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The women's music movement of the early 1970s was created by and for women who came to political consciousness as a result of the women's liberation movement. The music culture that emerged, originally called "lesbian music," gained the less controversial descriptor "women's music" as institutions such as record labels, distribution networks, and production companies evolved to meet audience demand (Lont 1992:242). What differentiated "women's music" from other music made by women of the period was its lesbian focus (in both lyrics and performance contexts). Artists such as Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Joan Baez had mainstream success with music that is almost identical sonically with women's music (folk-based, singer-songwriter, solo performance), and which explored topics of interest to women who were benefiting from a world irrevocably altered by the feminist movement, a world that included having sex outside of marriage, earning your own money, ambivalence about family life, and living alone.1 Outside of the women's music movement, music produced during this period rarely make explicit links with emerging feminist consciousness, but those few songs that did have become anthemic: "Respect," Aretha Franklin's 1967 cover of a song by Otis Redding, "I am Woman," Helen Reddy's 1972 hit, and, to a lesser degree, Honey Cone's 1971 song "Want Ads." Women's music, on the other hand, was created for a lesbian audience to describe lesbian experiences and desires: it was "music by women, for women, about women, and financially controlled by women" (Lont 1992:242). Describing themselves as lesbian-feminists and/or as women-identified-women, the key organizers of the women's music movement used music as their tool to raise consciousness through new venues for women to create, experience, and consume women's culture.2
Before I describe the details of the women's music movement, it is useful to contextualize the political and cultural environment of feminist activity in the United States prior to the movement. Feminist organizing in the early-to-mid 1960s focused primarily on including women in the national debates and legislation about civil rights (Davis 1999:55). The National Organization for Women (NOW) represented the clearest manifestation of mainstream feminist political organizing at this time. Founded in 1966, it was the movement's first mass-membership organization, which focused primarily on sex discrimination in the workplace. NOW held the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission responsible...