From an era when protest music rang out across every other frontier, we have only seven feminist songs where the lyrics spoke explicitly to women’s liberation.
When it comes to feminist music and what, if anything, is fashionable in feminism these days, Nancy Sinatra’s song about those soft-toe boots doesn’t come to mind. We’re more likely to think about how Taylor Swift presents herself on the world stage. “I don’t dress for women. I don’t dress for men,” she says, “Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.”
That’s how casually a billion-dollar female pop star can sing about feminist strength, autonomy, and consequence in the 21st century. The line assumes ownership of body, gaze, perception, and the fallout. There is no plea from Taylor Swift, here, no disguise, and no irony. It’s empowerment stated as fact.
Rewind to the supposed decade of liberation – 1960 to 1975, the so-called classic rock era – and you will probably not hear anything like Taylor Swift’s statement. Civil rights anthems, antiwar slogans, calls for equality and justice rang out from every stage. Yet, when it came to women’s liberation, the voices and lyrics of the era are almost silent.
Contents
- Feminist Voices with the Sound Turned Down
- Laura Nyro, Muted
- Big Mama Thornton’s Bite, Defanged
- Erase Her
- Feminist Forward
- Music’s Hearing Problems
- Casanova Reckoned
- Helen Reddy’s Feminist Referendum
- Pop Music’s Feminist Canon (1960-1975)
In the days before MTV and YouTube, there was an odd machine that worked hand in hand with your neighborhood jukebox. Called Scopitones, these large monitor attachments screened short promotional films in cocktail lounges or strip clubs, but not in teen hangouts. The films doubled as ads for artists, selling the single while shaping an artist’s persona.
The shorts were usually lip-synched and lightly scripted, often with a wink of titillation. Dionne Warwick reclined on a white shag rug for “Walk on By”. The Exciters sang in tight red dresses to a swimming bear at the zoo. Most famously, Nancy Sinatra – in almost thigh-high black boots, flanked by women in impossibly short skirts – strutted through “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”. The camera’s gaze is unmistakably male, even as the lyric suggests female power.
Today, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” is often remembered as proto feminist. Yet if you watch the clip, you see the lingerie peeking through and cannot help but see the suggestive choreography. It’s a commercial, not a manifesto. Written and produced by Lee Hazlewood, who admitted it “wasn’t really a girl’s song”, the single was staged to sell records, not topple the patriarchy.
In 1966, the year “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” hit the Top 10 alongside songs from the Beatles, Ray Charles, Lou Christie, and the Bobby Fuller Four, it stood out as an empowerment piece. That’s how bare the landscape was. The rock era was saturated with protest: civil rights, antiwar, and equality anthems. Still, almost none voiced feminism.
Aretha Franklin demanded “Respect” (transforming a man’s lyric into her own). Nina Simone sketched archetypes in “Four Women”. Lesley Gore warned, “You Don’t Own Me”. These songs are fierce, full of warning and stance. Not one of them spoke directly to the women’s liberation movement that was beginning to gather force.
Feminist Voices with the Sound Turned Down
The canon of explicitly feminist songs from that era is strikingly slight. We cannot expect listeners from 50 years ago to hear things the way we do now. What we can do is take issue with the disparity itself, and with the industry that sustained it.
Lesley Gore’s 1963 single “You Don’t Own Me” was among the first to declare teenage autonomy outright: “I’m not just one of your many toys, don’t tell me what to do.” Three years later, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” promised to “walk all over” an unfaithful man, the track’s revenge fantasy framed by Hazlewood’s pop craft and Sinatra’s deadpan authority. Aretha Franklin detonated Otis Redding’s “Respect” in 1967, transforming a man’s domestic demand into a cultural demand for dignity. That same year, Nina Simone unveiled “Four Women”, a devastating suite of archetypes confronting the intersecting oppressions of race and gender.
By 1971, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” finally planted a bold, unambiguous feminist anthem in the mainstream, while Yoko Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters” pressed directly for solidarity and resistance. Outside the Anglo-American market, French activists wrote “L’Hymne du MLF“, chanting “Debout les femmes” – “Stand up, women” – as a rallying cry for liberation. In the entire period, only two of these songs were written by women, and only one, Reddy’s anthem, secured a lasting place in the mainstream.
Set against this is a wall of normalized misogyny. The Rolling Stones alone contributed multiple hits, from the sneering domination of “Under My Thumb” to the contempt catalogued in “Stupid Girl”. Elvis Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House” bluntly warned, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl,” a line later echoed by the Beatles in “Run for Your Life”, where jealousy is framed as a license for violence. Tom Jones’ “Delilah” turned femicide into a stadium singalong. The Doors boasted of endless conquest in “Back Door Man”.
Even songs draped in romance carried coercion: Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” positioned obsession above a woman’s autonomy, while Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” glossed coercion as seduction. The Guess Who’s “American Woman” cast femininity itself as corrupt danger, while the Kinks’ “Complicated Life” and countless others reduced women to nagging burdens or disposable foils. What emerged was less a scattering of missteps than a systematic pattern: entitlement, contempt, and violence, packaged as swagger, romance, or fun.
Commercial caution alone cannot explain the silence. Labels tolerated, even celebrated, provocation when it came from white men. Bob Dylan was indulged by Columbia Records when he snarled at authority, when he went electric, and when he alienated his fans. The Rolling Stones could wrap contempt and violence toward women into radio anthems and stadium sing-alongs without a second thought from executives. Controversy was framed as “edge” when men delivered it, as liability when women did. Aretha Franklin demanding respect, or Nina Simone indicting racism and sexism, were treated not as marketable stances but as risks to record labels.
Behind this lay a scarcity logic. Giving women a voice on the airways was imagined not as an addition to the musical canon but as a subtraction from it: more space for women meant less for men. Equality required a measure of generosity; the willingness to concede room, attention, and acclaim. For white label executives, especially in the American South, racial politics deepened the caution. They could rationalize their refusal to push women forward as a commercial necessity, but it was equally about fear: that amplifying Black women’s voices would unsettle racial hierarchies, and that amplifying women’s voices at all would unsettle gender hierarchies.
To their credit, Atlantic and Motown broke ranks, pushing Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Martha Reeves, Barbara Lewis, Carla Thomas, and others into national prominence. Both labels were minority-owned: Atlantic by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, outsiders in the white Protestant establishment; Motown by Berry Gordy, building a Black-owned empire in Detroit. Their position gave them more incentive to champion Black women, but even there, the framing was tightly managed.
The women of those rosters rarely spoke beyond the bounds of romantic dynamics. Though Janis Ian smuggled in ideas around racial identity, only a generous interpretation allows “I Should Be Proud”, “Love Child”, or “Stoned Love” to be heard as female-forward power anthems. The exception proves the rule: it was never about whether women’s voices could sell. It was about who was willing to risk the loss of male primacy to let them.
Laura Nyro, Muted
How does one make sense of this discrepancy? In an era when protest music rang out across every other frontier, women’s rights barely appeared. We have only seven songs worldwide where the lyrics themselves spoke explicitly to autonomy or equality, against a flood of contempt and control. The ledger shows not cultural lag but willful refusal.
Liberation was imagined as freedom for men, while women were assigned back to silence or to service, their voices isolated, their powerful art erased. The calendar says this was the decade of gender militancy; the ledger says otherwise.
If absence defined the canon, erasure defined the artists: women who did voice autonomy – Big Mama Thornton, Hazel Scott, Ruby Andrews – were systematically contained, overshadowed, or erased. That is the next chapter of the story.
If women’s voices sound absent in terms of extolling feminism in the rock era, it is not because they were silent. Stance was often substituted for a literal push. Extraordinary songwriters Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Carole King, and others all found ways to smuggle their belief in pop-friendly terms, but never addressed feminism explicitly in their music.
It is challenging to discern why this was, although the period in which these women had their early successes was less than kind to female forward politics. While they often embraced the male counterpart, record companies saw it as a selling tool. Bob Dylan, the rebel. Waylon Jennings, the outlaw.
“I’m a woman / I’m a woman, Lord knows I’m a woman / Don’t try to buy my pride.” Laura Nyro sang those words on “Woman’s Blues” (1971). Using personal hurt to resist commodification, it’s steeped in the blues tradition without self-blame or lament. This was a confrontation. The song named power and boundaries, notions Nyro earlier visited on New York Tendaberry’s “A Woman of the World” (1969): “I’m not gonna be your toy / I’m not gonna be your girl.” Now that song was proto feminism without the banner.
Nyro was signed to Columbia, where Dylan had his deal, but the label never understood how to market her. They saw her music as too idiosyncratic for pop radio, too confessional for rock, and too uncommercial for mass push. As a result, her most radical stances stayed in the margins rather than on national playlists.
So they promoted her as a “sensitive songwriter”, not as a voice of cultural authority. That soft framing muted the nuanced feminist charge. Still, her seamless blending of gospel, R&B, and confessional songwriting rejected the narrow roles women were expected to play. What failed her was the machinery of feminist amplification.
Big Mama Thornton’s Bite, Defanged
Big Mama Thornton cut “Hound Dog” in 1952, growling contempt for a man who’d been using her. Four years later, Elvis Presley turned it into a cultural earthquake. The song was everywhere, but Thornton’s name – and her authorship of that attitude – was erased. What had been a woman’s indictment was rebranded as male bravado, and the canon enshrined the copy instead of the source.
Recorded in 1952, “Hound Dog” was fundamentally about a woman refusing to be taken advantage of by a man. Her deep delivery, with its mixture of threat and dismissal, made the lyrics sting: the man is a “hound dog”, sniffing around, looking for something he doesn’t deserve, and she is telling him to go. Thornton’s version flips the usual postwar gender script. Instead of the woman being needy or betrayed, she is in control, asserting independence and exposing male uselessness.
For a Black woman performer in Jim Crow America, that voice of refusal carried additional weight. Big Mama Thornton was pushing back against both the sexual entitlement of men in the song and the broader cultural expectation that women, especially Black women, should remain deferential.
When Elvis Presley recorded his version in 1956, the frame shifted dramatically. He took a song that, in Thornton’s hands, was about rejecting a man and retooled it into a danceable, almost nonsensical rock-and-roll number. The lyrics were pared down, stripped of their sting; instead of being about a woman’s agency against a leeching man, the words became a kind of cartoon insult: “you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” shouted over a frantic beat.
Gone was the gender confrontation. Instead, Elvis directed the jab outward in a generalized way, often performed with sneer and sexual swagger. The misogyny here is subtler: not in Presley’s lyrics, which became nearly meaningless, but in the erasure itself. Thornton’s voice, which had carried a woman’s rejection of exploitation, was overwritten by a white male body embodying sexual rebellion, rebranded as the sound of rock’s birth.
In Big Mama Thornton’s version, one of the biting lines is: “You told me you was high-class, but I can see through that / You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, been snoopin’ ’round my door / You can wag your tail, but I ain’t gonna feed you no more.” She also snarls that the man is “barking up the wrong tree”, a metaphor that fits perfectly with the hound-dog insult: she positions him as foolish and presumptuous, chasing something he’s never going to get.
When Elvis recorded the song, he mangled this lyric. Instead of “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time … You said you was high-class, but that was just a lie … You never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine,” he twists the original “barking” into “crying”, and in live versions he sometimes slurs the line so it sounds like “You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine – you said you was high-class, well that was just a crackin’ lie.” The imagery becomes muddled, if not nonsensical. A hound dog that “cries” and “never caught a rabbit” is far less sharp than a hound dog “barking up the wrong tree.”
That garbling matters. Thornton’s metaphor was cutting; it named male futility and misdirection, a man who keeps chasing what isn’t his. Elvis’ version, in losing the metaphor, drains the song of its gendered bite. The insult becomes a kind of playground taunt, rhythmically catchy but stripped of Thornton’s critique of male parasitism. This distortion is part of the larger pattern: Thornton’s performance offered a pointed, gendered refusal; Presley’s performance, through lyrical garbling and stylistic overhaul, erased that meaning and replaced it with a vehicle for his own swagger.
Erase Her
The cultural erasure of Big Mama Thornton’s song and the artist herself is textbook. Thornton’s recording sold modestly, and she never saw financial rewards remotely proportional to its later success. Elvis’ version, backed by a powerful marketing machine, exploded across white America. What was once a Black woman’s biting dismissal of male exploitation became a white man’s anthem of youthful rebellion. The transformation erased not only Thornton’s authorship but also the gendered stance of the original. Where Thornton’s performance resisted misogyny, Presley’s erased the woman altogether – and in doing so, reshaped a story of female refusal into a vehicle for male power and commercial dominance.
Hazel Scott traced a similar arc. A classically trained pianist and fearless performer, she played Bach as boogie and Gershwin as jazz long before it was fashionable to call that fusion “crossover”. She refused segregated venues, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and insisted on her dignity. For this, she was branded “difficult”, blacklisted, and pushed aside. By the time white men carried the same fusions into concert halls and textbooks, Scott’s innovations had been nearly scrubbed from memory.
These erasures set the terms for what came next. When Janis Joplin broke through in 1967, it was by taking the same blues Thornton had howled and electrifying them for the Haight. When Aretha Franklin redefined “Respect”, it was only by wrenching a male lyric into her own key. When Grace Slick commanded the stage at Monterey, she was flanked by men who still wrote most of the songs and controlled the contracts. Each breakthrough was undeniable, but each came tethered: to be amplified, a woman had to be extraordinary, singular, often mythologized as an exception rather than evidence.
Ruby Andrews belongs in that lineage, but she was denied even the platform of exception. In 1967, the same year Joplin wailed with Big Brother at Monterey, Andrews cut “Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over)” in Chicago. Where Jagger and Morrison strutted as avatars of sexual conquest, Andrews turned the archetype inside out: the Casanova figure exposed as repetitive, hollow, dependent on women’s attention to exist at all.
“Casanova” was a proto-feminist critique delivered as a soul single; sharp, unsparing, utterly of its moment. Without national machinery, though, the record stayed regional; her inversion drowned beneath the very archetype she punctured.
What we call the absence of women in music and feminist songs was, in fact, containment. Women generated the sound, the stance, even the blueprint for rebellion. Unless the industry could reframe it through male bodies or cauterize it into novelty, however, the voices were muted. The record of liberation preserved the swagger, not the source.
Aretha Franklin didn’t just cover “Respect”, she rewrote it in performance. Her version electrified precisely because it inverted the power: she spelled out R-E-S-P-E-C-T as both personal insistence and collective anthem, insisting that recognition of her worth was non-negotiable. In Franklin’s hands, the lyric stopped being a bargaining chip and became an anthemic promise. It was not a request but a declaration. Because she drove it onto radio rotation, the declaration became a cultural fact.
“What you want?! “Franklin demands. “You know I got it! What you need? You know I got it! There’s a cost for seeking reward from an empowered woman, and that is respect. It had better be apparent when you get home.
This isn’t a polite suggestion; this is a legitimate insistence. Franklin sounds like she’s already packed his bags, standing by the door, and there’s one request she offers that might let him stay. Respect. She’s saying it loudly, past whatever workaday fog her partner returns home in. She pierces his routine. This is the bill. Give it up or get out.
Feminist Forward
Considering Taylor Swift’s aforementioned casual threat, it might be difficult for some to understand how Aretha Franklin’s demand landed in 1967. On a record that bled soul in strutting cadence, Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967) allowed hard-won tenderness and spectral self-awareness; opener “Respect” was the tipping point. Pay now, the album suggests, or turn it off.
No song on the album hit harder. Decency was the price of the ticket.
If Franklin turned a man’s words into a demand for equality, Nina Simone wrote her own indictment of the stereotypes that defined Black womanhood. “Four Women” sketches four archetypes: Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches are each burdened by racism, sexual exploitation, or rage. The song is unsparing, refusing comfort or idealization. Simone names the tropes directly and then refuses their containment; the final figure, Peaches, erupts with fury that makes the whole song quake.
Released in 1966, “Four Women” was banned on some stations, proof that telling the truth about compounded oppressions was treated as too volatile for mainstream ears. Simone was not burdened by fear in her work – or fear of airplay.
The opening chords snake into your head. Both ominous and deceptively simple, a beat is formed in chords – it drags you into the lyric. Simone does something no other woman on top forty radio attempted: the character Peaches ultimately names the pain and outlines the consequences.
“My skin is brown
My manner is tough
I’ll kill the first mother I see
My life has been rough
I’m awfully bitter these days
‘Cause my parents were slaves “
Simone’s “Four Women” is an attempt to slaughter patterns, to end discriminatory things that are too recognizable.
By 1972, Yoko Ono was already issuing direct feminist calls like “Sisters, O Sisters”, but her work was met with ridicule rather than solidarity. She became the scapegoat for the Beatles’ breakup and for Lennon’s departures from rock orthodoxy; a lightning rod for misogyny and xenophobia. The irony is that Lennon himself had trafficked in misogyny (“Run for Your Life” threatens to kill a partner; Sgt. Pepper’s “Getting Better” boasts “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart…” ).
By the early 1970s, though, Lennon was clumsily trying to unlearn the sour and defensive lessons bequeathed from an enduring legacy of his own childhood trauma and the chauvinism allotted to men. His collaboration with Yoko Ono produced “Woman Is the N—– of the World”, a title and lyric still shocking in its bluntness but unmistakably intended as solidarity.
The shift in Lennon is visible in Andrew Scott’s Imagine-era documentary, where he and Ono argue with cartoonist Al Capp. Capp sneers at Ono, dismisses her art, disparages her physicality, and needles Lennon. The younger Lennon might have swung a fist or worse; instead, the new Lennon defends her without violence. He insists on her legitimacy, pushes back on Capp’s contempt, but does so with restraint.
The scene is awkward and imperfect, but notable: he doesn’t revert to the macho defenses that once defined him. His trajectory – from singing about killing a girlfriend, to defending his wife’s right to speak – illustrates both the depth of the problem and the halting attempts at correction. He often referred to Yoko Ono as “mother”, and for that, the fans who still rocked to the Beatles’ Abbey Road couldn’t forgive her. However, her influence on the ex-Beatle was grand, feminist-forward, and here it was on display if one wanted to watch.
Music’s Hearing Problems
The ledger of feminist anthems is damning, but it is only half the story. If the women who sang them were few, it was not because others lacked the will; it was because the culture lacked the will to hear them. What followed was not just absence but complicity. The counterculture that styled itself as liberation reproduced the same hierarchies behind closed doors: communes where women cooked while men strummed guitars; festivals where bravado faced bravado and women’s warnings went unheard. The silence was not accidental. It was a choice: a refusal of equality dressed up as rebellion.
If we set out the short canon of explicit feminist anthems before 1975, Ruby Andrews is nowhere to be found, and that’s the problem. Her catalogue shows the voice of a woman who, song after song, called out male betrayal, demanded accountability, and refused to play the submissive role. “Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over)” (1967), “Everybody Saw You” (1970), “You Made a Believer (Out of Me)” (1969) – these are not pleas but pronouncements, cutting through the complacency of a male-dominated soul scene.
Andrews was not coy. She merged Motown’s pop sophistication with the muscular edge of Chicago and Detroit soul. If she’d had the machinery of Motown or Atlantic behind her, she could have been framed as the grittier Aretha Franklin, or the direct heir to Etta James. Instead, she remained a regional success, sidelined by the absence of major-label infrastructure, radio push, or critical recognition.
That absence is telling. It shows how the music industry’s marginalization of women – especially Black women outside the top labels – muted proto-feminist voices before they could register nationally. It explains why “I Am Woman” could arrive in 1971 like a shock: because so many earlier voices, Andrews’ chief among them, were kept out of the frame. So Andrews becomes the ghost of the canon: not quite admitted into the pantheon because the system denied her scale, yet essential to understanding the continuum. She shows that feminist themes were already there in the music – simmering, defiant, regional – but systematically contained. Her absence from the official record is not evidence of silence, but of suppression.
The tragedy is that Ruby Andrews never got the machine. She recorded for Zodiac and Kellmac, Chicago-based labels with ambition but nothing like the reach of Motown or Atlantic. Distribution was uneven, radio play was mostly local, and disputes over publishing and royalties stripped her of both recognition and revenue. Even her strongest singles couldn’t break through the ceilings of infrastructure and bias.
By the late 1970s, the momentum was gone. Ruby Andrews stepped away from music and, like so many women denied a place in the canon, returned to ordinary work, taking jobs as a nurse’s aide and support worker. The jukeboxes still carried her voice, but the industry had already erased her name. This is the cruelest cut: the bridge was there, built in vinyl grooves, but the system dismantled it before anyone could cross.
Casanova Reckoned
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, an 18th-century Venetian adventurer, is remembered not for his politics or his pen but as a lover, a seducer. His name slid into shorthand, no longer a man but an archetype, virility personified, conquest made cultural. By the mid-20th century, “Casanova” was a mask worn by pop itself. In rock and soul, he strutted through Mick Jagger’s smirk, Jim Morrison’s theatrics, and the Guess Who’s macho sneer. Casanova had become the swaggering ego that the industry celebrated as enviable and heroic.
Ruby Andrews dismantled him. “Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over)” was not the lament of a betrayed woman; it was an execution. She reduced the archetype to exactly what he was: predictable, shallow, dependent. Instead of being objectified, she objectified him, stripping away the individuality that the male canon bestowed on its heroes.
Opening with a seemingly distant but echoing drum roll, the band sweeps in, hitting with the same punch as the southern-soul records being cut at Muscle Shoals, but this was Chicago, a place that had a different understanding of musical menace. The horns stab and strut, brassy punctuation marks that frame Andrews’ voice like exclamation points. The rhythm section is taut, locked in a mid-tempo groove that feels half sanctified church stomp, half barroom showdown. Guitar licks dart in the margins, sharp but never flashy, leaving space for her vocal to dominate.
“Hey boy, they call you sweet Casanova
But later, baby, your playing days are over!”
It’s not the lush sweep of Motown; it’s rawer, leaner, built to spotlight the authority of the singer. Ruby Andrews rides above it all – controlled, unsparing – as if the band were there only to underline her final verdict.
“It’s all over, Casanova
It’s all over, Casanova
It’s all over, Casanova”
This was not only personal revenge; it was a cultural indictment. Where men’s songs reduced women to types (“stupid girl”, “the girl who once had me down”), Andrews flipped the script: the man himself was just a type, a performance so tired that it no longer deserved stage time. “Your playing days are over” wasn’t a heartbreak line; it was a cultural verdict.
The deeper truth is that Casanova’s identity exists only through women. Without them, he collapses. Andrews named the dependency: “You need me more than I need you.” That was the secret hidden at the core of the rock canon itself. Page after page of the songbook – songs of sorrow, rage, desire, even camaraderie – hang on the presence or absence of women, yet women’s voices were denied equal authorship.
Ruby Andrews’ song should have been a reckoning, but it was barely heard outside Chicago. Without the machine, her takedown went unamplified, and the archetype marched on unchecked – resurfacing grotesquely in the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Some Girls”, where the male swagger grew more toxic even as her critique lay pressed into vinyl, unheard at scale.
Thus, Andrews remains the ghost in the canon: the singer who named the truth, who assassinated the archetype, but whose voice was denied its reach. She is the proof that absence in the rock era was not silence, but suppression; a refusal to allow the cultural indictment that might have rewritten the ledger.
And if Ruby Andrews tried to assassinate the archetype in Chicago, Merry Clayton exposed its hollowness in Los Angeles. Dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, four months pregnant, she walked into a Stones session and cracked “Gimme Shelter” wide open. Her scream of “Rape, murder! It’s just a shot away!” didn’t just match Jagger’s menace; it dwarfed it, made him gasp, left his swagger trembling.
For a moment, the Casanova act was punctured on its own record. Yet Clayton, like Andrews, was treated as disposable: misnamed on the sleeve, never invited back as an equal, remembered more as a jolt than as a colleague. Her power was undeniable, but it was harvested, not honored. The canon absorbed the shock and then sealed itself back up, preserving the swagger while erasing the woman who exposed it.
Helen Reddy’s Feminist Referendum
By 1971, protest had become its own genre. The charts carried songs against war, against segregation, against pollution. Everyone had an anthem – except women. Into that silence stepped Helen Reddy with “I Am Woman”. The song was an afterthought, tucked onto an album and ignored by her label. It only rose because women themselves picked up the phone, called radio stations, and demanded to hear it. What followed was extraordinary: the first global hit to declare women’s liberation without metaphor, without disguise, without apology.
Helen Reddy accomplished what even the most ferocious women of the era had not. Aretha Franklin had demanded “Respect”, but only by flipping a man’s lyric. Janis Joplin had screamed pain and defiance into the microphone, but her self-destruction made her a dangerous symbol for the mainstream. Reddy stripped away the menace and left only the fact. She was polished, melodic, camera-ready, and that was the point. Her anthem smuggled feminism into every living room, carried not as provocation but as inevitability.
The opening declaration – direct and absolute – shares its power with the great declarative rock canon of the previous decade. “I am woman, hear me roar / In numbers too big to ignore / And I know too much to go back and pretend.” It lands with the same authority as Dylan’s sneering “Once upon a time you dressed so fine…” – but this time the urgency belonged to women, who were not just listening but buying, demanding, spending. Reddy tapped into what the icons had ignored: power can take many forms, but nothing is greater than a public ready to purchase a cultural truth.
“I Am Woman” was not only a song; it was a referendum. Its stance dovetailed with a moment already cresting in film and television, where female characters such as Maude‘s Bea Aurther and Barbara Loden’s Wanda were finally being written as protagonists rather than foils. The moment was female, and Reddy gave it its anthem.
That was her point of departure: “I Am Woman” does not cajole, it does not plead. It tells the truth as if it were undeniable. My presence is a fact. My value is a fact. Because the song amplified from every radio speaker, it became undeniable; absorbed, repeated, embedded. The song was mocked for its earnestness, dismissed as soft pop, but its work was irreversible. It proved feminism could not only be voiced but could sell, chart, and dominate. Helen Reddy cracked the wall.
Behind that soft rock façade was defiance, both considered and subtly damning. If you do not give, I will take.
Once the scenery was slashed, the stage was set for someone who did not care about palatability at all. Ruby Andrews named the archetype and was erased. Helen Reddy declared the fact and made it undeniable. Patti Smith swung the blade. Taylor Swift would come along later.
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” wasn’t just a lyric; it was the opening line on Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses. That’s what made it so seismic: she used the very first breath of her recorded career to detonate the boundaries the canon had enforced.
This was the reckoning the canon had refused, stripped of artifice, stripped of fear.
While we understand how punk and later hip-hop emerged from these exclusions of feminist songs and their artists, it is necessary to examine the foundational build and identify its gaps. If the fatigue is real – and it is – then its cause must be diagnosed fully and its cure made visible: amplification without theft, freedom without containment, equality without qualification.
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” Patti Smith sang.
Damn right.
Pop Music’s Feminist Canon (1960-1975)
1. Lesley Gore – “You Don’t Own Me”
- Year: 1963
- Label: Mercury Records
- Songwriters: John Madara, David White
- Top Chart Position: #2 on Billboard Hot 100 (U.S.)
- Theme & Significance: A teenage girl directly asserts independence from male control: “I’m not just one of your many toys.” Unusual for the early 1960s teen market, this track introduced defiance and self-possession into mainstream pop.
2. Nancy Sinatra – “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”
- Year: 1966
- Label: Reprise Records
- Songwriter: Lee Hazlewood
- Top Chart Position: #1 on Billboard Hot 100 (U.S.), #1 UK Singles Chart
- Theme & Significance: A swaggering declaration of female revenge and autonomy. Though written by Hazlewood, Sinatra’s performance turned it into a statement of female power, blending pop accessibility with confrontational intent.
3. Nina Simone – “Four Women”
- Year: 1966
- Label: Philips Records
- Songwriter: Nina Simone
- Top Chart Position: Not released as a commercial single; became a cultural touchstone through live performance and later anthologies.
- Theme & Significance: A portrait of four archetypal Black women confronting slavery, colorism, sexual exploitation, and rage. Intersectional before the term existed, it fused feminism with racial and social critique.
4. Aretha Franklin – “Respect”
- Year: 1967
- Label: Atlantic Records
- Songwriter: Otis Redding (redefined by Franklin)
- Top Chart Position: #1 on Billboard Hot 100 (U.S.), #10 UK Singles Chart
- Theme & Significance: Franklin transformed Redding’s male-centered plea into a feminist demand for recognition and dignity. It became both a women’s liberation anthem and a cornerstone of Black pride.
5. Helen Reddy – “I Am Woman”
- Year: 1971 (album), 1972 (hit single)
- Label: Capitol Records
- Songwriters: Helen Reddy, Ray Burton
- Top Chart Position: #1 on Billboard Hot 100 (U.S.) in 1972
- Theme & Significance: The first mainstream pop song to explicitly proclaim women’s liberation: resilience, collective strength, and empowerment. Its commercial success gave the movement its own hit anthem.
6. Collective – “L’Hymne du MLF” (Hymn of the Women’s Liberation Movement, France)
- Year: 1971
- Movement: Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF)
- Top Chart Position: Not a chart single; circulated within activist networks and demonstrations.
- Theme & Significance: Sung collectively at rallies, opening with “Debout les femmes” (“Stand up, women”). Unlike commercial hits, this was grassroots feminist music created for mobilization, not markets.
7. Yoko Ono (with John Lennon) – “Sisters, O Sisters”
- Year: 1972
- Label: Apple Records
- Songwriter: Yoko Ono
- Top Chart Position: Not released as a single; appeared on Some Time in New York City.
- Theme & Significance: A reggae-inflected call for women’s unity and resistance. Ono’s authorship makes it one of the very few explicitly feminist rock songs written by a woman before 1975.