photo: Heather Evans Smith

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When I was a little girl, I used to misinterpret a lyric in “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” from the musical South Pacific. I would loudly sing:

There ain’t a thing that’s wrong with any man here/

That can’t be cured by putting him near/

A girly, womanly, female FEMINIST dame!

My mother never corrected me, thank God. The Rodgers and Hammerstein original dame was actually of the female, feminine variety—I guess I’ve been finding feminism in music ever since.

I’d already had a copy of The Liberated Woman’s Songbook for about 10 years when I learned about the Dobbs decision to repeal Roe v. Wade in 2022. Most women that I know can remember exactly where they where when they first heard the news. That night I stayed up, sleepless in my kitchen in Chapel Hill, N.C., rage-scribbling and searching for something to hold on to. I grabbed a songbook that I’d picked up in a used bookstore somewhere along the way, drawn to its bold, very ‘70s cover and the short description on the front: “Seventy-seven singable folk songs about women and their battles with husbands, lovers, the devil, the system… and themselves.”

I was sold. I’m a singer-songwriter and advocate for women’s rights, but I also once recoiled when an ex described my songs as “songs for women.” Did Bob Dylan write “songs for men?” It was ridiculous. And yet, here I was looking to these folk songs for direction and hope. What did the women of the past sing about during times of struggle? How did they cope?

I started learning the songs in the book. Every day, I would sit at the piano and plunk one out. There were laments, calls for justice, labor anthems, suffrage songs and a hilarious complaint by a new bride to her mother about hating sex—all accompanied by provocative photographs and bits of historical context. Jerry Silverman, the guitarist and folklorist who compiled the book in 1971, was a longtime contributor to Sing Out! magazine and provided detailed information about each cut, but I wanted to know more. I spent time at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke, leafing through feminist zines from the Women’s Liberation Movement while wearing plastic gloves. I stood among the musty and mighty shelves at the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC trying to find the origins of some of these folk songs so that I could create a timeline. I wanted to present the songs in chronological order to tell a story. I wanted history to teach me something, to make me feel better. I’ve “prescribed” songs for friends going through tough breakups before. I know that songs can heal broken hearts.

Searching for recordings of these songs, I encountered a surprising number of renditions sung by men. There were 78s by cowboy singers and a YouTube set featuring older men with ponytails, interrupted by the occasional younger-man-with-a-ukulele offering. The great Pete Seeger had recorded many of these songs, as had Peggy Seeger, his wildly talented and prolific sister who I had only recently discovered. Why had I never heard of Peggy Seeger, the author of one of the most famous feminist anthems “Gonna Be an Engineer?” I devoured her catalog and pinched myself when, a little over a year later, I found myself on a Zoom call with her, talking about the project and inviting her to sing with us at the Barbican in London. She remembered hanging out with Jerry Silverman and Alan Lomax at The Singers Club, a folk club she ran with her late partner, the songwriter Ewan McColl, in London during the early 1960s. Peggy Seeger had recorded the first song on my timeline back in 1954, “Hard Is the Fortune of All Womankind.” The first verse dates back to 1728, from a British theatrical piece, “The Ladies Case:”

Oh hard is the fortune of all womankind/

They’re always controlled, always confined/

Controlled by their parents until they are wives/

Then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.

That verse was the soundtrack to many a grocery store run in 2024. How much has changed since those words were written in the 1700s? Three hundred years ago, women were legally considered possessions of men, handed down from their fathers to their husbands. They could not inherit property in their own right, earn their own income, vote or even claim their own children. There has been definite progress, yet we still have so far to go.

One of the first songs that I ended up gravitating toward was “One Hundred Years Hence,” which was penned by Fanny Gage in 1852. Gage was a respected writer, feminist and abolitionist who organized one of the earliest women’s conventions in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. She fought for many social changes that didn’t come through in her lifetime:

In one hundred years what a change will be made/

In politics, morals, religion and trade/

In leaders who teeter and tip-toe the line/

Things will improve in one hundred years time.

Singing that song 170 years later, on the eve of an extremely important election where women’s reproductive rights hang in the balance, it would be tempting to succumb to sarcasm—here we are again, nearly 200 years later, still fighting for basic control over our own bodies and medical decisions. But, as Woody Guthrie proclaimed in his 1943 New Year’s resolutions, I would rather keep the “hope machine running” and share in Gage’s optimism. I hope that in 100 years, women will have more equity, equal pay, bodily autonomy and, as Betty Friedan and Jacquelyn Reinach called for in their 1970 song of the same name, “Liberation, Now!” My young daughter knows the words to “Liberation, Now!” and sings it loudly around the kitchen table. I hope that she will see change in her lifetime.

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Dawn Landes released her seventh solo album, The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, in March via FunMachine Music.