Everything Girl

Sheila Weller is truly a woman of the feminist movement of the late 60s and early 70s. She is a successful wife of 29 years, mother of a successful son and author of six books including two New York Times bestsellers, winner of numerous awards for journalism, a writer for Vanity Fair, and Senior Contributing Editor at Glamour. In short, she’s dynamic, spirited woman with entertaining tales of working for controversial and successful feminist magazine MS., while still in it’s infancy, and of the feminist movement itself.

Her latest book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–And the Journey of a Generation is an original and engaging look at three of music’s most important women. Much has been made of the contribution to the counter-culture by the male sing-songwriters of the day, like James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Paul Simon; but little recognition has ever been made of the ladies who were just as important, talented and cogent as the men.

Weller means to change that, even the score a little, to balance the scales with her new tell-all book about these three fascinating women. And in telling their story Weller is rewriting the tale of the feminist movement, righting a few wrongs, and shedding a tear or two along the way.

Recently this driven and effervescent woman talked to me on the phone about her new book, and her life in journalism.

Why write a book about these three women?

It started with me wanting to write the history of the women of my generation. I felt for a long time, ever since I read Sara Davidson’s Loose Change, that I wanted to write a book like that. And as the years went by there was more and more need for one because people were getting the decade wrong. They kept forgetting about it. People were writing about it differently. That was always the book I wanted to write.

I wrote a bunch of others in the meantime. But I was always waiting to tell this story. I always thought of these three women, when I thought of this generation. I always thought of their songs, and was aware of their lives — because we always kind of looked over what I call the celebrity divide and noticed what they were doing. They just kind of mattered. They were like us in many ways. One day I was walking down a country road and it just came to me, that I would write a triple biography. In this new way of doing it, in the Little Women or group kind of thing. Where you take real people, but do it in those kind of middle class, young women going out into the world stories.

That was quite an incestuous time in music wasn’t it. All those folk singers/singer-songwriters in California were all in each other’s lives.

And New York and definitely Laurel Canyon. Like any community there are shared people and certainly shared men (laughs), cue James Taylor.

Well he’s had everybody.

Poor James Taylor, these days he looks like such a dean of an architecture department somewhere.

I just wanted to tell that whole sweeping story. I knew it was them, I knew that they told that story. The more… It took me a long time to do this book, and I would get to certain points in the book and I would think “whew that’s what I meant”. I had a sense of it and nobody understood it, and now I’m kind of explaining it.

“Music is a special thing. It’s more special than movies. It gets in your bones and blood.”

Why did these women touch you in the way that they have?

Well first of all, when I say they have touched so many people I have discovered — what I knew but you really see it since this book has been out – how loved they are. How completely loved. Music is a special thing. It’s more special than movies. It gets in your bones and blood. During their heyday, and especially their beginning, there was very little media. We have a surplus of media, as everybody knows. Everybody is blogging, a million cable channels, everybody is iPod-ing, it’s completely over-saturated.

Back then it was just the radio and your record player. It was just a few people that really touched you. At the beginning of the counter-culture, at the beginning of the women’s movement, before it really started, there were very few people who had a pipeline to your sensibilities. You couldn’t even say that there was anything on TV. Nowadays TV is hip, it wasn’t then. It was such a total resonance for women who were their age, and then women who were their age started playing those songs for their daughters.

Do you think these women were important to the early feminist movement?

I absolutely do. I think that there was a sense… One of the stories I wanted to tell was the years before. The years when young women had discovered sexual liberation, had discovered a new bohemianism. Joni’s living alone in the garage, the long-skirted, dignified hippy-girl/artist. But there were no rules for men’s behaviour. I mean none. You see a show like Mad Men and people were deeply shocked to the core but was – even though it’s slightly exaggerated – that’s the way it was. Young women had to make those rules. That was the journey that led to feminism.

“Young women had to make those rules. That was the journey that led to feminism.”

Do you think these three women’s lives were as much about sexual liberation as they were about feminism?

I think they were about music and expressing themselves through music. Expressing different facets of themselves. They started it with a different personality. Carole started as a careerist songwriter, writing songs for other people.

Joni…it’s just absolutely amazing that she writes songs in her early twenties, that sound as if they were written by some world-weary 45 year old.

They all really wrote from their hearts and souls.

A.L. Harper is a freelance writer and motorbike fanatic originally from Salt Lake City, Utah but now living in Scotland. In edition to being the Managing Editor for All Things Girl, A.L. is the Assistant Music Editor for Blogcritics.org and a freelance writer for hire.

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