Ill even omit my customary lame professor humor about the ncaa tournament, for example, thats how serious this is. Lets think for a minute though about where were situated, what were working on here. In this last third of the course that we started last week, were dealing with the post revolutionary era. Weve built this idea that something radical and transformative happens to music nick the 1960s. You worked hard over the course of several weeks to establish those ideas. And we cant leave without justice a kind of baby boomer nostalgia for the days that were. What weve been trying to deal with is the sense of disappointment that the revolution somehow end nd the early 1970s, that popular music became a disappointment as thetically, politically. Thats the cliche. We saw plenty of evidence for it. What weve tried to do is say o kay, maybe if we shift perspective, if we dont simply buy the asumgtss thpgss that we the age of countercultural music i we do that, we may see music engaged in a different kay. The way we started out, isnt it the case that popular music nick 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. Thats where we started last time. With ideas about masculinity and the way in which theres a radical transformation about ideas of masculinity tied up with the emergence of the Gay Liberation movement, bound up in music such as glam rock, bound up in disco. As we said, in a sense, that music was inherently political. Something the really vicious anti disco campaign really drove home. So it seems weve started building the idea that post 60s, American Music still is politicized, still is engaged, but in way, a way that rejected, as we saw with david bowie, that rejected counter cultural rock. Thats where i want to go today in talking, as i promised about issues of women in popular music in the 1970s. We dealt with this before and thinking about the limited place accorded to women in popular music as a business, its deeply embedded in western culture and ideas. Yet, this is a period in the 1970s of real change and thinking about women. Theres an opportunity for us to say just as there was this political agitation over gay rights, what can we do with the emergence of feminism and what musical implications did they have . So i want to do five things. You should get your bets down about me getting through this. 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 societies relationship to women, notions of women changed radically with the emergence of what was called womens liberation. I 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 most stunning and yet were ready for this, the idea that in fact counter cultural roc rock, acid rock, it was quite conservative in the terms of this famous essay i gave you, it was defined by the needs of masculinity and almost completely o blib rated the place of womens. The business hardly altered. And that sets the other thing music januagenres in a differen perspective. 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 that weve seen in talking about Country Music in the 1950s or the 1960s, its country that has this space to articulate a country feminism and its summed up in that piece that gives this lecture its title, your squaw is on the warpath. No costume and singing. Thats my quarantine to you. At 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. But the real place is in mainstream popular music. In musical terms, its there that with helen reddys hit i am woman that you have a breakthrough. History is interesting and completes this picture of what is a very complicated response within music to the rise of the Womens Movement. At the end, im going to want to draw in a together. Thats where i want to go here. As i say, im going to start with what you know already. Lets get a common point together from which to works here which is the emergence of new ideas and new activism among women that would lead to 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 gave you and i will take time to work through them. In very simple terms, were talking about a couple of basic sets of ideas here and we can flush them out as we go along. You know this, the first wave that emerges in the late 1950s, early 1960s is liberal feminism, liberal in the sense that its a middle class movement, focused on demands for equality, both in the workplace, equal pay, for example, for women, equality in the workplace and the idea that women should have full representation politically, not just the vote. Liberal feminism too because these are women who believe that activists liberalism of the kind that john f. Kennedy and president Lyndon Johnson embodied, Government Intervention could repecreate equality. Most famous founding figure is author of the feminist mystique. Arguing where how ideas about womens inequality get embedded in american society. Shes one of the key founders of the National Organization for women. Theres a suense of the urgency that becomes the most important vehicle for liberal ideas and one of the ultimate expressions of liberal feminine nichl and one that would be granted, an equal rights amendment to the constitution. The e. R. A. Change in government to promote equality. Almost as soon as that emerges, this 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 campus activism. Radical feminists shared many goals with liberal feminists. Whats interesting are some of the emphasis, 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 often werent traditionally considered political. Some of you in my 60s class have heard me talk about this in another setting, 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 hit baby boomers like me want to relive our youths, though, 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, about abortion, which is 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 of them including a celebration of lesbianism that is relatively absent in liberal feminism. Radical feminism is especially important for us to for its focus on culture. Many radical feminists zeroed in particularly on the importance of words, cultural categories, ideas like beauty. Words like whore, for example, categories like beauty. This is 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 butchers store where a piece of beef is sliced up so you know what the cuts are. Here is a woman presented that way. Welcome to the miss america cattle auction. 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 to denigrate or celebrate women. They dont monopolyize everything. Theres substantial backlash. Theres an active antifeminism. Here is a big best seller from 1973, the total woman. Its only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband that she becomes beautiful to him, his queen. Antifeminism produces a strong womanled movement against the equal rights amendment to the constitution led almost paradoxically by a woman, an important conservative thinker. You get the point. This is a very rocky terrain in which to think about music and the place of of women and music. Even arguably more than in response to the emergence of the gay rights movement. The First Response is here. Its from the radical feminists who thinking over cultural, thinking over words, thinking over the power of words to put people in their place 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 disco, which you might have expected, it is mainstream rock n roll, the biggest icons of 60 rock n roll. I want to take some time to work through the sources that i gave to you. There are three of them. We have three radical feminist critiques of counter cultural 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, youve got these women saying weve misunderstood the 60s, we need to reinterpret the 60s about the kinds of power relations 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 way station towards the revolution that still needs to happen. So theres a 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. It appears in 1970 in rat magazine. Womens liberation with the rat highlighted. Working away against main treem ideas. This was published when it was an that will jazzed. The who used the amplifiers among others. This is someone who is hiding her identify but playing with the rock n roll world but more than playing it, cock rock 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, its this idea when shes growing up in school, in school and college, rock n roll was a generational thing for her. She saw it in those terms, not in gendered terms, not in social 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. It took me a lot of going to the fill mother, the auditorium we talked about and reading Rolling Stone before i registered that what i was seeing and hearing was not all of these different groups, but all of these different groups of men. Once i noticed that, it was hard not to be noticing all of the names on the albums, all the voices on the radio, even the g deejays between the songs. They were all men. Powerful moment. And to her, that leads to the obvious conclusion, that rock representatives the massive exclusion of women, it keeps them out. In the female 51 of Woodstock Nation that i belong there, there isnt any place to be creative in any way. She says there are no women electric guitarists, no wilmer drummers, leaders of rock bands, nothing. There are women singers, but 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 the reality, the reality 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 is better by far than anybody else. And rock, Janice Joplin, of course what precipitates this piece is the death of Janice Joplin which we mentioned before. She says joplins demise as this sad acknowledgement of what music does to you. She says joplin for audiences was an credible sex object. Thats what drives underneath is this anger at the reality of the narrow space that women can occupy. What you can do to be a woman is strum an acoustic guitar, be like joni mitchell, folk musician over here, but you cant electrify, you cant get out of line the way that Janice Joplin did. Again, born out. She says, the people who play guitars, the people who get to use the power of electricity through those highwatt amps are men, jimmy hendricks, jimmy page. Do we have to interpret this here . As i said to you before, the best female electric guitar player in the 70s is the bass player carol k. Shes a studio musician. No one knows that a woman is playing bass on those records. Thats susans point. Deejays, i gave you the opening for that. Deejays have been a basic phenomenon and theyre overwhelmingly men. The first woman dejay deejay allison steele. The night bird. 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 susans point about the world of rock. Women are invisible. But its more than that. She argues, rock is fundamentally nasty. Its misogynist. Who is truly where the edge comes in again. You feel it when she talks about what happens to Janice Joplin. She describes the attitudes of men, the men who sing songs, men who write the lyrics. When you listen to rock lyrics, the message is ridiculous, were cunts, sometimes bitchy, and sometimes just plain cunts. Radical language. Here is susan occupying this new space of language and blowing up words and the way theyre used to put people down. All of that Sexual Energy that seems to be in the essence of rock is energy that climaxes in fucking over women. After all of the groovy, hip celebration of rock music at the end of the 60s, the spirit of woodstock, even the kind of despair, this represents a stunning shift in perspective, really radical. She also finally makes a point. 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. Woman are there to be worshipers of men and to provide them with what they need. And so drawing it all together, susan ends with the really striking point, that revolutionary is the Counter Culture seems to be, as much as it represented blowing up old values, an attack on capitalism, property should be communal, the exception is women. And so women remain the last legit form of property that the brothers can share in a communal world. Cant have. For the musicians themselves, theres their own special property, groupies which enrages her. You get the point. Theres a powerful set of arguments. Shes not alone. Theres a whole proliferation of this line of thinking which is w why ive given you examples. This one is from marion mead. She wrote a book called bitching that is a summary of womens conversations about men. Its the New York Times folks. No fourletter words. Much more buttoned down. But she drives home the same analysis with a couple of really interesting points. One of them, again, with this project of rethinking the 60s, changing our understanding, her jumping off point is woodstock. It finally dawned on me not at the concert, it dawned on me when i saw the film a couple years later. It finally dawned on me that this is a fantasy land that welcomed only men. How about the women . Its interesting to see how women are portrayed at woodstock. Theres the admiration thats michael lang on his motorcycle. Look at him soaking it in there. Nudity, its interesting, most of it is shared nudity. Meads point seems kind of selective to me. Whats not selective, the thing you see over and over is women and babies. You look everywhere for signs of men taking care of children and you dont see it. Womens basic role is to have sex, conceive and then maybe some nudity there, but taking care of children. Meads point is really well taken. You can see why it would sink in. The other thing she does is really build on this idea that the 60s revolution wasnt real. Just like woodstock is a fantasy land. She says, we were told that the 60s was about the reconfigure ration of masculinity. Dont be fueled by uni sex clothes. Nothing really changed. All of those things are hip camouflage for the same old sexism, same power relations that existed before. Style changed, culture may have changed, but underneath power didnt. In fact, she says, the 60s are worse than the 50s. Here you see how this critique blows up the conventional rock history. Instead being history of progress from the 50s to the 60s, instead, as she says, look, earlier rock didnt at least treat women in such a nasty away, and in such a false way. Women were passive sexual partners to be sure, but not that passive. E m thats not the 50s, thats the 60s. And the people who are most guilty of it are the beatles, bob dylan, the Rolling Stones. All of it blown up including this idea that rock is a history of progress. The last one is ellen willis. Work with me, these ideas are those of you who had to do this assignment, analyzing these sources, you know what im talking about the. These are a little more complicated. Its worth being careful and laying the foundation. 1941, pioneers rock critic. Here is a woman at the center of rock culture. She was the rock critic of new yorker magazine for a number of years. She was a member of two founding radical feminist groups, the new york radical women who helped organize the protest against miss america and the red stockings. Willis was a creative, an original thinking acros