Beth Ditto, Ethel Merman, and Feminism

(Link courtesy of redlightpolitics )

In an interview for Spinner.com, Gossip's Beth Ditto -- who recently released her first solo ep  -- lists some of her early feminist icons as Miss Piggy, Whoopi Goldberg, Aretha Franklin and Ethel Merman:

I worshipped Ethel Merman and I worshipped Ethel Merman a lot. It's incredible -- Ethel Merman was a conventional singer. Her naming her child Ethel Merman, Jr., was, to me, one of the coolest feminist things. Aretha Franklin was a teenage mom, a musician who came from an incredibly Christian background, but there was a lot of love, which is really inspiring in a feminist way. Whoopi Goldberg was also a really big one for me -- she was one of the first people I heard talk about back-alley abortions.

She also talks a little about riot grrrl's influence:

All those things slipped under the radar. Feminist theory that wasn't accessible, which is why Riot Grrrl was so cool. It basically gave academic language to people who didn't have one at all, a feminist language. It gave us an understanding, made it more accessible to people who weren't in college. That was really rad.

As much as I want to raise my fist in solidarity, I have mixed feelings about riot grrrl's inclusivity, or lack of it, which I've written about at length here. Riot grrrl, as told by mainstream media (which, frankly, was the way a number of girls -- myself included -- heard about riot grrrl), was intrinsically tied to its music to the point of being divorced from any genuine meaning, was overwhelmingly white and middle-class, and is seen as largely responsible for informing the politics of a generation of women. To me, those things make it everything it wasn't supposed to be.

I don't say this to take away something that gave a lot of women a voice, and put a name to those feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability, but with the current deluge of 90s nostalgia, it's something that's often glossed over.