NPR book 'How Women Made Music' centers women in music history — right where they were all along

Music is a male-dominated industry, which has led to women and other marginalized genders getting left out of music history.

In 2022, 30% of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart were women. Locally, the Bloomington-Normal the music industry has been overwhelmingly male-dominated, as WGLT previously reported, with female-led bands making up only a small percentage of acts booked at several popular venues.

Some people are actively trying to make women more prominent in the music industry. In a 2023 interview, Town of Normal Civic Arts Specialist Morgan Schulte said she will “snatch up” female-fronted bands in “two seconds.”

“I had so many female-fronted bands this year reach out and get a hold of me. It’s not equal to the [number of] males, but now I’m seeing more and more of them,” said Schulte.

Schulte reported that during the town's 2024 outdoor music season, 39% of bookings (50 out of 127) were female-fronted. The gender gap has improved, though Schulte said it should be as close to 50/50 as possible.

An author and editor duo who contributed to NPR’s Turning the Tables series aim to fill the gender gap in music history even more with their book How Women Made Music.

Author Ann Powers said the idea for the book came to her and some friends, one of those being editor Alison Fesnsterstock, 10 years ago while having a conversation about female guitar player Barbara Lynn.

“We thought she was so dynamic,” said Powers. “And we started to talk about why we didn't know that much about her. Why was she left out of all these histories and lists? And she's never on those ‘best guitarist of all time’ kinds of lists.”

The conversation about Barbara Lynn got Powers and her friends to discuss other great women guitarists they did not know much about, which eventually led them to talk about the exclusion and marginalization of women in music.

“We've always got Bob Dylan to go in that top slot. We always have the Beatles. We always have the [Rolling] Stones,” said Powers. “So where is someone like Queen Latifah on that list? Realizing that even with the progress we had made in the 21st century, women are still underestimated, underrepresented [and] sidelined in a way, made us want to do something that made it impossible for women to be sidelined. And there's only one way to do that, and it's to only focus on women.”

How Women Made Music only features women musicians.

Editor Alison Fensterstock added, “It's not really a secret history, it's not really an alternative history. It just is the history of popular music. Everyone is there.”

Women get obscured by the men who have their “lifetime reservation” in the top 10 spots of best musicians in history, said Fensterstock.

“So you just have to shift your focus a little bit and decenter the men, and then [women musicians] are revealed where they were all along," said Fensterstock.

Fensterstock said the book is a feminist project because it took the idea of a list—a very linear and traditionally masculine tool—and applied it to a book about only women.

Determining who was featured in the book was “very democratic. It was not hierarchical,” said Fensterstock. “It was kind of a constant conversation where no single voice was privileged, or at least that was the point.”

The book integrated materials from more than 50 years of NPR interviews.

“One thing that I loved about putting the different elements of the book together and going into the NPR archives and finding old broadcast interviews to excerpt [is that] you see people talking to each other across time,” said Fensterstock.

An example of artists talking across time is in the chapter Warriors, which is about activism in music.

“You have Odetta talking about how, even though she was trained as a classical singer, moving into folk helped her really express what she felt was necessary expression [and] necessary political action,” said Fensterstock.

“And then two pages later you have Tracy Chapman from 1988 after [her] first album came out. It was such a hit. Everyone's saying to [her], ‘It's amazing that you're a Black woman who's a protest folk singer. They never do that.’ And Tracy Chapman's like, ‘It's frustrating, because this has been going on for decades.’ And you're like, ‘Yeah, just two pages ago there was Odetta.’”

The chapters are organized by themes rather than chronologically in order to have those conversations throughout time.

Powers said organizing the content for their book was a real challenge.

“We had commissioned very different kinds of pieces: very short pieces, 5,000-word essays [and] things that were in between,” said Powers. “We had podcast conversations, we had performances. And Alison had to figure out what would be the glue, how does all this hang together?”

Powers said Fensterstock refers to the book as “the zine of her dreams."

“And it has that handmade feel, that feel of just being alive and part of a conversation,” Powers said.

The book has been a great “closing the circle” moment for Powers.

“Back in 1994, or maybe 1995, my friend and colleague, Evelyn McDonald, and I edited a book called Rock She Wrote, which was the very first anthology of women writing about popular music,” said Powers. “So this project is a really great turn of the wheel, closing of the circle for me to see how far we've come since the 90s, which was another time in which women were very prominent [and] getting a lot of attention.”

Powers said she calls the 1990s “the decade of the year of women in rock” because it felt like every single year was coined “the year of women in rock.”

“Hopefully now we're in a really different time when there isn't just a year of women in rock, and there isn't just a year-end feature about women in rock or in music in general, but that women hold equal space with [men], non-binary people and trans people too,” said Powers.

How Women Made Music is available online and at major bookstore retailers.