Between The Screams: Claiming Space in Beatlemania

Images of screaming young women are integral to the recent commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of “Beatlemania” and to the visual record of the 1960s.  Yet as much as these smiling, frantic, faces are seen and their screaming voices are heard in documentary footage and live recordings, the experiences of these women have been largely glossed over in histories of the 1960s as well as histories of popular music.  As historical subjects, the voices of Beatlemania are heard mainly in screams.  While those screams are significant, alone they do not tell the rich story of connection, meaning, and liberation of which they were a part.  Drawing on contemporary coverage, archival sources, oral history, and memoirs, this paper illuminates the experiences of women as fans and to recast them as significant historical actors in the context of the 1960s and within the intersections of gender and cultural rebellion.  By focusing on the ways in which women enacted their fandom in public, often disregarding gendered expectations of behavior and display, I argue that by occupying public, visible spaces, many women deployed fandom as a terrain on which to challenge gender conventions in public spaces and behavior.  My work is premised on the agency of fans and helps shift the lens of popular music studies, often focused on performers and too often the exclusive purview of men, towards audiences and women, rendering a deeper understanding of the connections between music, the project of women’s liberation, and the cultural rebellion of the 1960s.