Women's music
[2] Women's music initially focused on feminism questions[clarification needed] which exposed the unfair treatment on female from society and families that was ignored by men.
[4] The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery[5] and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near.
Studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.
While the Stonewall Riots in 1969 became the cradle for the Gay Liberation Movement, political feminists felt the danger of their past efforts and that their activities may be negatively labeled.
A series of movements against the homosexual community began, with the central role labeling Gay Liberation as counterrevolutionary and bourgeois.
[7] In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, some critics and musicians perceived that there were few "positive women's images within popular music" and a "lack of opportunities for female performers".
These early recordings relied on sales through mail order and in a few lesbian-feminist bookstores, like Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C., as well as promotion by word of mouth.
[1] Kehrer noted that although the organization was founded on the premise of helping women and lesbians, it was unable to work around the contradictions surrounding the company's ethics[specify] and place in a capitalist society.
Most Women's Music festivals used either private land or one-time event contracts in order to insure that they could exclude men from the space.
Feminist musicians aimed to show a positive, proactive, and assertive image of women that not only critiqued the rifts in regards to gender, but also demonstrated the goals of the feminist movement in terms of social justice regarding gender as well as the right of privacy concerning abortion and birth control.
[citation needed] Due to the speciality of purpose of Women's Music, create a women-only space, and the cultural shocks to traditional patriarchal society, it is hard for the companies whose focus on Women's Music to gained any financial through it under a male dominant and capitalized society, such as the male dominant companies refuse to collaborate with them.
Starting with a single that was successfully sold by mail order, Olivia was able to release Meg Christian's I Know You Know and Cris Williamson's The Changer and the Changed.
The Changer and the Changed was "one of the all-time best selling albums on any independent label"[20] at that time, and was also the first LP to be entirely produced by women.
[22] As these record labels grew, so did the music genres represented, and the ethnic and social diversity of the artists expanded.
Several other labels were also formed by artists; Berkeley Women's Music Collective, Woody Simmons, and Teresa Trull were distributed by Olivia through their network.
With the growth of independent record labels and increasing demand for women's music, an organized system for distribution and promotion became necessary.
Olivia's informal network formed WILD (Women's Independent Labels Distributors) in 1977 to distribute music into different regions of the United States.
The main topics at the conference were the drop in concert sizes, the unreal pay demands by the female performers, the lack of diversity in women artists, and how Olivia Records, which was initially intended to be a female ran company, was giving high positions to men.
[28] Tracy Baim of Windy City Times called HOT WIRE "the national voice of the burgeoning women's music movement and a wide-ranging chronicle of lesbian feminist culture.
[30][31] The publication focused exclusively on lesbian feminist musicians, festivals, venues, and various topics pertaining to writing, theater, dance, comedy, and the arts.
Robin Tyler and Tori Osborne co-produced the festival, which received seed money from an accident settlement.
On the stage were Melissa Etheridge, Sweet Honey and the Rock, Teresa Trull, Ferron, Casselberry and Dupree, Lucie Blue Tremblay, Holly Near, and Chris Williamson.
Designed to provide a safe space for women's music and culture, many festivals are held on college campuses or in remote rural locations.
"[38] Bonnie Morris describes in her book Eden Built by Eves, how festivals serve women throughout the stages of their lives.
[39] Though historically controversial, The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is sometimes posed as an example of an environment that celebrates all women, not just those who conform to stereotypes in mainstream media.
[45] Petitions and boycotts ensued from notable organizations like GLAAD[46] while MichFest founder Lisa Vogel insisted that it is not transphobic to have a "healthy, whole, loving space" for women who were assigned female at birth to come together.
