Just as a kind of baby boomer nostalgia for the days that were. What weve been trying to deal with is this sense of pervasive disappointment, that the revolution somehow ended in the early 1970s. The popular music became a disappointment, aesthetically, politically. Thats the cliche. We saw plenty of evidence for it. What weve been trying to do is to say ok. Maybe if we shift perspective, maybe if we dont simply buy the assumptions that went into the age of countercultural music, if we do that, we may well see music engaged in a different way. And the way i suggested, the way weve started out is by saying isnt it the case that popular music in the u. S. In the 1970s was doing what popular music typically had done well before the 1960s . Which is to mediate relationships between men and women, to mediate notions of gender, to rethink sexuality. And thats where we started last time, with ideas about masculinity. And the way in which theres a radical transformation of ideas about masculinity tied up with the emergence of the Gay Liberation movement, bound up in music such as glam rock, david bowie, lou reed, bound up in disco. As we said, in a sense, that music was inherently political. Something that the really vicious antidisco campaign drove home. So it seems to me weve started building the idea that post60s, American Music still is politicized, still is engaged but in a different way, a way that rejected, as we saw with david bowie or we saw with mott the hoople, that rejected countercultural rock. Thats where i want to go today in talking, as i promised, about issues of women in popular music in the 1970s. Weve already dealt with this before in thinking about the very limited place accorded to women in popular music as a business, as performers really with the idea that women couldnt place instruments, that they could only sing. With the idea that women couldnt play instruments, that they could only sing. Weve seen thats deeply embedded in western culture, western ideas. And yet this is a period in the 1970s of real change in thinking about women. So theres an opportunity for us to say just as there was this political agitation over gay rights and over the nature of masculinity, what can we do with the emergence of feminism, of new feminisms, liberal, radical and what musical implications did they have . So i want to do five things. As i said, you should get your bets down about me getting through this. But i will. I have not lost yet. First of all, i want to think a little bit about the context. Do you know this . Its familiar but lets remind ourselves of the way in which american societys relationship to women, notions of women changed so radically with the emergence of what was then called womens liberation. We want to use that as a backdrop for looking specifically at music, four different settings here, two, three, four, five. First of all, with the thing thats the most stunning and yet were ready for this, the idea that, in fact, countercultural rock, acid rock, whatever you want to call it, was much less radical in terms of gender than we would have thought. That in fact, ar gluably it was arguably it was quite conservative. It was in the terms of this famous essay ive given you to start our assignment that it was cock rock, that it was completely defined by the needs of masculinity and almost completely obliterated the place of women. I want to look at the debates that emerged from that, the radical shift of perspective on rock. It didnt really change either, as youll see, the business hardly altered. And that sets the other three music genres we want to talk about in a different perspective. Disco, again, subject of much contempt, nonetheless had a larger space, arguably, for women and the articulation of their concerns. Even though youll see once again theres a tendency to try to make that disappear, to explain it away. And then stunning to me, but weve built on this, too, Country Music which is supposed to be so conservative, so anchored in older notions of family, as weve seen in talking about Country Music in the 1950s or Merle Haggards music in the 1960s. Its country that has this surprising space to articulate a kind of conservative feminism or country feminism. And its summed up in that piece that gives this lecture. Its titled your squaw is on the warpath, by loretta lynn, that i want to work through with you. Though im not going to sing it. Again, no costumes, no singing. Thats my guarantee to you so were never fully embarrassed. And then last i want to think about where a more open kind of feminist politics emerges in the 70s. It does to a degree in disco as well see, but the real place is in mainstream popular music which you could argue is the least adventurous kind of music in the 1970s. In musical terms, its there that with helen reddys hit i am woman that you have a stunning rind of breakthrough whose history is interesting and completes this picture of what is a very complicated response within music to the rise of the Womens Movement. And at the end im going to want to draw that together. But thats where i want to go here. And as i say, well start with what you know already but lets get a common point together from which to work here which is the emergence of new ideas, new activism among women that would lead almost inevitably as i want to suggest to you to a new critique of popular music generally in rock music in a new critique of popular music generally, and rock music in particular. All of womens liberation is not a preparation for journalism about rock music, but thats going to be the key linkage. You know this. And history of modern feminism is very complicated. You see that in those sources that i gave you, and i wont take time to work through them. But in very simple terms, were talking about a couple of basic sets of ideas here. And we can flesh them out as we go along. You know this. The first wave that emerges in the late 1950s, early 1960s, the socalled liberal feminism. Liberal in the sense that its a middleclass movement focused on demands for equality both in the workplace, equal pay, for example, for women. Equality in the workplace and also the idea that women should have full representation politically, should have power politically, not just the vote. Liberal feminism, too, because these are women who believe that activist liberalism of the kind that john f. Kennedy and even more so president Lyndon Johnson embodied, that activist liberalism Government Intervention could create equality just as it was doing in response to the black freedom struggle. The most famous founding figure you know is betty fordan, author of the feminine mystique, arguing how ideas of womens equality get embedded in american society. Shes one of the key founders of the National Organization for women. Now theres a sense of the urgency, now in 1966 that becomes the most important vehicle for liberal ideas. And one of the ultimate expressions of liberal feminism and one, of course, that would never be granted, an equal rights amendment to the constitution, the e. R. A. Changing government to promote equality. Almost as soon as that emerges and this is what makes it complicated you have slightly later in the 1960s what people very quickly called radical feminism. Middle class mostly to be sure, but somewhat younger women with roots in the black freedom struggle, the push for civil rights and also campus activism, a good number of campus radicals. Radical feminists shared many goals with liberal feminists. Whats interesting are some of the emphases. An emphasis on both public life and private life. The slogan the personal is the political sums that up. The idea that what happens in the intimate spaces of our lives, that thats political, too. As you can see from this course, that idea is one of the things that animates the idea that music matters. That music is political precisely because so often it is about intimate relationships that often werent traditionally considered political. Some of you in my 60s class have heard me talk about this in another setting. But radical feminism is one of the most important intellectual developments in the modern world. Not simply for the arguments about power relationships between men and women, but by redefining whats important. Classes like this exist not just because aging allegedly hip baby boomers like me want to relive our youths. That does seem very important to me. But also because of the intellectual terrain opened up by radical feminism. Part of this focus on the personal includes issues about male violence, especially in the home, about womens control of their own bodies, concerns about rape, forms of abuse, about abortion, which is, of course, a liberal concern, too. Its radical feminists who also played more, argued more about the nature of feminine identities themselves and wanted a broader range asserted along the lines of the Gay Liberation movement that weve talked about, including a celebration of lesbianism thats relatively absent in liberal feminism. Radical feminism is especially important for us to for its focus on culture. Much many radical feminists zeroed in particularly on the importance of words and culture categories, ideas like beauty. The way people, mostly men, could use words to put people in their place. Words like whore, for example. Categories like beauty. This is, of course, a famous moment. Youve seen the pictures. This is the protest against the miss america beauty pageant in Atlantic City, 1968 famous poster that parodies what you see in a butcher store where a piece of beef is sliced up so you know what the cuts are. Heres a woman presented that way. Welcome to the miss america cattle show, cattle auction. So the idea that women are sold in part through the world of beauty and, of course, preabs. That concern on culture immediately gets us because it makes it very likely that in turn, radical feminists would focus on music. That they could see music as one more cultural area, one more set of categories that could be used either to denigrate or to celebrate women. Now, they dont monopolize everything. These are truly radical ideas that are disturbing to people on a whole bunch of levels. So theres a substantial backlash. You know this already by the late 1960s into the early 1970s. Theres an active antifeminism, also middle class but culturally different. Heres a big bestseller from 1973, marabel morgans the total woman. Its only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him that she becomes really beautiful to him. She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen. It produces a strong womanled movement against the equal rights amendment to the constitution led almost paradoxically by an important conservative thinker, stop the r. A. You get the point. This is a very rocky terrain in which to think about music and the place of women in music. Even arguably more than in response to the emergence of the gay rights movement. The First Response is here. Its from those radical feminists who thinking over culture, thinking over words, thinking over the power of words to put people in their place. You know, in the same way, say, that the n word was a way of putting africanamericans in their place. Its feminists who first come to terms with music. And what they criticize is not so much Country Music, which you might have expected. Not even, say, disco, which you might have expected. It is mainstream rock n roll. Countercultural rock n roll. The biggest icons of 60s rock n roll. I want to take some time to work through these sources that i gave to you. Theres three of them. Weve got three radical feminist critiques. Or almost radical, of countercultural rock as a form of male privilege. Thats obvious, and we want to work beyond it. In particular, i want to note a couple of points here. One, in line with what weve seen this sense of disappointment in the 70s, youve got these women saying weve misunderstood the 60s. We need to reinterpret the 60s and not see it as some revolutionary liberating moment but instead as a continuation of the kinds of power relations of male domination that weve had in the past. And that ties, in turn, to their subverting the whole idea that the 60s represented some kind of revolution. Instead, it becomes a weigh station toward the revolution that still needs to happen. So theres a very powerful set of ideas here and some real differences among them. But the question of how much impact is something were going to need to gauge. The first piece is this one from susan hiwat. It appears in 1970 in rat magazine. A feministt publication a few can see here. You see womens liberation with the rat highlighted. It was anthologyized long after. She took the name susan hiwatt, which is a musical joke. It was a British Company that produced amplifiers. The who used them, among others. So this is someone whos hiding her identity but playing with already the rock n roll world but more than playing it cock rock even now is a stunning title. Even now, is a stunning title. For her, she describes it, the personal is the political. Each one of these three pieces you see this personal journey that leads to a new set of ideas and a new set of attitudes. For susan hiwatt, its this idea when shes growing up in school, in school, in college, rock n roll was a generational thing for her. She saw it in those terms. Not in gendered terms, not in social class terms, but as part of dealing with the gulf between young and older. It was the only thing we had of our own where the values werent set up by the famous wise professors. It was the way not to have to get old and deadened in white america. So thats a common sentiment. Weve heard that a bunch of times. But this is where she goes. It took a whole it took me a whole lot of going to the fillmore, the auditorium weve talked about whose demise is part of this whole nostalgia for the disappearing 60s, and listening to records and reading Rolling Stone before it even registered that what i was seeing and hearing was not all these different groups but all these different groups of men. And once i noticed that it was hard not to be constantly noticing all the names on the albums, all the people doing sound and lights, all the voices on the radio, even the deejays between the songs, they were all men. Powerful moment. And to her in turn that leads to the obvious conclusion. That rock represents the massive exclusion of women. It keeps them out. Because in the female 51 of Woodstock Nation that i belong to, there isnt any place to be creative in any way. Its a pretty exclusive world. She says, there are no women electric guitarists, there are no women drummers, there are no Women Leaders of big rock bands, nothing. There are women singers, but as she says, they have to be twice as good just to be acceptable. Just to play this traditional role that women have fulfilled in music. Its strongly argued. But it rests in reality. Its the reality that we started to talk about in discussing girl groups back in the 60s. As she says, to become the top of the heap in black music, Aretha Franklin soul sister number one, she says better by far than anybody else, and there are not that many others of them. In rock, janis joplin. And of course, what precipitates this piece is the death of janis joplin, which weve mentioned before. And she sees joplins demise as this sad acknowledgement of what music does to you. She says, joplin for audiences was an incredible sex object, a cunt with an out of sight voice easy to fuck and easy to dismiss when shes dead. Thats what drives underneath this anger in the reality of the narrow space that women can occupy. As she says what you can do to be a woman is strum an acoustic guitar. Nothing powerful, no highwatt amplifier, strum an acoustic guitar, be like zoni mitchell, judy colins. But you cant electrafy, you you cant electrify, you cant get out of line, you cant get out of the line the way janis joplin did. Again, borne out. She says that people who play guitars, the people who get to use the power of electricity through highwatt amps, are men. Male guitar gods like jimmyi also dead by jimmy page, do we really have to interpret this here . I didnt think so. Again, as i said before, arguably the best female electric guitar player in the 70s is in the 60s is the bass player carol kay, whos a studio musician. Nobody knows she even exists. Shes on all of these hit records, no one knows who she is, no one even knows that a woman is playing bass on those records. Thats susan hiwatts point. Deejays, i gave you the opening for this, deejays as weve seen have been a basic phenomenon mediating rock music from the 60s forward. And theyre overwhelmingly men. The first almost sole famous woman deejay emerges just in this period in new york city on wnew fm, allison steele, known as the nightbird. Theres her famous opening. The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the night bird spreads her wings and soars above the earth into another level of comprehension where we exist only to feel. Come fly with me. Shes on in the middle of the night. Daytime, when lots of people listen, its all men. Thats susan hiwatts point about the world of rock. Women are invisible. But its more than that. She argues rock is fundamentally nasty, its misogynist. Heres truly where the edge comes in again. You feel when it she talks about what happens to the janis joplin, the flip side of it is when she describes the underlying attitudes of men. Men who sing songs, men who write the lyrics. Because when you get to listening to male rock lyrics, the message to women is devastating. We are cunts, sometimes ridiculous, 20th century fox, sometimes mysterious, ruby tuesday, sometimes bitchy, get a job, sometimes just plain cunts not common language at the time. Radical language opened up paradoxically by the Counter Culture. Heres susan hiwatt occupying this new space of language and blowing up words and the way theyre used to put people down. All that Sexual Energy that seems to be in the essence of of rock is really energy that climaxes in fucking over women, a million Different Levels of womanhating. After all the groovy celebration of rock music, the 60s, the spirit of woodstock, this represents a really stunning shift in perspective. Really radical. She also finally makes a point. She says, women are excluded but theyre necessary. They still do have a role to play in music. Women are required at rock events to pay homage to the rock world. A world made up of thousands of men. Homage paid by offering sexual accessibil