Both movements created and relied on the support of women both within their community and outside of it. However, in the history of feminism, most do not give the same courtesy to the older generation, the second wave feminists. In everything from method to style, from content to mode of production, riot grrrls stood on the shoulders of second wave feminists and pushed their work into new areas, and to deny that is to deny a cross-generational community of women. But what about those who saw a need to distance themselves from a past where feminism was yet another set of rules for women to conform to? The sex-wars aside, this is the same story that every social movement goes through.1 Susan Brownmiller admitted that she never bothered to learn about the suffrage movement because she saw them as stuffy, “a bunch of ladies in hats, marching.”2 Now, of course, she knows better. Is it surprising then that riot grrrls didn’t rush to align themselves with their most recent feminist foremothers? The split over prostitution and pornography gave the male-dominated press an excuse to paint the feminists as man-hating, prudish women.
For those who made grrrl zines, “the acts of imaging, naming, and even hyping a project were necessary first steps in its process of creation.”3 The whole process, from filling one’s individual half sheet of paper to rubber-cementing the pages together, to appropriating someone else’s copy machine and passing out the finished product at a DIY show was about more than just the zine. The making of Riot Grrrl necessitated, relied on, and created a community that gave space to women who felt marginalized in their own cultural space. This community enacted real social change, organizing women to take part in protests and educating many about the political nature of their gendered oppression. From the lists of other zines a reader might like in Riot Grrrl to the suggested reading at the back of Women's Liberation Newsletter SPAZM, from the creators of Riot Grrrl meeting through music zines to Shulamith Firestone being sent from Chicago to New York with other people's activist contacts, these movements are all about connecting women to other women.4
If Women’s Liberation was a face to face movement, Riot Grrrl was a zine to zine movement. Although they did meet occasionally and eventually, most of the consciousness-raising and organization happened in the Xeroxed pages of a zine. The reliance on zines for dissemination of distribution has several possible explanations, but I would argue that a large part of it was the aesthetic. They arrived like presents, glittery and personalized, in the mail and gave the reader the desire to get involved.5 Because the Women’s Liberation Movement set out to change women-oppressing laws, their actions were radical and designed to attract media attention. As a result, they relied much more heavily on mainstream media and traditional press. Riot Grrrl on the other hand was made up largely of punk rock groups who despised the popular media and were less interested in turning their own raised consciousness – because that’s essentially what it boils down to – into anything further than their own education and the formation of networks of solidarity. Although Baumgardner argues that “Riot Grrrls weren’t pushing a radical feminism,” they were connecting with the legacy of one and continuing its work.6 And surely, in a world in which men write most of the historys, make most of the music, edit most of the new sources, and control most of the culture, even that is radical feminism? By forging bonds with each other and with the feminists of the past -- event without intending to do so -- riot grrrls subvert the expectation and dominant depiction of women as competitive and disconnected.
1. The controversy and disagreement surrounding prostitution and pornography that split second wave feminists is commonly referred to as the “sex wars.”
2. Brownmiller, Susan, Personal Interview, Zoe Guttenplan, 05/12/16.
3. Marcus, Sara, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 49.
4. Brownmiller, Susan, In Our Time, New York: The Dial Press, 1999, 20.
5. Zeisler, Andi ‘Forward’ from Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines : Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York, US: NYU Press, 2009.
6. Baumgardner, Jennifer, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, 133.