Feminist Music Quotes

Lauryn Hill inspired me so much. She had that whole women's empowerment vibe in all of her songs back when that didn't even exist.

When I think about the cause I'm most passionate about, it's all in my music all the time, because I'm always singing about the empowerment of women. Always, even when it's a little love song - it's still about the empowerment of women and this high spiritual nature of love. It's the biggest healer ever.

Look at Loretta Lynn. Look at Jeannie C. Rily singing 'Harper Valley PTA' and Tammy Wynette singing about divorce. They were ahead of their times in a lot of ways.

There's still a lot of misogynist pop music out there, and I think that hearing something that's so explicitly feminist and so angry - when we're still growing up in a culture where girls and women are not supposed to be angry - is a real revelation for young women.

I go to lectures and girls are finding out about Bikini Kill or Le Tigre for the first time and are like,' This is my jam!' It still feels fresh to them.

A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.

With Sleater-Kinney, we have a lot of earnest fans, and we were an earnest band.

I saw an article where the manager of the Pussycat Dolls, which is kind of this like striptease band, girl band, said, oh well, the girls are totally third-wave feminist. This is what third-wave feminism is about. Like you don't get to use that word. You don't get to say that something is feminist as a way to sell back sexism to women, as a way to further consumerist ideas.

I started dating JD Samson from Le Tigre, and suddenly I was listening to more up-tempo music and old dance music, like ESG and Gang of Four, and I thought, 'Wow. This is fun.'

There is a lot to say about what Bikini Kill and other 'riot grrrl' bands were able to achieve when they first set out. They were not some momentary, convulsive, creative spasm of independent music. There was a very real, relevant point of view being expressed.

Listening to Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna gave me the confidence I needed to get up on stage and be photographed every night on tour.

When I was little I wanted to be like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love or be attached to the X-girls and hang out in downtown culture.

What was nice about the nineties is that it was an example of music that responded to a desire of the times. It spoke to the social conditions of the times. Women were making more money. Women were saying, "My voice counts. If we're going out on a Friday night, I don't want to see a Rambo movie. I want to go see a singer/songwriter who sings about my life".

Despite erasure by the media and other patriarchal institutions, there was, by 1975, a substantial body of feminist writings as well as artwork, music, films, and organization of all kinds.

I was in a band in the '90s called Bikini Kill, and we were so freaked out about documentation then, and there was the whole thing, not just about the male gaze, but that people were going to misrepresent you... a kind fear of the mainstream that a lot of us had.

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.