“The Riot Grrrl movement of the mid-1990s soon satisfied young women’s desire for an “angrier” sound, but O’Brien noted it came at a cost of setting aside the very recent history of feminist music. “The 1990s hardcore girl groups took their success for granted … a sense of feminism refracted through a younger generation put off by their mothers’ acoustic separatist protest. By the early 1990s the vintage/separatist “womyn’s music” scene was mocked by both mainstream and lesbian entertainment publications as being out of date, or oppressively politically correct.
It may come as no surprise to find mainstream, male-dominated magazines mocking Holly Near and festival culture as fogey-dyke antecedents to the real story of “girl” rockers Jewel, Alanis Morrisette, Tori Amos et al. Radical lesbian style had rapidly become square due to its association with the 1970s, the parent generation for younger rock critics and fans. That association with parents, traditionally figures to rebel against in antiauthoritarian rock and roll, helps explain why the music industry press ignored the first wave of women’s music: it was not a youth-driven movement. The lesbian music scene made possible a new and very unexpected brand of adult liberation, putting mother-aged women in the spotlight as the daring transgressors who fled unhappy marriages for lesbian land. Its impact had been to peel back the layers of lesbian nation, revealing women of every age who had been forced to live in the closet their entire lives. Women who had married men and raised children while denying their own lesbian orientation (or terrified of acting on it), and who eventually felt able to come out in their mid-thirties, formed a substantial part of the women’s music audience. They were often entertained by lesbian artists with similar stories: Alix Dobkin had been married, was raising a daughter, and recorded her first album at age thirty-three; Holly Near did not come out until she was over thirty; and folksinger Ronnie Gilbert of the once-blacklisted Weavers made a spectacular comeback as a lesbian festival artist in her seventies. Plenty of very young women, too, built the house we call women’s music: Margie Adam and Jamie Anderson were both writing lesbian love songs to their girlfriends at age fifteen; Teresa Trull was nineteen when she started working with Olivia Records; and Lisa Vogel was nineteen when she founded the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. “Nonetheless, it was easy for critics to see the earlier stage of women’s music as limited to a peculiar band of grown-ups. Moms coming out did not seem sexy except to other moms; and this sort of misogyny and ageism is partly why Riot Grrrl became inscribed as the “new” movement.
Both Curve and Girlfriends, glossy lesbian ’zines targeting lesbians under thirty-five, publicized women’s music artists and festivals throughout the 1990s; yet at the same time their writers belittled the founding artists of women’s music. For the release of Alix Dobkin’s remastered Living with Lavender Jane compilation,” Girlfriends music reviewer Susannah Anderson-Minshall called the recording “a dusty relic of innocent times.” Curve’s September 1998 feature “Where Are They Now?” which informed and updated readers about women’s music pioneers, quoted a thirty-two-year-old lesbian who said, “I started playing guitar at age 15 and if they had Lilith Fair then, I would have been totally inspired.” This thirty-two-year-old would have been fifteen in 1981; during that year, long before Lilith Fair, there were already a dozen women’s music festivals around the country and around the calendar, with thousands in attendance at Michigan, National, Sisterfire, NEWMR, and the West Coast Music Festival, where a young Melissa played. Curve let its readers draw the conclusion that Lilith Fair set the standard for inspiration, and that it stood alone with neither predecessors nor concurrent and contrasting fests.
Bonnie Morris, The Disappearing L
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