Lawrence, Kate, and Lilith
"Now we [women] are a movement, because we have music!"
originally published in FOLKWORKS, March-April 2005
The previous issue of FOLKWORKS featured an essay on the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the now-famous song that it inspired. On the cover of the paper were photos of four contemporary women artists, illustrating an article on singer-songwriters. Between these two stories, along a 90-year trail of feminism, lies a little-known but significant way station in time and space: March 8, 1973, Seattle.
I know, because I was there.
You are probably aware of March as Women’s History Month. It's less likely that you've heard March 8 referred to as International Women’s Day. The notion of celebrating women, especially in their roles as workers and activists, began in 1905 and was solidified in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. For the next decades, however, the holiday was observed only in countries affiliated with the USSR. In the 1960s, feminists in western countries
reclaimed this ready-made celebration.
Seattle in the early 1970s,
where I happened to be going to college, was a city with several
vigorous feminist organizations. So it was that on a rainy March night
in 1973 I joined other women poets and songwriters onstage at a
community center, before an enthusiastic crowd.
Recall that in the tumultuous 60s-70s, Joan Baez was the best-known
female folksinger, but not yet a songwriter. She offered her exquisite
voice to traditional ballads and political songs written by others,
generally men.
Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell completed the trio of J-named
songbirds on the folk-becoming-folk-rock scene, and Carole King was the
next to emerge as a solo musician in the pop world. Mitchell may have
written brilliant lyrics and unusual music, but she has rightly
complained that the Woodstock-era media were far less interested in her
artistic voice than in which male star(s) she slept with.
The entire notion of women having a public voice had driven the
First Wave of feminism in the 1849s, and remained a radical one. I’d
been inspired to write songs at age eleven when I first heard Bob
Dylan, but I didn’t truly believe I could do it, and be heard, until
other women broke the ground and encouraged me.
 Back to Seattle, 1973: Kate Millett, an important early feminist
theorist, had been invited to my university for International Women’s
Day. After her campus appearances, she was a guest at the “cultural
night” arranged by the local women’s center, where perhaps a dozen of
us read or sang original work. Many had never shared their writing in
public before.
The movement was young enough that no one seemed to care WHAT we
wrote. There were words of anger, humor, political analysis, and
romantic delicacy. I honestly don’t remember what I sang. Everything
was welcomed and applauded, so long as it was our own.
Kate, a veteran
of song-rich civil rights and anti-war struggles, was visibly
astonished and moved by what she heard. I heard her say several times,
“Now we ARE a movement, because we have music!”
As soon as she returned to her home near UC Davis, Millett organized a
festival of women’s music, which took place there in May 1973. I was
invited to participate, and heard groundbreaking artists such as Naomi
Littlebear and Margie Adam. Although less well-known than the National
Women’s Music Festival (NWMF), which was inaugurated in Illinois the
following month, this Sacramento festival was probably the first event
of its kind.
Holly Near’s first album appeared that summer too, and Olivia Records was soon established as the first music company run entirely by women. In the next few years, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival sprouted as a wilder, woodsy-pagan sister to the university-based NWMF, and newsletters by and for women musicians began to circulate in Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere.
 Meanwhile, in the mainstream music industry, Bonnie Raitt’s recording
contract still stipulated that she was a singer only; guitar playing
was for guys. The Deadly Nightshade, a female country-rock trio for
whom I opened a few shows, told of contract negotiations with a major
label where they were warned not to get pregnant because “the label
won’t pay for your abortions on the road.” But the political movement continued, and over the next 20 years, women musicians gradually won support and acceptance in genres from hard rock to symphonic conducting and instrumental jazz. In 1992, at the Folk Alliance gathering in Tucson AZ, the first women’s caucus in that organization tackled professional concerns that ranged from which microphones best suited women’s voices to child-care problems on tour. I sat on the floor in the middle of that group and knew we'd come a long way.
Sarah McLaughlin’s famed “Lilith Faire” traveling festivals may have seemed fresh-sprung from nothing, just as women’s rights to vote and to use birth control are taken for granted by the daughters known as generation D. I’m not angry at younger womens' ignorance, as are some of my peers. The freedom and ease experienced by this generation of artists, even those oblivious of their foremothers, are what we’ve all been fighting for.
I keep a glossy page tacked to my office wall: a beautiful woman embracing the neck of a pearl-inlayed guitar neck, her fingers ornamented by dramatic rings. It’s an ad for Cartier jewelry. Nearly a century after the young textile laborers first sang “Bread and Roses,” the image of a woman musician has traveled from ridicule to high chic! International Women’s Day is an annual chance to celebrate how far we’ve come.
© Joanna Cazden 2005, revised 2008.
Update: to keep up with feminist-forward music, or find musicians from the 'movement' era: check out HotWire. http://hotwirejournal.com/home.html
| 
