>>Perspective in Retrospect

By the mid-1990s, riot grrrl was largely over. Only Bikini Kill continued to put out records; their final album, Reject All American, was released in 1996 (though a singles collection was released in 1998). The mainstream media easily replaced riot grrrl with the next women-in-rock "trend," the late-nineties wave of female singer/songwriters like Jewel, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan, who also founded the touring women's music festival, Lilith Fair. Though hardly a radical event compared to riot grrrl — Lilith Fair's performers by and large maintained the traditional singer/songwriter position, a female lead singer backed by an all-male band — McLachlan expressed surprise at how reluctant male promoters initially were at the idea of booking an all-female bill.

Sometimes it seemed like little had changed for women involved in the music industry. "When we started out there was no riot grrrl," says Erin Smith. "People would laugh at us when we'd get onstage, they'd say, 'When's the real band going to play?' Bratmobile just came back from Europe last month, [November 1999] and it was so sexist in Europe, I couldn't believe it! It was just like going back in time. They were still laughing and still like, 'What are you doing up there? You guys are silly.'"

Still, many women who'd helped start the riot grrrl movement went on to have careers in music, taking the lessons they'd learned from riot grrrl along with them. Corin Tucker, for example, says her experiences dealing with the media while in Heavens to Betsy had a direct impact on how she handled the same situations in her next band, Sleater-Kinney, founded in 1995.

Something else happened too: young women who had seen riot grrrl bands play were inspired to make music themselves, like the original riot grrrls had hoped. In the Los Angeles area, sisters Wendy and Amy Yao and their friend Emily Ryan sneaked out of their homes to see shows by Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, struck up a correspondence with Molly Neuman, and eventually formed their own band, Emily's Sassy Lime. They also came in contact with other riot grrrls at these shows, and credit the movement in helping raise their self-esteem.

Olympia's Nomy Lamm experienced a similar awakening through riot grrrl, discovering an issue with personal resonance for her that she hadn't known about — fat oppression. "Riot grrrl introduced this idea of there even being such a thing as fat oppression," she says. "Though I'd been experiencing it for many, many years, I didn't have a name for it [and] I wouldn't have thought of it as 'oppression.'" Lamm's zine on the subject eventually led to her writing an essay for the anthology Listen Up: Voices From The Next Feminist Generation and being chosen as one of Ms. magazine's "Women of the Year" in 1997.

Even women who had been involved in music before riot grrrl emerged were energized by the movement. Sharon Cheslow's experiences with riot grrrl led to her tackling a mammoth endeavor: compiling a list of women involved in punk from 1975 to 1980, a list that eventually numbered close to 200 names. It was really inspiring for me," she says. "There's this whole history out there, and I think it's really important for women to educate themselves to it. And it's not just punk music. It's in rock 'n' roll, it's in jazz, it's in blues, it's in experimental and avant-garde classical music; in every one of these genres, women's history is lost. Women are seen as an 'other.' And the only way things are going to change is if women are not [seen as] an 'other.'"

Others are heartened by the changes they have seen. "Even in some of the worst moments, you would still get letters from fans that would say, 'You really inspired me to speak up to whoever is oppressing me,'" says Allison Wolfe. "And I still receive notes that girls will give me at shows saying, 'Your songs were really important to me.' And just knowing that does make it all worthwhile."

Jean Smith is pleased both with the riot grrrl movement, and the increasing numbers of women involved in music. "It's a real luxury to have been part of any kind of inspiration for that," she says. "[And] that it is possible to actually change the course of history, social history, by your actions. There are a whole lot more female musicians now for a lot of different reasons. We've got your Jewel, and we had your Spice Girls, and all this kind of thing. It's not necessarily that it means there's going to be great music just because women are making it, but it's good that women are encouraged now. That hasn't always existed."

But there was one thing each participant in this project agreed on — while there are indeed more women playing in bands than ten years ago, there still aren't enough. "The media tells you that riot grrrl happened, 'Women In Rock' happened, and there's been this big breakthrough," says Tobi Vail. "But there hasn't been the big breakthrough. I thought by now there would be so many more female drummers, so many more all-woman bands, and so many more aggressive girl guitar players, and there aren't. That, to me, is really what depresses me about the whole thing, and makes me want to keep doing it too, you know?" It's this determination to keep pushing for further change that is the true legacy of riot grrrl.