Sex and Laughter in Women’s Music, 1970-77

Abstract

The movement of the early 1970s was created by and for who came to political consciousness as a result of the movement. The culture that emerged, originally called gained the less controversial descriptor women's as institutions such as record labels, distribution networks, and production companies evolved to meet audience demand (Lont 1992:242). What differentiated women's from other made by of the period was its lesbian focus (in both lyrics and performance contexts). Artists such as Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Joan Baez had mainstream success with that is almost identical sonically with (folk-based, singer-songwriter, solo performance), and which explored topics of interest to who were benefiting from a world irrevocably altered by the feminist movement, a world that included having sex outside of marriage, earning your own money, ambivalence about family life, and living alone. (1) Outside of the movement, produced during this period rarely make explicit links with emerging feminist consciousness, but those few songs that did have become anthemic: Respect, Aretha Franklin's 1967 cover of a song by Otis Redding, am Flelen Reddy's 1972 hit, and, to a lesser degree, Honey Cone's 1971 song Want Ads. Women's music, on the other hand, was created for a lesbian audience to describe lesbian experiences and desires: it was music by women, for women, about women, and financially controlled by women (Lont 1992:242). Describing themselves as lesbian-feminists and/or as women-identified-women, the key organizers of the movement used as their tool to raise consciousness through new venues for to create, experience, and consume culture. (2) Before I describe the details of the movement, it is useful to contextualize the political and cultural environment of feminist activity in the United States prior to the movement. Feminist organizing in the early-to-mid 1960s focused primarily on including in the national debates and legislation about civil rights (Davis 1999:55). The National Organization for Women (NOW) represented the clearest manifestation of mainstream feminist political organizing at this time. Founded in 1966, it was the movement's first mass-membership organization, which focused primarily on sex discrimination in the workplace. NOW held the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission responsible for enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which had been passed by Congress (Friedan 1985:80). The organization employed a hierarchical organizing structure with elected officials and dues-paying members. This style of organizing is often referred to as liberal or mainstream feminism, in opposition to the next phase of the movement, which was called womens liberation (Davis 1999:69). The movement emerged around 1967 and was created by younger who had become politically radicalized through experiences in the organizing within the early and civil rights movements (Collins 2010:178). Women's liberationists fell into roughly two categories: one blamed capitalism for oppression, and the other patriarchy. The voices of this latter group soon began to dominate groups that were forming in major urban centers across the United States, and these groups were often in conflict with mainstream, liberal feminists about tactics, strategy, and goals (Echols 1989:13). This was nowhere more apparent than in the conflict that arose over the role of lesbians in the movement. Mainstream feminists before 1970 were reluctant to acknowledge or support lesbian identity as part of their political interests and practices, based on sensitivity to the accusation that all feminists were gay (Collins 2010:172). Early NOW leader Betty Friedan called lesbians the lavender menace, according to the descriptions of Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love in their 1972 book Sappho Was a Right-on Woman, who caused rifts in the New York NOW chapter. …