Difficult Women is a literary-folk music cabaret created in 1992, in Melbourne, by Lin Van Hek and Joe Dolce and has been performing internationally for 15 years.
Difficult Women, a name taken from the Salem witch trials, was established as a literary-folk music project by Lin Van Hek and her domestic partner, Joe Dolce, in early 1992.
"[1] The group works through a combination of theatrical vignettes, original music, songs, harmony singing and oration, to tell the stories of women who were labelled "difficult" by society for their willingness to defy what was expected of them.
"[2] A typical show contains over four hours of material on important women including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Memphis Minnie, Sonya Tolstoi, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Camille Claudel, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa Lawson.
Strange Australian aunts and the work of Dale Spender on the links between gender and language mingled with Madam Tolstoy, who wrote out War and Peace 53 times by hand for her husband.