The next few years will long be remembered for the women’s movement and a new musical era of anger, strength and empowerment in iconic songs like Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” (1972) and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” (1979). The author recalls that, when she played the song to her teenage daughters, they expressed shock and disbelief that it could ever have been widely accepted as “normal”.īut if the decade still rewarded doormat tunes like “I Will Follow Him” and “Stand By Your Man”, the book argues that Leslie Gore’s hit “You Don’t Own Me” marked a watershed. “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor,
As late as 1966, Sandy Posey could reach #12 on the national charts with her hit Born A Woman, singing: But they were largely crushed by postwar radio and TV promotion of compliant-women hits by the likes of Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. And the growing female labor force participation through the Great Depression and World War II raised hopes that women’s strength and independence would win wider favor. Blues queens like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang with less acceptance and more anger at husbands’ betrayals. So men, and the patriarchal culture, deemed female compliance essential to marriage. Then and long after, wives had no legal rights and husbands could beat them without any legal consequences. Though women had just won voting rights, the lyrics include:
Just one of numerous examples is the classic My Man, a 1922 hit for Fannie Brice, much recorded since. It's astonishing to learn how consistently over the first two-thirds of the last century, women were cast as compliant, codependent doormats in most popular music. (Full disclosure: I’ve gotten to know her personally over the last year). The author blends historical and lyrical analysis with her own painful and humorous personal memories of seeking solace and guidance in pop music while growing up in small-town Wisconsin. I thought it a highly readable, enlightening and enjoyable mix of social science research and interviews with diverse women reminiscing about the impacts on their lives of top 40 hits by women singers. In Respect: Women and Popular Music, Dorothy Marcic, a much-published Columbia professor and playwright, explores the dramatic changes in the images of women and their relationships in popular music throughout the 20th century.
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