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Evelyn McDonnell has written or coedited six books, from Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop and Rap to Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways. A longtime journalist, she has been a pop culture writer at The Miami Herald and a senior editor at The Village Voice. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Billboard, and Option. She teaches students how to write and make noise at Loyola Marymount University.

“The Rebel Girls: From Joe Hill to Bikini Kill”
In 1914, the Wobbly and warbler—or what we’d today call an “artivist”—Joe Hill found himself dismayed by what a sausage party the labor movement had become. “We have created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union, and our dances and blowouts are kind of stale and unnatural on account of being too much of a ‘buck’ affair; they are too lacking the life and inspiration which the woman alone can produce,” he wrote. He wanted to celebrate the does who were agitating for women—who, as he pointed out back then, were even more oppressed as workers than men. In Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, he found his muse. The next year he wrote a song celebrating this labor and feminist leader. “And the grafters in terror are trembling/ When her spite and defiance she’ll hurl,” he sang in “The Rebel Girl.”

Fast forward 78 years, and another songwriter and activist was disturbed by male dominance of another supposedly progressive movement, punk rock. Kathleen Hanna took inspiration for her “Rebel Girl,” written and recorded with her band Bikini Kill, from women around her, like performance artist Juliana Luecking. “She holds her head up so high/ I think I want to be her best friend.” This paper will compare these two “Rebel Girl”s and the way they book-end the 20th century with their visions of real-life revolutionary women. Did the figure of the rebel girl change with historical progress? Why did she not grow up to be a rebel woman? Were Bikini Kill aware of Hill’s anthem? This paper will look at the continuity of themes in protest music and the compelling figures who inspire and create it.

Photo credit: Tim Maxeiner