporters and detractors expected rock and roll to be a fad. Few counted on long careers in the genre, and the idea that a young woman might be an entertainer until she married was not necessarily radical, particularly if she was working class. Record labels even sought ‘female Elvises’. RCA promoted rockabilly Janis Martin under that epithet right alongside her labelmate, Elvis Presley. Another woman with the stage name ‘Alis Lesley, the Female Presley’ toured internationally with Eddie Cochran and Little Richard and played barefoot while shaking her hips.
Nearly everywhere men performed rock and roll, women did too; even if, as is the case today, they were not always present in equal numbers or had career arcs that differed from men’s. Driven to capitalise on whatever could be labelled ‘rock and roll’ and sold to teens, the industry in the mid-1950s defined the term in a fairly catholic way, not yet uniformly rendered masculine. Examine the Billboard charts as rock and roll broke in 1955, and not far below Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline’, you’ll see a record by Lillian Briggs – the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ – of Louis Jordan’s ‘I Want You to Be My Baby’. One of the biggest hits of 1956 was Kay Starr’s recording of ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’, which seemed to poke fun at rock and roll, but started as an inside joke for listeners of Alan Freed’s famed rock and roll radio shows. Live performances and sock hops were also common venues for women. Freed’s productions on air and in theatres always included women, which was not uncommon for package shows featuring multiple acts. Performers who made appearances on his shows included women from R&B, country, and pop backgrounds. Fans might hear LaVern Baker, Jo-Ann Campbell, Valerie Carr, the Chantels, Jean Chapel, Linda Laurie, Gloria Mann, Ruth McFadden, the Rhythmettes, Jodie Sands; even Freed’s third wife, Inga Boling.20 Ads for venues ranging from state fairs to urban clubs further show that women were working as musicians in rock and roll in many contexts.
The restrictions that women faced in the 1950s should not be discounted, barriers that were broken must be recognised, and the careers that might have blossomed under different circumstances deserve to be mourned. But we must take care to apply these narratives with precision so as to not create blinkers preventing us from seeing the women who did it anyway.
The 1960s and the Double Standard of Content
The first wave of rock and roll is often said to have ended around 1960. The standard story is that men from the early craze left the scene: Elvis Presley was drafted; Chuck Berry served prison time; Jerry Lee Lewis was enmeshed in scandal; Little Richard left music for religion; and a plane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson (known as ‘The Big Bopper’). Meanwhile, payola investigations and the standardising of radio formats took a toll on distribution. The first generation of fans headed into adult life, and the younger cohort coming up behind them had its own taste, which many critics characterise as tamer.
Still, many women produced music rooted in the teen-oriented customs of rock and roll in the early sixties. Connie Francis and Brenda Lee led a youthful group of singers, releasing impressive streaks of hit records. Mary Wells was cutting her first sides for Motown by 1960, as that label was poised for success. Wanda Jackson finally cracked the Billboard Top 40 with ‘Let’s Have a Party’ (1960). The first nationally popular ‘girl groups’, including the Chantels and the Bobbettes, had emerged by the late 1950s and established a burgeoning trend. (See Chapter 8, ‘Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s’ for an in-depth consideration of the American girl groups of the 1960s.)
So, was it men’s departures or women’s participation that signalled rock and roll’s ‘death’, or at least its taming, to many critics? One critic claimed, for example, that it was not ‘until rock’n’roll lost its spark of spontaneity and became a tributary of the musical mainstream, with its waters paddled by clean-cut kids, was it acceptable for white girls to dip a toe in’.21 Another noted that ‘female artists were also successful during this period. They were usually not categorised as teen idols, but their music followed the same pallid formulas … As is the case of the teen idols, girl groups were simply song stylists.’22
This discourse shows how anomalousness and isolation were less effective strategies for separating women from rock in the 1960s. The teen stars at the outset of the decade were just a few of the musicians who are still household names today, rendering the manoeuvre more difficult. The Supremes alone had twelve No. 1 US singles between 1964 and 1969, and they were only one act from a slate of Motown talent. Girl groups from other labels, including the Ronettes, the Shirelles, and the Crystals, had enduring hits, too. Solo singers also sold millions of records each; Aretha Franklin and Lesley Gore, for example, or Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield as part of the British Invasion. In the countercultural movement, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were both prominent in psychedelic rock, whereas on the folk side, artists like Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, and Odetta made an impact with socially conscious lyrics and ushered in a new age of singer-songwriters. (See Chapter 10, ‘“(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman”: Women in Songwriting’, for a consideration of women songwriters, including a discussion of Mitchell.)
Not only was ‘rock and roll’ undergoing redefinition, but the way we conceptualised the category of ‘women’ in the 1960s was also shifting. If the dominant narrative of the 1950s was one of repression, in the 1960s, we look towards the growing force of second-wave feminism in tandem with the civil rights movement and the ‘free love’ of the countercultural sexual revolution. The story is generally no longer one in which women are not participating, but their increased visibility allows narratives employing what Russ terms ‘the double standard of content’. The double standard relegates women’s art to a separate realm, proclaiming their work less universal than that produced by men. The lower social value placed on women’s experiences leads to their art being devalued. Russ explains that even when the art isn’t ignored, the double standard can hurt ‘all women artists, both those whose art is specifically recognised as “feminine” (it is depreciated) and those whose art is not (it is misinterpreted)’.23
It’s easy to find examples of music by women that was made throughout the 1960s being devalued, perhaps because of its meaning to women. Susan Douglas’s 1994 essay ‘Why the Shirelles Mattered’ noted that the group’s music voiced the concerns of girls but that:
Girl group music has been denied its rightful place in history by a host of male music critics who’ve either ignored it or trashed it. Typical is this pronouncement, by one of the contributors to The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll: ‘The female group of the early 1960s served to drive the concept of art completely away from rock ’n’ roll … I feel this genre represents the low point in the history of rock ’n’ roll.’24
Critical appraisal of the girl groups seems to have shifted in a positive direction since Douglas’s essay. Yet the centrality of the women’s rights movement to the story of social change in the 1960s to this day has a narrative pull that can paradoxically bring about the double standard of content. The emergence of second-wave feminism can be a useful interpretive lens for music of the time, and there is an important body of scholarship showing how music helped young women voice political concerns, as both performers and listeners.25
Used uncritically, however, this lens becomes another way of claiming that music speaking to women must have had a limited audience and that the larger story of rock therefore needn’t be too bothered by it. One male critic went so far as to blame feminism and the sexual revolution – in a book titled Go, Girl, Go! The Women’s Revolution in Music – for women’s lack of chart success in the 1960s, asking:
If men were exerting such domination over women, why would female record buyers – still the majority – purchase records that reflected that attitude? Why would they buy records such as Leslie [sic] Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me’ one minute, then turn around and buy Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’ or Elvis Presley’s ‘You’re the Devil in Disguise’? The answer seems to be that when they wanted meaningful lyrics, they turned to female artists, but when they wanted to dance, when they wanted to tap into that inner male rage that skewed their hormonal balance, they flocked to the male artists who were not ashamed to give it to them.26
The sexual revolution and women’s movement did not impact only women, just as the songs of Lesley Gore or the Shirelles were not heard by only girls. The double standard of content suggests that rock performances by women amount to the sum of their success or failure to achieve presumed feminist aims. And while discussions of the 1960s are particularly susceptible to this suppression tactic, it often crops up when the audience for a woman’s music is believed to be feminine.
The Rock Era and False Categorisation
The term ‘rock and roll’ has never had a singular definition. By the 1970s, it was sometimes just ‘rock’, and the number of subgenres included under its umbrella increased. Broad depictions of rock from the 1970s into the 1980s will generally include varied sub-classifications including progressive rock, arena rock, glam, funk, punk, post-punk, new wave, hip-hop, and heavy metal. The umbrella had greater coverage, but the danger of a slippery definition of ‘rock’ for marginalised performers is that it can continually be redefined to exclude them.
Russ calls this move ‘false categorisation’, which can manifest as ‘denying [creators] entry to the “right” category, by assigning them to the “wrong” category’, or even rearranging or renaming phenomena in order to change their significance.27 ‘The assignment of genre can also function as false categorising’, writes Russ, ‘especially when work appears to fall between established genres and can thereby be assigned to either (and then called an imperfect example of it) or chided for belonging to neither’.28 The establishment of rock criticism as a discipline over the course of the 1960s encouraged defining and categorising. As Norma Coates argues in her work on the masculinisation of rock, criticism sought to establish rock as serious and ‘authentic’. Authenticity was a vague concept that was ‘best defined by what it was not: not mass culture, not prefabricated, and not necessarily “popular”’. Coates notes that it was defined on the level of ‘I know it when I hear it’.29 Defining in the negative and on a subjective level makes exclusion easier.
The ‘wrong’ category for women can be pop, for instance, but it can also vaguely be ‘not rock’. Even women who were stars during what we think of as the ‘classic rock era’ – generally the late 1960s through the 1980s – were frequently excluded from the category for reasons not applied equally to men. Sometimes this was an accusation of a lack of substance via claims that the woman’s visual appeal supplanted musical talent. Sometimes it was criticism that she appealed to commercial interests. Sometimes it was because she didn’t play an instrument or write her own songs; having her success attributed to a man is also recategorisation. Examples are, again, easy to find:
Pat Benatar may not be ‘the rock and roll woman of the ’80s’, as her record company would have us believe. And after co-authoring only two songs on her debut album, one is still not sure where her mentor, producer Mike Chapman ends, and Pat Benatar picks up. (1980)30
If any of rock’s male marauders (say Triumph, or Rush) opened up an LP with a stop ’n’ start thumper about spotting a 17-year-old number by the record machine and taking said number home for some action, and if the thumper had a chorus like ‘I love rock ’n’ roll/So put another dime in the juke box, baby’ … you can bet that the crapometer would be reading about 88% by the time the guitar solo came galloping around the bend. Joan Jett gets away with a lot of such hand-me-down foolishness. Part of her escape hatch is likeability (oh, all right, lustability, but who ever said that dark bangs and well-applied mascara had nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll?). (1982)31
While these performers and their peers also received favourable reviews embracing them as rockers, comments like those above are frequent enough to destabilise how women were perceived with respect to rock.
False categorisation was hardly a new tactic in music. Jes Skolnik writes in her critique of the ‘women-in-rock’ trope that:
white rock music, too, has been given critical primacy, with black artists shunted off to subcategories and ‘urban radio’ (the modern version of ‘race music’), and Latinx artists relegated to Spanish-speaking radio only, even artists who record primarily in English. The historical shared and tangled root of rock, R&B, folk, and country somehow divides fairly neatly for most critics, leading to the current overuse of tropes like ‘genre-defying’ to describe music that plumbs this root fully.32
These segregation practices had existed about as long as recorded music. The criticisms lobbed at Pat Benatar or Joan Jett for not ‘rocking’ correctly might not be given the chance to arise when an artist had already been relegated to another genre. Could Donna Summer be ‘disco’ as well as ‘rock’? Can Chaka Khan’s style be thought of as ‘rock’ in addition to R&B or funk? While many of us find it easy to answer these questions with an unqualified ‘yes’, significant enough doubt in rock’s dominant discourse requires us to make these arguments constantly. And, as Russ noted, falling between genres can itself constitute suppression by recategorisation.
In the early 2000s, the term ‘rockism’ emerged to describe these gatekeeping practices.33 Rockism can be difficult to defeat, because, as Kelefa Sanneh reasoned, ‘the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself’.34 The theme of rebellion and struggle against power is a consistent thread connecting rock culture to its varying subgenres. Empowerment and rebelliousness, however, can be difficult to delineate within an intersectional feminist framework because the patriarchal forces shaping rock – and the risks of reproducing them – do not act upon all people in the same way.35 Patricia Hill Collins writes that ‘empowerment for African-American women will never occur in a context characterised by oppression and social injustice. A group can gain power in such situations by dominating others, but this is not the type of empowerment I found within black women’s thinking.’36 Instead, Collins found empowerment that occurs in tandem with larger, networked efforts to address social injustice. As philosopher Monique Deveaux argues, feminist modes of empowerment can be hard to perceive. ‘Feminists need to look at the inner processes that condition women’s sense of freedom or choice in addition to external manifestations of power and dominance … Women’s “freedom” does not simply refer to objective possibilities for manoeuvring or resisting within a power dynamic but concerns whether a woman feels empowered in her specific context.’37
Judging whether a woman feels empowered by her circumstances is more complex than noticing if she has tattoos, wears leather, or plays electric guitar. Yet while we do not always know how performers navigated their options or asserted personal rebellions, we can complicate the idea that pleasing audiences of straight white men is evidence of rebellion. Dismantling such notions could trigger more significant disruptions. As Russ writes of women in literature: ‘In order to have her “belong” …, the tradition to which she belongs must also be admitted. Other writers must be admitted along with their tradition, written and unwritten. Speech must be admitted. Canons of excellence and conceptions of excellence must change, perhaps beyond recognition.’38 Would the concept of ‘rock’ survive such a dismantling?
Revivals and Lack of Models
In 1991, Barney Hoskyns declared that ‘rock and roll is being hijacked by angry girls with electric guitars’. He continued:
Tired of playing airbrushed pop dollies for salivating male voyeurs, women on both sides of the Atlantic have seized the traditional rock weapon of phallic oppression and made it their own.
More importantly, they have exploded the Ideal Feminine of pop by singing of sweat and blood, lust and menstruation, fear and self-loathing. Inger Lorre of LA’s infamous Nymphs quotes Rimbaud to the effect that when woman has thrown off her servitude she will ‘discover strange, unfathomable, repellent, delicious things’ – which is precisely what acts as diverse as Hole, Belly, L7, Daisy Chainsaw, PJ Harvey, The Breeders, and Babes in Toyland are busy doing on their new releases.39
Critics wrote so much about women’s presence in rock around this time that Ann Powers once quipped, ‘I’ve often joked that I wrote at least one article about the “year of women in rock” every single year in the 90s.’40 An impulse to explore this apparent trend on a deeper level led to a new wave of cultural criticism and books on ‘women in rock’. Many of the musicians profiled in this literature seemed to harken back to earlier subgenres in which women were particularly visible. The 1990s and early 2000s saw new girl groups, amongst them TLC, Destiny’s Child, and the Spice Girls. Meanwhile, singer-songwriters including Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, and Liz Phair echoed the movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
These revivals also demarcate a cycle of remembering and forgetting. Russ refers to this as ‘lack of models’. She argues that it isn’t contradictory to claim that women’s traditions exist while also noting that contemporary women lack models. ‘One difference is in the age of the women involved’, she notes. ‘Female support groups exist, but they must be created anew by each generation, so that what was missing during one’s formative years may (with luck and drive) be built or discovered later on at considerable cost in time, energy, and self-confidence.’41 Thus, ‘women in rock’ are reinvented every decade or two.
Looking back, for example, it seems that 1974 was also declared a ‘year of women in rock’. One 1975 newspaper article bemoaned the proliferation of writing on the topic: ‘[T]he stories keep appearing. What they do is merge different styles of music and performers to substantiate a “new phenomenon”, when in fact different types of female singers and groups of female singers have been with us right along.’42 The columnist also mentions a new book documenting the phenomenon, Rock ’n’ Roll Woman, by Katherine Orloff.43 Orloff concluded that ‘rock and roll’ and ‘women’ were contradicting terms: ‘If rock demonstrates that very masculine power, a woman is at odds with the definition immediately. While she can play the notes and sing the tunes, all the elements that have influenced her upbringing and attitudes tell her she is in the wrong place.’44
And around we go. The terms ‘rock’ and ‘women’ still resist rectification, so the trope of ‘women in rock’ continues. But Russ urges us to keep working on the problem. The worst thing we can do, she notes, is turn our backs.45 Recovery is important, but we should also not mistake enlarging the existing canon for systemic change. We have to monitor the cultural work that the label ‘women in rock’ does, remaining cognisant of the history of suppression it contains. We must rethink how we define women and rock to break old cycles, prevent harm to musicians, and address inequality in the industry.
