An entertaining and unique look at the role of women in 20th century America through well-known songs. Dorothy Marcic has created a fascinating and original story chronicling the development of women. Using the country's Top 40 hits with archetypes, lyrics, and personal stories from 1900 through 2000, she shows how in the early part of the century song lyrics resonated with women's dependency and compliant natures; echoed their eventual rebellion in the late 1960s; and mirrored their development as mature, independent persons in the 90s.
Dorothy Marcic was for many years a professor at Vanderbilt Universitys Owen Graduate School of Management and Director of Masters and Doctoral programs in Human Resource Development. In 2000, she left her fulltime academic position at Vanderbilt to become a playwright, and her first Musical, Respect, has been seen by nearly one million people. Her Off-Broadway musical SISTAS has been playing for 8 years. Her book Managing with the Wisdom of Love was a bestselling business book, along with Understanding Management, one of the top-selling management textbooks. Her latest book is With One Shot: Family Murder and a Search for Justice. Dr. Marcic teaches Leadership at Columbia University.
In Respect: Women and Popular Music, Dorothy Marcic, a much-published Columbia professor and playwright, explores the dramatic changes in the images of women and their relationships in popular music throughout the 20th century. I thought it a highly readable, enlightening and enjoyable mix of social science research and interviews with diverse women reminiscing about the impacts on their lives of top 40 hits by women singers. The author blends historical and lyrical analysis with her own painful and humorous personal memories of seeking solace and guidance in pop music while growing up in small-town Wisconsin. (Full disclosure: I’ve gotten to know her personally over the last year).
It's astonishing to learn how consistently over the first two-thirds of the last century, women were cast as compliant, codependent doormats in most popular music. Just one of numerous examples is the classic My Man, a 1922 hit for Fannie Brice, much recorded since. Though women had just won voting rights, the lyrics include:
“He isn’t good, He isn’t true, He beats me too, What can I do?”
Then and long after, wives had no legal rights and husbands could beat them without any legal consequences. So men, and the patriarchal culture, deemed female compliance essential to marriage. Blues queens like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang with less acceptance and more anger at husbands’ betrayals. And the growing female labor force participation through the Great Depression and World War II raised hopes that women’s strength and independence would win wider favor. But they were largely crushed by postwar radio and TV promotion of compliant-women hits by the likes of Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. As late as 1966, Sandy Posey could reach #12 on the national charts with her hit Born A Woman, singing:
“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, Or if you’re smart or dumb, A woman’s place in this old world Is under some man’s thumb.”
It gets worse, with zero irony intended. The author recalls that, when she played the song to her teenage daughters, they expressed shock and disbelief that it could ever have been widely accepted as “normal”.
But if the decade still rewarded doormat tunes like “I Will Follow Him” and “Stand By Your Man”, the book argues that Leslie Gore’s hit “You Don’t Own Me” marked a watershed. The next few years will long be remembered for the women’s movement and a new musical era of anger, strength and empowerment in iconic songs like Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” (1972) and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” (1979). Fast forward to the 21st century, and those same ingredients (plus brash doses of fun and sex) figure prominently in the work of global superstars Madonna, Beyonce’ and Lady Gaga.
This book led its author to leave her full-time academic world to start a new career as a playwright. National tours of her musical RESPECT were followed by an even more successful off-Broadway production, SISTAS. It charts the past century of leading black women vocalists through a rousing musical reunion of three African American sisters, a daughter and their white sister-in-law. Until the COVID pandemic, it ran for over nine years and holds the record as the longest-running off-Broadway African American musical. Let’s hope that it and this book enjoy renewed post-pandemic success.
While the thesis of Marcic's book is interesting, I feel she makes a big error when she argues that because a song was a Top 40 hit it is therefore culturally significant. Some songs that she spends a lot of time on are not very well known and not impactful today, especially compared to artists like Joni Mitchell, Heart, Stevie Nicks, Carole King, all of "riot girl" and punk, much of hip-hop etc., artists who have had a much larger cultural impact than their chart status may indicate. As such, we lose a lot of how female artists were able to grow and gain greater autonomy over their art, their sexuality, their family lives, etc., because Marcic focuses solely on the worst of the Top 40 pop pablum. She also often treats as insignificant whether or not a song was written by a man or a woman and rarely reads into the songs' structure. Is the song coming from the perspective of the singer herself or is this a character she is playing? Is the song saying something descriptive (this is what happens) or prescriptive (this is what should happen) when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality?
Marcia clearly has an interest in music created by and for women, but she lacks the pop cultural knowledge, textual criticism skills, and writerly finesse to pull off this book. That being said, I love the "Reminiscence" and "Contemplation" sections because they allow us to see what listeners (both men and women from a variety of backgrounds) think about the songs in the book. This is the sort of cultural sociology that makes a book like this meaningful. However, Marcic, in not trying to figure out how the songs impacted their listeners, in a broader sociocultural sense, fails to articulate why a certain song having a certain message (women should be subservient, women want to be independent, etc.) means anything at all. Popular music is bound up in the relationship between the artists (and their songs) and the people who listen to them (cf. Frith, "Performing Rites").
If you want to read a really great book focused on popular music and gender, I recommend "Girls Like Us" by Sheila Weller, "Out of the Vinyl Deeps" by Ellen Willis, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by Gerri Hirshey, or anything by Ann Powers and Jessica Hopper. There are a lot of important issues and ideas to be talked about here and, unfortunately, Marcic does not treat them with the nuance, detail, and critical knowledge they deserve.
A great way to learn and understand why women are the way they are and how they have progressed through history. history through music is a great way to catch the attention of a not so "history buff" type.