"Garage Girls: Playing with Sound and Technology in the 1960s"

This presentation explores the global phenomenon of all-girl rock bands in the 1960s. Based on oral interviews with surviving band members, memoirs, sound and video recordings, photographs, archival materials, and histories of technology, popular music, gender and media studies, I argue that these bands shed new light on the history of adolescent girls and young women, who in the postwar era defied parental expectations and rejected gender norms and embraced what has historically been considered (with a very few exceptions) the domain of boys and men. Girls were not just responding to musical culture in the 1950s and ‘60s, as Susan Douglas argued in Where the Girls Are, they were making it. I argue that this is a crucial and overlooked aspect of both rock music culture and women and gender studies as these bands proliferated before there was a fully developed rock music media or an overtly masculinized rock music culture. It reframes the notion that guys were the only ones picking up electrified instruments and forming “garage bands” emulating the Beatles, as the story goes, once they appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1964. Girls were doing that as well, but we know practically nothing about them. Also, because they existed not only in the U.S., but also in the UK, Europe, the Nordic countries, Serbia, India, and Indonesia, their stories promise to reconfigure our understanding of women’s and young girls’ embrace of technology and power in electrified music making on a global scale.