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1. 1 2021-06-16T16:23:38-07:00 Julia M Tanenbaum f184d58ff97337c79794f4b4a236d9dc8034c647 Building a Movement Julia M Tanenbaum 36 image_header 2021-06-29T14:23:47-07:00 Julia M Tanenbaum f184d58ff97337c79794f4b4a236d9dc8034c647

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• 1 2021-06-16T16:23:38-07:00 Building a Movement 20 image_header 2021-06-23T16:47:45-07:00

  “Those kinds of songs ... came out of the inner feeling of if I don’t get this out I’m gonna die”  - Casse Culver ¹

  Most women joined the movement with no prior experience in audio engineering, managing bands, securing venues, or sometimes even playing instruments. Movement participants hoped to employ and uplift women and were determined to do everything themselves without the guidance of men. Their sheer strength and purpose propelled performers, producers, managers, engineers and others to overcome obstacles to successfully make a space for themselves. Although not all performers and fans were lesbian, women’s music became synonymous with lesbian culture.² Alix Dobkin’s Lavender Jane Loves Women achieved national recognition as the first album financed, engineered and performed by women, and proved there was a market for women’s and lesbian music. 

  A year later, Olivia Records’ Meg Christian released I Know You Know (1974), which sold nearly 80,000 copies. Following the success of these albums, festivals, production companies, venues and radio shows focused on women’s and lesbian empowerment emerged all over the country. In 1974 alone, the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective put on the Amazon Music Party, the University of Illinois hosted the openly lesbian first National Women’s Music Festival, Boo Price started the all-woman production company Women in Production in San Francisco, the all-woman venue Las Hermanas Women’s Cultural Center opened in San Diego, and Philadelphia’s WXPN began hosting the first women’s music radio show, Amazon Country.
  
  The mid-1970s saw an explosion of all facets of women’s music culture, propelled by both artists and less visible but equally dedicated staff.  As the popularity and financial success of the music grew, production companies produced more albums and concerts. Holly Near founded Redwood Records in 1972. In 1975 Boden Sandstrom and Casse Culver founded Woman Sound, and Terry Grant founded Goldenrod Distribution. Cris Williamson’s 1975 smash hit, The Changer and the Changed, sold 250,000 copies, “proving that an indie, lesbian album could match and even outpace sales of mainstream male rock” according to historian Bonnie Morris. ³
  
  
  
  
  Sound engineers like Sandy Stone and distributors like Betsy York worked tirelessly to produce these lesbian and feminist anthems with minimal resources and training and to persuade record shops to sell them.⁴ Without managers, engineers, distributors, and other behind the scenes workers lesbian and feminist music of hope, joy, frustration, and love would not have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of women.

   

  Mazer Oral Histories, Betsy York, "Working in Women's Music in the 70s and 80s", 2018/02/01 from June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives on Vimeo.

  Even as they succeeded financially, production collectives and record companies like Olivia rejected patriarchal and hierarchical business practices in favor of transparency and feminist ethics. For example, Olivia Records regularly published their expense and income reports, and production and distribution companies like Woman Sound only hired and trained women. When homophobic politics threatened lesbians, they took feminist direct action. ⁵

  In 1977, singer and ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission Anita Bryant led the “Save Our Children” campaign to roll back already minimal gay rights protections in Florida. The campaign incited Olivia Records’ Linda Tillery to produce an eclectic album entitled Lesbian Concentrate condemning Bryant. Fourteen artists contributed their own empowering lesbian anthems to the album, from Sue Fink’s “Leaping Lesbians” to Gwen Avery’s “Sugar Mama.”
  
  As the women’s music movement grew rapidly throughout the early to mid-1970s, its feminist principles were challenged but rarely compromised. As a result, women across the country began to see themselves in popular songs and as workers in a field traditionally hostile to women and lesbians.
  1. Dee Mosbacher, Radical Harmonies, Documentary, 2002.
  2. Bonnie Morris, “‘Anyone Can Be a Lesbian’ The Women’s Music Audience and Lesbian Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5:4 (2008): 91.
  3.  Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 297. 
  4. Betsy York Collection,” Mazer Lesbian Archives, https://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/collections. 
  5. Statement of Income and Expenses for 1974 Olivia Records, Inc.,” Paid My Dues (1974), https://queermusicheritage.com/olivia7.html. 

• 1 2021-06-16T16:24:04-07:00 Division 17 plain 2021-06-25T21:15:16-07:00 The movement’s vision of sisterhood fractured as participants debated lesbian separatism, transgender inclusion, and the prominence of race and class base discrimination. While lesbian separatists created a healing and empowering environment for many women, women of color and transgender women faced discrimination that ultimately undermined festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and the community they aspired to create. 
  
  The Women’s Music Movement was a child of lesbian separatism, an identity based social and cultural movement that both challenged heterosexism and built and sustained utopian women’s communities.¹ Lesbian separatists believed that women-only spaces empowered, healed, and inspired women by creating a safe environment where they could be their authentic selves. ² Furthermore, separatists argued women’s marginalization in the music industry made separatism a priority. 
   

  “If you can name five women singers, engineers, etc, then we’ll stop being women only” Judy Dlugacz (co-founder of Olivia Records) ³

  
  
  However, as the movement grew, separatism became a highly contested principle.

  Some women did not want to exclude their male children, family members, and friends from women’s music events.⁴  Separatism alienated Black women like Sweet Honey in the Rock member Evelyn Harris, who described the divided state of the movement in a 1986 interview. 

  “I admired the fact that there is a sense of family. But at the same time, as a Black woman I found it difficult when men and boy children were excluded… I found that in woman-only spaces women still need a lot of work on how they deal with each other.”- Evelyn Harris⁵

  Black musicians like Harris and Mary Watkins appeared on stage, but white women held the vast majority of behind the scenes roles. Furthermore, Black artists faced additional difficulties finding venues because concert producers saw their music as less popular and profitable.⁶ The movement’s vision of sisterhood was only partially fulfilled. 
  
  Transgender exclusion became a clear point of contention as separatists protested transgender woman Sandy Stone’s participation in the Olivia collective. In 1976 the separatist collective the Gorgons protested Stone’s position as Olivia Record’s sound engineer, and argued that she was a man or even a FBI agent “infiltrating the women’s movement.”⁷ Stone identified as a woman and was excited to work in a feminist collective, but separatists argued that employing her betrayed the movement’s principles. Olivia ardently defended Stone, publicly asserting that “she is a woman we can relate to with comfort and with trust,” but Stone eventually decided to leave the collective in 1979.⁸ 
  
  
  The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s “womyn-born-womyn only” policy sparked controversy, protests, and boycotts throughout much of the festival’s 30 year run.  Separatists felt that trans women with male sex characteristics made some women feel unsafe at festivals where nudity was standard.⁹ Tensions boiled over when festival officials expelled “post operative transsexual leatherdyke” Nancy Burkholder from the 1991 festival. Burkholder attended the festival the previous year and wrote in retrospect that she was “so enthusiastic and wanting to contribute to the community when I went back in ‘91.”¹⁰ In the following years transgender women like Davina Anne Gabriel attended the festival in protest, and were welcomed by many attendees. In 1994 queer and transgender activists established Camp Trans.¹¹ The last festival occurred in 2015, and Dianne Anderson Minshall speculated that the founders chose to end the event rather than changing the “womyn born womyn” policy.¹² 
  
  Festivals like Michigan were instrumental in uniting lesbians and feminists and set the standards for accessibility by including ASL translators and child care stations, but conflicts over difference undermined their utopian visions. Transgender women hoped to join the women’s music community, but faced crushing rejection that spurred years of protest. The mixed legacy of the movement illustrates how sisterhood can be both powerful and imperfect. 
  
  1. Anne M. Valk, “Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a Lesbian Feminist Collective,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 303–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178744. 307-308. 
  2. Bonnie J. Morris, “‘Anyone Can Be a Lesbian’ The Women’s Music Audience and Lesbian Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (2001): 107. 
  3. Dee Mosbacher, Radical Harmonies, Documentary, 2002.
  4. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019).Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 62. 
  5. HOT WIRE March 1986 cited in Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 63-64
  6. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019).Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 128-129
  7. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 65, Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 300. 
  8. Anderson, 65. 
  9. Bonnie J. Morris, “‘Anyone Can Be a Lesbian’ The Women’s Music Audience and Lesbian Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (2001): 108. 
  10. Nancy Jean Burkholder. “A Kinder, Gentler Festival?” TransSisters : The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, December 1993. http://archive.org/details/transsistersjour00unse_0. 5. 
  11. Davina Anne Gabriel. “Mission to Michigan.” TransSisters : The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, December 1993. http://archive.org/details/transsistersjour00unse_0.  8-12
  12. Anderson-Minshal, Diane (April 24, 2015). "Op-ed: Michfest's Founder Chose to Shut Down Rather Than Change With the Times". The Advocate.