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Barbara Kruger, a renowned feminist visual artist, has created art across different eras of the feminist movement. This piece, created in response to the Supreme Court's recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, is meant to draw attention to both Republicans' "relentless campaign to restrict reproductive rights and control women’s bodies" and the failure of Democrats to respond forcefully to this campaign.

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Over the course of her career, the iconic singer and performing artist Beyoncé has come to embrace an explicitly feminist and anti-racist politics in her music and videos. While her work is not without critique from the Left, recent singles like "BREAK MY SOUL" see Beyoncé delivering a powerful message to break free from our attachment to work and find joy and meaning in our lives.

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Beyoncé - BREAK MY SOUL (Official Lyric Video)

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"Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely getting by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind, and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it!"

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The proliferation of feminist ideas and organizing in the 1970s had a deep impact on the way women presented themselves publicly, including in the workplace. "While most women wore feminine dresses and pantyhose, or stylish pantsuits with womanly accents to work, feminists had a different idea of what would get women ahead in their corporate climb."

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"…I’ll hold you and you’ll be mine, sweet woman."

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An all-women run record company and leading voice of the women's music movement. Olivia Records helped bring the music of the movement to millions of women in their own homes, and was particularly progressive in its embrace of lesbian artists such as Cris Williamson.

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"I'm not ready to be a museum piece," a veteran of the women's music movement confided in me recently.

During the second wave of feminism in the United States, women's music albums and concerts invited thousands and thousands to find validation in their identity as women and as lesbians, and to experience being the majority for a night: not in a smoke-filled, testosterone-filled bar, but in a music hall with some of the finest songwriters in the land onstage.

Though some remain downright incredulous that enough time has even passed to make their work "historical," there's also been an audible murmur growing in this vibrant, intelligent community of steadily graying fans: We did something important. We mattered to one another. And how we did it is a tale that matters, too.

As the historian of Olivia Records, a trailblazing all-women's recording label that emerged from this movement, I am intimately aware that the artists and producers that were on the forefront of this distinctive cultural turning point are now approaching their 70s, as are many of their earliest fans.

With samples of now-historic album art and vinyl beginning to become objects of interest for researchers and the public-at-large, the question becomes: how should Olivia should be remembered, collected and exhibited for those unfamiliar with its legacy?

If the protest music of the 1960s turned anti-war, anti-government, pro-marijuana and even profane songs into "Top 40" radio hits, by 1973, viewpoints from the feminist journey were still nowhere to be found in the mainstream beyond the tokenism of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman."

This absence, however, offered an opportunity for a "new" sound, by women, for women-including songs that didn't candy-coat female friendships but actually acknowledged racism as well as homophobia. A collective of women seized the moment and built Olivia Records, the first national women's music network (which has since evolved to become a lesbian lifestyle company).

These pioneers were an eclectic mix of folk performers, activists, and political theorists based in Washington, D.C.

Ginny Berson belonged to the Furies collective, a radical, separatist household that published journals, taught classes, and advocated communal living apart from men. Judy Dlugacz, 20, had postponed law school to pursue lesbian activism and was interested in finding an economically workable means of serving the women's community. Performing as a folk musician at area clubs and coffeehouses, Meg Christian was eager to meet other women songwriters like Cris Williamson-who had released her first album in 1964 at age 16.

When Williamson came on tour to D.C., Christian and Berson not only arranged to bring other women's music fans to the concert; in a gesture that changed history, they also scheduled a follow-up interview on Georgetown University's "Radio Free Women" program. On the show, Berson spoke about how she and other members of the Furies collective were searching for a bigger project to invest in- "something that's for women, by women, and supported by women's money"-and Williamson responded with a simple yet provocative suggestion, "Why don't you start a women's record company?"

Over time, the excited gathering of ten settled into a collective of five women, Berson, Christian, Dlugacz, Kate Winter and Jennifer Woodul, who appear in iconic photographs as the original "Olives." Now in its fifth decade, Olivia holds the distinction of being the first and longest-lasting woman-owned recording company in U.S. history.

Theirs isn't just any success story. The women of Olivia were revolutionary for completely sidestepping entertainment industry paternalism. The collective took control of every aspect of record production. They taught one another how to record and mix sound, run lights, produce concerts, distribute albums and handle sales. Donations and loans came from delighted fans who first learned about Olivia artists by seeing them on tour.

It's important to note that Olivia was building on a tradition. Black blueswomen, performing in the clubs of the Harlem Renaissance, preceded Olivia by decades in composing songs that rebuked male violence and celebrated the resonant resistance of " bulldagger " identity. White artists were just beginning to discover and learn from that songbook-and to address the racial divisions in feminist coalition-building as the '70s dawned.

Through processing and community feedback, Olivia became an intersectional voice-beginning with the 1975 Varied Voices of Black Women tour and the 1976 release of "Where Would I Be Without You," a spoken-word album pairing Bay Area poets Pat Parker and Judy Grahn.

From its earliest days, Olivia was singular in that it targeted gay women with one of the only positive, relationship-affirming products available to the niche group: love songs. Olivia's first full-length record, Christian's boldly titled 1974 LP I Know You Know, included songs like "Sweet Darling Woman" and "Ode to a Gym Teacher," which brought the women's music movement right into feminists' living rooms and house parties.

Olivia's most famous recording, Williamson's The Changer and the Changed, appeared in 1975. Changer had developed a nearly mystical hold over its listeners by the time Ms. magazine heralded Williamson on its cover as "the new star of women's music" in 1980. At concerts, audiences sang along to emotional ballads like "Sister" ("Lean on me, I am your sister,") "Song of the Soul" and "Waterfall. They also sighed aloud with the yearning strains of "Sweet Woman," which asserted "...I'll hold you and you'll be mine, sweet woman," a groundbreaking lyric no other female lead vocalist was singing at the time.

Describing the mood of those early years, Dlugacz (who continues to serve as Olivia's president) suggests "We were reaching out to an audience that wanted to be found, but not necessarily identified." After all, at a time when LGBTQ rights and protections did not exist in U.S. law, having an Olivia album was more or less "proof" of membership in a still-illegal tribe. The ambivalence Dlugacz describes could be seen at concerts, which as defiant mass gatherings, elicited emotions from fans about having to hide integral parts of themselves. Many women wept openly at discovering community and sisterhood; at seeing the full range of others like themselves.

The concert experience was life-changing for some, and at the same time terrifying for others who longed to become involved as local producers and distributors but feared losing jobs, child custody, housing. Venues ranged from Unitarian church basements to college campuses to women-only festivals in the woods, offering fans choices between public and private settings. Self-taught producers learned to accommodate audience needs with sliding-scale ticket prices, occasional child care, and, increasingly, sign language interpretation so that deaf women, too, could experience an evening of woman-positive lyrics and political rhetoric from the stage. With the advent of affordable tape cassettes and car tapedecks, even the most closeted Olivia fans could own the music and be inspired by it while driving to and from work.

Staging concerts by and for women without men at the sound board controls proved too much for some critics, who lobbed charges of reverse discrimination, illegal exclusion of males from public events, or the inherent inferiority of female engineers ("Olivia was an all-woman company. They made a point of doing without men, even if that meant a temporary lower level of performance," as Jerry Rodnitzky writes in Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of a Feminist Counterculture.) But most audiences were too rapt to care about imperfect sound quality, instead heady with the thrill of seeing women gain opportunity and skill in stage work roles once closed to them. And production values improved as concerts moved from fans' living rooms and cramped clubs to better venues.

Backstage, Olivia was not without strife-throughout its history the company battled confrontations over racism and money, plus dramatic breakup drama between artist couples. A painful boycott by some former fans concerned Olivia's employment of a transwoman, prolific sound engineer Sandy Stone, who resigned amid a bitter debate over her place in a women's recording company. (Stone was defended, then and now, by Olivia.)

With the help of women's dollars asserting sheer gratitude for the songbook of albums affirming women's lives and experiences, however, Olivia continued to be propelled forward. By the fall of 1982, Olivia was already commemorating its 10-year anniversary. In late November, the collective marked the occasion with a concert by Christian and Williamson at Carnegie Hall, the first time the venue publicly hosted a lesbian majority audience for a gala event.

Olivia's continued relevance today lies in this transparency and arc of diversity; it attracted artists who understood that music could evoke and address the range of milestones women were reaching. A single concert night could galvanize thousands to march for their rights in an era of social justice; an example of this was Olivia's 1977 album Lesbian Concentrate, recorded in response to Anita Bryant's homophobic "Save Our Children" campaign in Florida. Promotional materials for the album exhorted audiences to take action in securing lesbian rights.

In the 1990s, with the original collective long dispersed, and fewer women's music venues available for still-touring artists from the collective, Olivia Records was reborn as Olivia Cruises, a lesbian lifestyle experience that has taken hundreds of thousands of women on vacations to ports around the world, rainbow flag flying snappily from the bridge of luxury ships. The cruises and resort vacations offered year-round from Olivia Travel continue on, today, and attract women of all ages, ethnicities and income levels, some celebrating their now-legal weddings and honeymoons, some rejoicing in retirement.

If it feels impossible to convey the impact of this one company in a few paragraphs, 45 years of women's music archives sure won't fit inside one large file box. Right now, all of Olivia's archival material-the master recordings, the stored stock of old vinyl and cassettes, artists' posters and press kits from touring-are currently in a back room at the travel company's San Francisco headquarters, in the early stages of undergoing critical organization as new interest in Olivia's legacy is reflected by museum exhibits and research requests.

Where should those Olivia albums, and veteran fans' own scrapbooks of a lifetime in women's music, go next-in order to educate future generations? Who will impart these stories? Where does Olivia fit on the political timeline of feminism; of grassroots American music history? Is the generation that demanded women's history in college classes ready to see itself as historically meaningful?

A thoughtful museum staff can make the difference in welcoming, collecting, and cataloguing LGBTQ memorabilia from these potential donors. But it's a delicate mission, all the same. As longtime outsiders, many women who have lived to see domestic partner and marriage rights become realities are still skittish about attracting too much attention, lest the heavy gavel of discrimination descend again. The new option of displaying private, quasi-underground material ephemera from a radical movement feels, to some, like coming out of the closet all over again, as well as an admission of our own mortality.

Nevertheless, academics, political archivists, musicologists, and oral historians all stand to benefit from the rich storehouse of Olivia's legacy. (And there's plenty to go around for those just discovering Olivia: catalogued so far is a surplus of 3,212 45 singles, 868 LP albums, 400 cassette tapes and 1,205 CDs. The music lives.)

On the 45th anniversary of Olivia's founding, conversations about preserving both concert tour and voyage highlights have taken on a new urgency too. While all the original collective members and artists and most of the original distributors, producers and fans are still living, it's crucial to preserve their stories now. Olivia's material culture is secure-with many original albums still shrink-wrapped- but full oral histories and narrative memoirs are needed to pass along this torch of music activism.

We're not only taking measure of a recording company's success as a grassroots feminist enterprise, as a source of comfort and inspiration, as an artistic legacy with Grammy-winning and best-selling artists in the wheelhouse. We're taking the measure of a timeline, from first daring to voice women's lives to seeing that kind of political stance spoken at rallies, at the Academy Awards, and in exhibits marking 50 years since Stonewall. This is about women who happen to be gay being seen as part of the American fabric.

These daring women matter. Their collective history helped push forward the feminist movement, the LGBTQ movement, awareness about domestic violence and breast cancer and equal wages. The recorded ballads of their struggles and triumphs deserve to be heard and exhibited in our nation's museums- a trumpet blast against patriarchy, and a reminder that female equality and LGBTQ rights are incomplete revolutions, still in need of anthems.

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How Should We Archive the Soundtrack to 1970s Feminism?

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"I'm not ready to be a museum piece," a veteran of the women's music movement confided in me recently. During the second wave of feminism in the United States, women's music albums and concerts invited thousands and thousands to find validation in their identity as women and as lesbians, and to experience being the majority for a night: not in a smoke-filled, testosterone-filled bar, but in a music hall with some of the finest songwriters in the land onstage.

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Sojourner's Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" speech is legendary for its bridging of the struggle for racial justice and gender justice in the lives of Black woman. As such, it served as an essential precursor to the "intersectional" analysis we talk about today.

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Women, rise up now
Don't let them rewrite our lives
Make them hear our cries

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“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

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A documentary about the Jane collective, whose members risked their personal and professional lives to support women with unwanted pregnancies in the pre-Roe v. Wade era. A film which speaks to the urgency of the struggle for reproductive justice today.

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An American comedy starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as three working women who live out their fantasies of overthrowing the company's sexist boss. This is an example of feminism "going mainstream" through a major motion picture, and highlights the particular issues of pay inequality and sexism in the workplace.

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9 to 5 (1980) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

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One of the first works of what would later come to be known as "feminist science fiction." Ursula Le Guin opened the door to complex female and gender-fluid characters in a genre that had long prioritized male protagonists.

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Toni Morrison's debut novel, The Bluest Eye, tells the story of a young black girl who longs for blue eyes. The book was groundbreaking in its exploration of rape and incest and helped draw critical attention to the experiences of black girls as a feminist issue.

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With her novel, The Color Purple, Alice Walker became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The novel traces one African American woman's struggle for empowerment and self-love in the face of abuse, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

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A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" who "dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia."

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Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation."

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"Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

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"Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

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"I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps."

Adrienne Rich was a key figure in the writing and shaping of feminist poetry and theory. Rich, a lesbian, was widely celebrated as a poet, but also devoted her life to intersectional, anti-racist feminist dialogue and struggle.

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First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

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Diving into the Wreck - First having read the book of myths,

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"Before women could change patriarchy we had to change ourselves; we had to raise our consciousness." (bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody)

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Consciousness Raising group at meeting for the Women’s March, New York 1972

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Consciousness Raising groups were critical in the political and cultural evolution of the feminist movement. These grassroots, non-hierarchal gatherings served as spaces for discussion, healing, strategizing, and analysis building among hundreds of thousands of women, and were often held in people's homes.

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Harriet Tubman is most closely associated with the movement to abolish slavery in the U.S., but her life and work would inspire generations of feminist activists to come.

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The Combahee River Collective (which took its name from a raid led by Harriet Tubman) was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The Collective highlighted that the white feminist movement was not addressing their particular needs, and worked to combat this.

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The Personal is Political: A Feminist Movement Padlet

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The Personal is Political: A Feminist Movement Padlet

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A political slogan popularized in 1970 expressing a common belief among feminists that the personal experiences of women are rooted in their political situation and gender inequality.