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

[Dina Hornreich <dina.hornreich AT gmail.com>]

Fabulous post, Sharon.  Thanks for sharing your perspective.

One thing: I was quoting that Ian dude on the "felt completely free  
to express their feminine and masculine and simply human qualities  
freely."(I wish I could take credit for this observation!)

-Dina


On Feb 14, 2009, at 6:35 PM, Sharon Cheslow wrote:

> 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
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