“Our Generation”

Abstract

“‘Our Generation’: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock” compares the deferral of women’s contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture to the delayed recognition of the significant contributions by women to twentieth-century rock music, exploring how both aesthetic trends express the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. Middleton uses Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to theorize Romanticism and women’s issues within Romanticism. Women’s key obstacles to recognition as artists were due to “the fetishization of wealth and women’s objectification,” which closely aligned women’s status with capitalism and economics in both the Romantic era and that of women in rock. Alanis Morissette (1974–), Natalie Merchant (1963–), and the Indigo Girls (Amy Ray, 1964–, and Emily Saliers, 1963–) serve as Middleton’s exemplars of female Romanticism in the late twentieth century and in rock as she focuses on Morrisette’s album Jagged Little Pill, Merchant’s albums Motherland and Tigerlily , and the Indigo Girls’ Rites of Passage.