Defining Women's Music: History, Identity, and Community

Introduction: The Challenge of Definition

What is women's music? Anyone who is involved in the world of music has some idea of what women's music is, but any attempt to define it is like attempting to define art itself: you know what it is when you hear it — or see it — and that experiential definition suffices. Or rather, it may suffice on a personal level, but it does not suffice on an analytical one. If we are to examine the history, development, and future of women's music, then we must be able, at least in part, to define it. That is the task this paper sets out to accomplish.

Any investigation into the world of women's music quickly reveals that there is no single vector along which a definition may be constructed, and this is no doubt one of the reasons that an easy definition tends to elude us. Women's music is defined by its performers, by its audiences, by its content, by its style, and by its mode of transmission. Unless all of these elements are present, the result is not women's music — or it may fall into a category recognized within the women's music community as "not quite women's music," a tacit recognition that it meets some but not all essential criteria. These different aspects of women's music will be discussed in turn. Each allows for some ambiguity of classification, but women's music is only considered to be such if at least some of the categories are unambiguously met.

The performers of women's music are indeed women, or at least primarily so. (Again, it is important to remember that there is a certain amount of latitude permitted in each of these categories, a certain degree of ambiguity.) A women's group may certainly have a man fill in from time to time in place of a regular member. It may also include a regular male musician if the group is large enough. Women's music groups may play music written by men — but not most of the time. Women's music groups can be released by mainstream companies and even be played on MTV, but they must also use other means of transmission as well.

A Multi-Vector Framework for Women's Music

In general, women's music is played by women, bought and listened to by women, addresses issues of concern to women, and favors certain musical forms over others. There is, for instance, very little women's hard rock — but any musical style might come to be considered women's music if the other defining factors were in place. Women's music is typically released by "women's music" labels, which come to be known as such because they work primarily with women musicians and usually also have a higher-than-usual percentage of women executives. It is also performed at women's music festivals.

Women's music can never be defined, as McClary (1991) argues, by any single criterion. Attempts to do so almost always originate from outside of the women's music movement and are usually dismissive of the movement — and are usually made by men. These attempts to categorize all women's music as fundamentally the same (as well as fundamentally unworthy of notice) sound a good deal like cross-generational arguments over the value of rock.

Much research into gendered art forms (e.g., Hanna 1988) suggests that content and style are the most important criteria in determining whether an art form should be considered masculine or feminine. However, in the case of women's music, this may not in fact be the case. Although both content and style are important, mode of transmission may be equally so within the realm of music, setting it apart from other forms of communication (Tannen 1990).

While such things are very difficult to quantify, a group and its music would have to score above 50 percent compliance in each of these categories to qualify as women's music — although a group that played exclusively at women's music festivals, for example, could include more male musicians than other groups and still be considered a "women's music" group.

The figure of fifty percent is, admittedly, somewhat arbitrary, but it is certainly arguable that in order to be considered a women's music group, that group would have to comply with the basic conditions of the genre more than half of the time. This definition sounds complex and even unwieldy, but it does in fact reflect the way in which women's music is defined, as McRobbie and Garber (2000) suggest. Art is almost always complicated.

Mode of Transmission and Cultural Power

As Giroux (2001) argues, the mode of transmission for those elements of popular culture that genuinely challenge the status quo is often defined by channels that lie outside of the corporate mainstream. This is, it should perhaps be noted, only true in cultures where monopolistic corporations hold substantial power. Countries that exist to some extent outside the sphere of the modern industrialized world are not inclined to define art in terms of its modes of transmission. There is certainly, as Koskoff (1987) notes, "women's music" in traditional cultures such as that of the Bedouin, but it functions differently in societies where women's formal power is so substantially limited.

In societies such as the United States, women have at least some access to formal power — which exists within the cultural as well as the political and economic realms — and so what constitutes women's music, or any other manifestation of "women's culture," must be different in the industrialized West. The following interview excerpt with singer-songwriter Teresa Trull, published on Technodyke, summarizes a number of the complexities and ambiguities in the world of women's music today:

"As far as Women's music is concerned, I think it was high time for it to change from what I considered to be a narrow definition. Women's music was momentarily weakened as I was, but the diversification was long overdue.

Conclusion: What Sets Women's Music Apart

What sets the modern women's music movement apart from the women's music of the 1970s or 1920s — and apart from other forms of popular music — is that combination of factors discussed above: the gender of its performers, the composition and diversity of its audience, the content and style of the music itself, and its deliberate use of transmission channels outside the corporate mainstream. Together, these criteria constitute a working, if necessarily flexible, definition of women's music as a living cultural form.