Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[Sharon Cheslow <decomposition AT mindspring.com>]

Dina and Mike, you both bring up some really good thoughts.  Having 
been there at the time (although just as an observer in the 
beginning), it's hard now to explain how different things were for 
women.  Even though the '60s had brought on many positive changes, 
there were still many rigid and superficial roles that were expected 
of girls and women.  If you attempted to break out of those roles, 
you were ostracized or teased or called derogatory names.

I can only speak for myself in terms of how these women were 
perceived or what impact they had, but what I noticed right off the 
bat with punk, and then with post-punk, was that most of the girls & 
women involved were subverting stereotypes of females.  Yes, a part 
of that meant androgyny.  But it also meant looking at the signifiers 
of what constituted women in society and women in rock and then 
turning those things on their heads or doing something playful or 
shocking with them.

Even though many weren't commercially successful, they had just as 
much of an influence on the "rock culture at large."  For example, 
Patti Smith didn't have a top 40 hit until Because the Night with 
Bruce Springsteen in 1978, but she'd already had a huge influence by 
then (she'd been performing for five years prior).  Many rock mags 
and newspapers wrote about her - she was critically successful before 
she was commercially successful.  Part of the reason she was covered 
is because she was a rock writer herself, but mostly it's because she 
was so unique and powerful for that time.

In the US, both Patti Smith and Debbie Harry dealt with this in 
different ways.  Patti wore a tie and embraced her male rock and 
poetry idols - she made you think about how we define women by the 
way they dress and act.  It caused an uproar when she appeared on the 
cover of Easter revealing her hairy armpits and led to Gilda Radner's 
Candy Slice character on SNL which made fun of this.  Debbie took the 
girly-girl stereotype to its extreme and even the band name Blondie 
was a reference to the dumb blonde stereotype.  Yes, she was 
subverting the girl singer, and she was also parodying the role of 
the female lead singer with the male backing band.  Females were not 
expected to do anything other than sing in a band.  If they were a 
singer-songwriter, they were allowed to play piano and sing or play 
acoustic guitar and sing.  It was very, very rare for females to play 
electric instruments or drums until punk and post-punk came along.

In the UK, the Slits and Poly Styrene dealt with this by writing 
lyrics examining these stereotypes and societal expectations. 
Siouxsie Sioux, like many other UK punk ladies, bared her breasts in 
revealing clothes as an act of protest.  One of the first widely 
distributed UK punk photos in the US was of the Bromley Contingent 
after the Sex Pistols' Bill Grundy TV incident...Siouxsie Sioux and 
Sue Catwoman were shocking merely by having close cropped hair and 
extreme make-up!   These images were widely distributed in the 
mainstream media, both print and TV.

In those days, women were expected to be groupies, not to express 
themselves creatively.  That's why the cover of the Slits' Typical 
Girls record is so amazing.  Not only were they liberating themselves 
from the groupie role by playing their own instruments and writing 
their own songs, but they represented themselves naked in mud in 
defiance.  As Dina notes, they "felt completely free to express their 
feminine and masculine and simply human qualities freely." The Slits 
may not have been widely known in the US at that time, but they were 
very popular in the UK and were covered regularly by NME and Sounds, 
both of which were widely available in the US.

Sorry for the long post.  I could talk about this forever!!

Sharon