Just started reading the book Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s by Jacqueline Warwick and while I am only a few chapters in I’m really enjoying it thus far.  I WILL be drawing from it in future posts…

Warwick starts her introduction with anecdote about her first feminist awakening.  I attempted to paraphrase it but I believe it’s better inserted as an excerpt…

“When I was nine, I had an experience I have come to consider a feminist awakening.  It happened on a Sunday Morning; the Brownie troupe of which I was a member was preparing to take part in a special annual church service, awaiting the signal to march up the aisle and gather in front of the altar, singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”  A puny and dreamy child, I had not been entrusted with an important job such as carrying a cross of flag at the head of the procession, so instead I sulked resentfully in the narthex with the other undifferentiated Brownies, hideous in our mud-brown and orange uniforms.  I noticed the flag of the church’s Cubs troupe displayed prominently on the sanctuary wall (Cubs, if you don’t know, are a boys’ organization junior to Boy Scouts, in the same way that Brownies are to Girl Guides or Girl Scouts).  I was immediately offended that there was no equivalent emblem of Browniedom anywhere in sight, but closer inspection reveal a far greater injustice: the Cub motto, “Do Your Best,” emblazoned magnificently in dark green silk.  The Brownie motto, I knew only too well was, “Lend a Hand.”

As an adult, I have often told the story of the Brownie Incident in order to account for my evolution as a feminist as well as to demonstrate that children are indoctrinated from very early on into rigid gender positions.  As I perceived in a flash of clarity that morning, boys in Western society are urged to strive for excellence and independence, whereas girls are more likely to be directed toward helping, supporting roles.  Brownie dogma, I have warned, prepares us to conform to patriarchal institutions like traditional marriage, wherein wives are expected to be nurturing helpmeets to their ambitious and hardworking husbands.  Thus, organizations like Brownies and Girl Guides are no merely anodyne after-school clubs for girls, but rather they are training grounds for repressive womanhood.

In making this dramatic claim, I have sought to emphasize the importance of girls, a social group that is generally dismissed and overlooked in cultural analyses, where of woman or youth.  Girls have little social power, and their interests and concerns are often regarded with derision (if they are noticed at all).”

Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture

The sixties specifically are taught in the following narratives: the British Invasion with heavy hitters The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and so forth, Monterey Pop and Woodstock.  There is a male bias in these accounts.

I recently withdrew from my Women’s Studies course (with hesitation) and what I took from the course are the following things….

In regards to history, as historians we must always question it; it’s validity and truth.

Why is there are there women’s studies courses?

Because women demanded it!  It is unfathomable to think that in stark contrast to the lack of women in modern history books that they did not make valiant contributions and efforts in the shaping of history.

Mary Weiss, former singer of the Shangri-Las affirms, “We never though of ourselves as a ‘girl group.’  We were rock and rollers. same as the guys.  True rock and roll has no sex–it’s rock and roll.”

But it is apparent that such is not the case and there are biases in how we characterize the quality or the level of ability between male and female rock and rollers.

On that note, I would like to introduce not a sixties girl group but instead an ALL-GIRL JAPANESE GRINDCORE BAND: Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation the reasoning being that they kill in a genre that is exceedingly male dominated.