The Little Folk Singer with a Big Agenda: Third Wave Feminism and Ani DiFranco

 

I grew up just 14 miles from Seneca Falls, New York, the home of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention, and the place commonly known as the “birthplace of women’s rights,” but it wasn’t first wave suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott or Susan B. Anthony that forced me to challenge the gender norms I’d learned from television and magazines. That inspiration came in the form of a 5’2”, 100- pound folk singer named Ani DiFranco.

With three older brothers, my childhood was spent watching Masters of the Universe, NFL games and The Dukes of Hazzard, thumbing through car magazines and playing with miniature plastic Army figures, but it wasn’t until I attended my first of dozens of DiFranco’s concerts that I started to question why She-Ra had to fight evil in a skimpy skirt and high-heeled boots, why the cheerleaders on the sideline of the Cowboys’ games were never called athletes, what conflicting climate must have existed in Hazzard County for Bo and Luke Duke to wear long-sleeved, button-up shirts and jeans while Daisy only wore cut-off shorts, why all convertibles came with a blond-haired, blue-eyed, bikini-clad hood ornament or why there were no female Army figures.

    A posterchild of third wave feminism, DiFranco raged against the patriarchy with songs like “Not a Pretty Girl,” whose lyrics mocked the status quo stereotypes of women perpetuated by popular culture:

I am not a pretty girl, that is not what I do

I ain’t no damsel in distress, and I don’t need to be rescued

So put me down, punk. Wouldn’t you prefer a maiden fair, isn’t there   a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere?

    DiFranco didn’t just champion common third wave standpoints like sexual freedom, body image, gender roles, the intersection of race and gender, the me-too movement and the social and economic power of women, she modeled them. She turned down multi-million-dollar record deals from male-dominated labels and started her own, Righteous Babe Records. She challenged the beauty norms cultivated by music video vixens by shaving her head and performing in combat boots instead of high heels and she refused to label her sexuality despite constant speculation from fans and the media.

    Thirty years have passed since I first discovered DiFranco’s music and became a more critical thinker with respect to gender roles, and in that time, the third and fourth waves have helped usher in two female presidential candidates, a female Speaker of the House, the country’s first female vice president, the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act and marginal improvements in the pay gap between men and women. During that time; however, we have also seen the growth of social media, where women constantly reinforce beauty norms with make-up tutorials and outfit-of-the-day videos; where we are bombarded with ads for GLP-1 medications and where academic achievements take a backseat to rush week festivities. While the fourth wave tackles these issues through digital activism, I can’t help but wonder what the fifth wave will bring, and I hope it brings it soon.