Issue #90: Women's History Month and You

The most wonderful time of the year (????)

one woman at a time, and one of them will be Next

By Natalie

It starts with the listicles. Or the endless carousels of Instagram infographics, complete with a full paragraph’s worth of hashtags. 10 Women Who ________ or the First Woman to ______. History, but make it women. It reaches a zenith on International Women's Day, which was this past weekend — like so many things, a concept founded on radical (in this case, socialist and communist) ideas that has been co-opted by corporations and other toothless entities, becoming a bland, rosy-hued celebration of what exactly? It's hard to say. Ladies!!!

Most identity-based "heritage months" (as I am just learning they are called) exist in this same kind of limbo — relevant because the inequality they are intended to address is still pervasive, and also vague enough to allow for a wide array of disingenuous interpretations/capitalization. See, for example, the much-discussed corporatization of Pride month — hard to swallow — and how many companies have recently scaled back their embrace of Pride — scary in a completely different way.

In my experience, International Women's Day/Women's History Month/all of them tend to get most discussed as either pegs for content that, in a just world, would be timeless (or irrelevant, because all the things women have done would be recognized alongside men already), or as a punch line ("Can't believe I'm cleaning on International Women's Day" or something, you probably have better jokes than I do). Because on its face, these kinds of things are self-evidently a little silly: rarely is there an acknowledgement of any specific history month or day that doesn't come with the requisite "Every month should be ____ history month," because of course it should.

It doesn't take any kind of radical feminist philosophy to acknowledge that saying approximately half the world's population gets one special day is goofy, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that segmenting out history by identity, regardless of intent, generally has the effect of perpetuating that history's marginalization rather than erasing it. Of course the intent of these months is not so that people say, "OK, November is over and I don't need to care about Indigenous people until the next one rolls around" — but in practice, I feel like that's more often what happens. Awareness-raising that rings hollow because it reads as checking boxes. A friend texted asking what I thought of the Dallas Mavericks' broadcast having its first all-women broadcast team last Friday for International Women's Day. My response was more or less, shrug — having women fill roles taken the rest of the year by a cast of men just for a special International Women's Day treat is pretty insulting, but also if they're excited about it more power to them. Of all the meaningless gestures in the world, it's not the worst.

What does this have to do with country music? Well, a fair amount, considering it's a genre where women's success is still the exception to the overwhelmingly white male rule —a genre (like most of them) chock full of underappreciated "Women's History." We go over the embarrassing stats about women artists on country radio all the time in this newsletter, which only get more egregious when it comes to women who are not white and trans and nonbinary people. Perversely, pop country often gets critically derided in part because it is a genre that is (at least slightly) more popular with women — hence the excuse at radio that women don't want to listen to women.

As with so many gender-related qualms you truly can't win: women are somehow at fault for the lack of women on country radio because they're the ones listening to it and they don't like hearing women's voices, allegedly (tell that to the crowd at any Chicks or Shania show). Never mind that the gender gap in Americana etc. hasn't historically been all that much smaller, and plenty of gendered language is used to talk about what qualifies as Real/Worth Listening To Country. Again: You can't win (said with extra emphasis as one of two women running a newsletter about a genre that doesn't tend to get much respect in the broader music journalism community, truly compounding factors).

It's Women's History Month, and all I can think about is that we keep having to repeat it, finding new "firsts" and milestones to commemorate because it still isn't just normal for women to exist on the same plane as men — for gender to be irrelevant to the way art is received. CMT just announced their new Next Women of Country class (ahead of, say it with me, International Women's Day!), which includes a not-diverse-enough array of artists that range from brand-new to quite well-established (does this mean we're going to get Kaitlin Butts on country radio????).

Just about every one of the very few woman you do hear on country radio today — Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley, Kelsea Ballerini — has been part of the program, which promises to promote the artists across CMT platforms (woohoo) and "corporate synergy" with "our portfolio of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios & Paramount Media Network brands." Cool. Needless to say, all stuff that gets given to the guys as a matter of course. Also needless to say, the program is half as big as it was last year, and Leslie Fram, who started the program as well as a number of other important diversity measures at the network, left CMT last fall amid massive layoffs there.

Why should these artists be excited to be a Next Woman of Country? I'm fairly certain they all just want to be country singers, but no, they have to be Women Of Country, presumably one of the two to four allowed to succeed at any given time, a new generation of women perpetually made to feel like the exception to the male rule — from Kitty Wells to today. It feels, honestly, like we are just getting further from the place where all stories and histories are included in one, more accurate narrative — the true story of everyone on this planet together, because we don't live in our own little vacuums. The Next Women of Country deserve more than that patronizing title, just as we all — cis women, nonbinary people, trans men and women — deserve to be seen and heard and taken seriously all year round.