My Ride to Freedom, 1969
In August 1969 I was 24 years old and driving my mother’s pink Buick from Chicago to Connecticut for my first teaching job as a Speech Therapist in Orange, Connecticut. I scanned the radio dial noticing that the DJ’s, broadcasters, and announcers were all men. A few months later, I would hear a new word that explained the absence of women’s voices on radio and in rock culture. A word that helped to lead me to experiences and a life I never could have imagined.
Teaching wasn’t my calling. It was a ticket to independence. I found a one-bedroom apartment in West Haven and nervously prepared for the job I was hired to do. Weekends I ventured into New Haven and wandered into one of the many bookstores catering to Yale University students with the intention of meeting a guy. I struck up a conversation with a Jewish bearded progressive Yale grad student. He soon took me to a party where met a woman who mentioned women meeting together. She began talking to me about Sexism. While we were talking a guy came up and asked her to dance. She said, “no thanks, not right now, I am in the middle of a conversation.” He said, “What’s the matter you stuck up or something?” When he turned to me and said, “What about you.” That fellow did me a favor. Later that evening, the fellow I was dating derisively talked about women’s lib, watch out, those women are crazy. His derision reminded me of men in my family and guys that I dated. I went to the very next women’s liberation meeting, quickly embraced feminism, and dumped the boyfriend.
I learned a new word naming what I didn’t have a name for. Sexism began to help me understand how laws, religion, culture and family circumscribed women’s lives, systematic sexism
The nature of my relationships with women changed. From that point on, we began to help each discover and unpack the lies, myths, stereotypes, and assumptions that made us second class citizens in a hetero-sexist, racist, capitalist and classist culture. We wanted to turn it all around.
We became comrades, friends, and lovers. To us these were revolutionary relationships and they helped us to free ourselves and each other of from the yoke of low expectations and self-esteem. Our common angers and youth fueled feminist collective activism, individual bravery, creativity, and imagination.
In January of 1970, five months after I arrived in New Haven, I heard about a music gathering at an old factory loft where the Women’s Liberation meetings were taking place. As I remember it, seven women showed up. Only three of us had any musical training. “Look, said one of the women, “Every 14-year-old white boy forms a band in their parent’s garage, why not us?” A question none of asked when we were in our teens. Her words gave us the permission that we needed to try.
We had a French horn, trombone, flute, bass, drums and guitar; an unconventional lineup for a rock band, but a rock band is what we wanted to be. Rock was the culture we grew up with. It was loud, fast aggressive, something we were not supposed to play.
We saw the band as a “cultural arm” of Women’s Liberation. We wanted to change the culture for every 14-year-old-girl in America who listened to rock music, and expected to dance to their own oppression.
We took aim at songs like “Look at that Stupid Girl” by The Rolling Stones: and “Back Street Girl”
Please don’t be part of my life
Please keep yourself to yourself
Please don’t you bother my wife
That way you won’t get no help
Don’t try to ride on my horse
You’re rather common and coarse
Don’t want you out in my world
Just you be my backstreet girl…
.James Brown sang, “It’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world, and Led Zeppelin told women “I’m going to give you every inch of my love, way down inside. Rock Concerts were where women were physically and sexually assaulted.
We didn’t want to be a female version of male rock/cock bands. We wanted to be a rock band to shake up the patriarchy.
Our lyrics reflected discovered sisterhood, “Sister Witch,” righteous anger, “Papa Don’t Lay that Shit on Me,” our right to choose, “The Abortion Song,” and “Ain’t Gonna Marry,” and that expressed our empathy and solidarity with women who were incarcerated or in the typing pool, “Prison Song,” and “Secretary.”
We covered Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT and Spirit in the Dark and the yearnings of Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.”
We wanted our performances to be celebratory and participatory, to encourage revolutionary fervor and activism; and where women could joyously dance free from expected mating rituals.
On August 26th, 1970, Women’s Equality Day, women across the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving American women the right to vote. In New York, the newly formed National Organization for Women joined with community groups around the country to stage a national women’s strike. The demands included: twenty-four-hour childcare centers, abortion on demand, equal employment and educational opportunities.
Women’s Liberation in New Haven organized all day workshops and events on the New Haven Green. In the evening, seven months after our first rehearsal, The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band performed its first performance at an all-women’s dance. “After the first set … every woman stood, applauded and held up a ten-foot banner reading “A Standing Ovulation for Our Sisters.”
The following year, we played at the Women’s March and Rally for Reproductive Freedom in Washington, DC. It was the largest demonstration of the Second Wave. It was thrilling for me to sing and hear the horns blazing and drums pounding, while looking at the White House over the multitudes of beautiful passionate women holding signs: Fight Racism! Free Abortion on Demand!
When Rounder Records approached us to record an album, at first, we said no. We weren’t ready and we didn’t have enough original material. But with our sister band, The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band, we had enough music and we created Mountain Moving Day (Rounder Records, 1972).
Because of the band, Ann Hill, a graduate law student at Yale University who ran a weekly two-hour radio program “Up from Under,” invited me to speak about the band on her show that featured music and stories of blues and jazz women unfamiliar to many of us. Mamie Smith was the first black person to record, Bessie Smith, the first jazz singer. We heard about Ma Rainey and Gladys Bentley, both out lesbians, along with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who invented the rock and roll sound, and Big Mama Thornton who first sang and recorded Hound dog, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog hangin’ round my door,” her interpretation was lost on Elvis Presley. Hills program enriched her listeners musically while informing us about the harsh realities and experiences of Black Women’s lives.
Ann Hill, I other local feminists decided to produce a feminist soap opera, ” The Liberation of Lydia” 13, 5-10-minute episodes. I was Lydia a housewife in her 20s married to Art a piggy businessman with liberal politics. In the first episode, Janet, Lydia’s friend takes Lydia to a Women’s Liberation meeting, which means Art has to go without dessert. The episodes emerged from stories we heard from the women we knew. Lydia was the first feminist radio soap opera.
When the band disbanded in 1976, I found my first passion in radio, a journey that lasted 19 years.