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• 1 2021-06-16T16:23:38-07:00 Building a Movement 53 image_header 2021-07-15T00:52:05-07:00

  “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
  
  
  
  
   Producers and Distributers like Betsy York and Linda Dederman 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 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 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.