Anita Jane Bryant is an American singer. She had three Top 20 hits in the United States in the early 1960s. She was the 1958 Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and a brand ambassador from 1969 to 1980 for the Florida Citrus Commission.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, was a feminist women's music festival held annually from 1976 to 2015 in Oceana County, Michigan, on privately owned woodland near Hart Township referred to as "The Land" by Michfest organizers and attendees. The event was built, staffed, run, and attended exclusively by women, with girls, young boys and toddlers permitted.
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Feminist separatism is the theory that feminist opposition to patriarchy can be achieved through women's separation from men. Much of the theorizing is based in lesbian feminism.
June Elizabeth Millington is a Filipina-American guitarist, songwriter, producer, educator, and actress.
Cris Williamson is an American feminist singer-songwriter and recording artist. She was a visible lesbian political activist during an era when few who were unconnected to the lesbian community were aware of gay and lesbian issues. Williamson's music and insight have served as a catalyst for change in the creation of women-owned record companies in the 1970s. Using her musical talents, networking with other artists working in women's music, and her willingness to represent those who did not yet feel safe in speaking for themselves, Williamson is credited by many in the LGBT community for her contributions, both artistically, and politically, and continues to be a role model for a younger generation hoping to address concerns and obtain recognition for achievements specific to people who have historically been ignored.
Women's music is a movement, chiefly in Western popular music, said to promote music "by women, for women, and about women". The genre emerged as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement as well as the labor, civil rights, and peace movements. The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near. Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.
This article addresses the history of lesbianism in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, the members of same-sex female couples discussed here are not known to be lesbian, but they are mentioned as part of discussing the practice of lesbianism—that is, same-sex female sexual and romantic behavior.
Olivia Records is a women's music record label founded in 1973 by lesbian members of the Washington D.C. area. It was founded by Ginny Berson, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Jennifer Woodul, Kate Winter and five other women. Olivia Records sold two million records and produced about 40 albums during its twenty years of operation.
Meg Christian is an American folk singer associated with the women's music movement.
Teresa Trull is an American female singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer from Durham, North Carolina. She is recognized as a pioneer in Women's music, with her debut album The Ways a Woman Can Be released on Olivia Records in 1977.
Linda "Tui" Tillery is an American singer, percussionist, producer, songwriter, and music arranger. She began her professional singing career at age 19 with the Bay Area rock band The Loading Zone. She is recognized as a pioneer in women's music, with her second solo album titled Linda Tillery released on Olivia Records in 1977. In addition to performing, she was the producer on three of Olivia's first eight albums. Within the women's music genre, she has collaborated with June Millington, Deidre McCalla, Barbara Higbie, Holly Near, Margie Adam, and others. Tillery was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997 for Best Musical Album for Children.
Deidre McCalla is an American singer-songwriter from New York City. McCalla was raised around the folk music scene of Macdougal Street in New York, where she began her career. In 1983, she moved to northern California. She has released several albums on the women's music label Olivia Records.
Save Our Children, Inc. was an American political coalition formed in 1977 in Miami, Florida, to overturn a recently legislated county ordinance that banned discrimination in areas of housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. The coalition was publicly headed by celebrity singer Anita Bryant, who claimed the ordinance discriminated against her right to teach her children biblical morality because the ordinance specifically required parochial Christian schools, like the one her children attended, to hire openly homosexual teachers. It was a well-organized campaign that initiated a bitter political fight between gay activists and Christian fundamentalists. When the repeal of the ordinance went to a vote, it attracted the largest response of any special election in Dade County's history, passing by a more than 2-to-1 margin. In response to this vote, a group of gay and lesbian community members formed Pride South Florida, now known as Pride Fort Lauderdale, an organization whose mission was to fight for the rights of the gay and lesbian community in South Florida.
Jeanne Córdova was an American trailblazer of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and proud butch.
Maxine "Max" Adele Feldman was an American folk singer-songwriter, comedian and pioneer of women's music. Feldman's song "Angry Atthis," first performed in May 1969 and first recorded in 1972, is considered the first openly distributed out lesbian song of what would become the women's music movement. Feldman identified as a "big loud Jewish butch lesbian."
The Lesbian Tide (1971-1980) was a lesbian periodical published in the United States by the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. It was the first lesbian periodical in the US to reach a national audience and the first US magazine to use the word "lesbian" in the title.
Nedra Johnson is an American rhythm and blues and jazz singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. She has performed internationally at jazz, blues, pride and women's music festivals as a solo artist, a tuba player, and vocalist.
Lesbian erasure is a form of lesbophobia that involves the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within feminist groups or the LGBT community.
Bonnie J. Morris is an American scholar of women's studies. She completed a PhD in women's history at Binghamton University in 1989 and has taught at various universities including Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of California, Berkeley.
