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Making Our Own Kind of Music: The History and Legacy of the Women’s Music Movement

1985 Los Angeles Women's Community Chorus Performance

The Los Angeles Women’s Community Chorus was founded by Sue Fink in 1976 to enact consciousness raising and create a feminist community through music. They sang choral music by women, for women.One of their many performances is pictured in this photograph by Angela Brinskele from 1985. The chorus officially existed until 1990, but former members celebrated its legacy at a 20th anniversary event in 1997.

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1. Sheet music to "A Woman."
2. 1985 Los Angeles Women's Community Chorus Performance The Los Angeles Women’s Community Chorus was founded by Sue Fink in 1976 to enact consciousness raising and create a feminist community through music. They sang choral music by women, for women.One of their many performances is pictured in this photograph by Angela Brinskele from 1985. The chorus officially existed until 1990, but former members celebrated its legacy at a 20th anniversary event in 1997.
Contents of this tag:
10. 1985 Los Angeles Women's Community Chorus Performance The Los Angeles Women’s Community Chorus was founded by Sue Fink in 1976 to enact consciousness raising and create a feminist community through music. They sang choral music by women, for women.One of their many performances is pictured in this photograph by Angela Brinskele from 1985. The chorus officially existed until 1990, but former members celebrated its legacy at a 20th anniversary event in 1997.

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Impact
“Women’s music in general didn’t set out to accomplish something. It was the expression of the culture we were creating … It was our sustenance. We didn’t do that for the outside world. We did it for ourselves. It was our creativity. It was sharing with each other. What the world got was to see that women could perform on a level that was high quality, exciting and fun.” - Kristan Aspen¹

Women’s music artists, producers, record labels, and fans built a unique lesbian feminist culture that sustained women economically, emotionally, and spiritually within a discriminatory society for decades. The movement preserved a lesbian feminist movement in decline throughout the 1980s, by making lesbian voices visible and raising funds for rape crisis centers, the women’s health movement, and women’s bookstores.² In 1995, women's music artists like folk and jazz influenced singer songwriter Jamie Anderson still produced lesbian feminist anthems like When They Know Who We Are.

By the 1990s, festival attendance declined as lesbian artists like Melissa Eldridge and the Indigo Girls became mainstream stars, and young lesbians both saw themselves in mainstream pop culture and created their own music through the burgeoning riot grrrl movement, which reflected their “third wave” queer feminist politics.³ Women’s music provided the foundations for this new movement, by making women musicians visible and valuable.⁴ The riot grrrl movement emphasized disrupting the status quo through do-it-yourself music, art, and activism. However, this punk feminist movement also fractured around issues of racism.⁵While young feminists may criticize their foremothers, their interventions continue a long tradition of musical opposition to patriarchy, homophobia, and injustice.

1 Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 233.
2 Ibid. 11. Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp, "Women's Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism: A Reconsideration of Cultural Feminism. Signs 19 (autumn 1993) 32-61.
3 Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 228.
4 Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 232.
5. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22, no. 2–3 (2012): 174-180.