Earlier, we excoriated the Beatles for their misogynistic missteps. Below, we praise them for their emergent feminism.
To fully appreciate that emergence, it’s helpful to place oneself firmly in the context of the early Sixties. As Kenneth Womack expresses it,
“Rock ’n’ roll, or even popular music, [was] often highly gendered and sexist. It certainly was paternalistic in the Sixties and prior, in terms of songs being directed at women as objects, women as needing to be ‘counseled’ about love, [or] it was about coming on to them, even if it was just something innocent and romantic...”
Innocent and romantic are certainly words that can be applied to the Beatles’ early songs. We’ve already noted, in our ‘pronoun’ analysis above, that the big meta-hook of Beatles lyricism is that the singer is directly addressing the female listener: I’m singing to you! Though this wasn’t unique to the Beatles, they were certainly the first to platform their entire musical presentation on that technique.
Even then, when their songs were largely themed on courtship and Happy-in-Love, there’s a submissive quality in their lyrical expression that separates them from the rock ‘n’ roll attitude that Womack describes - the singer is presenting himself for the woman’s approval, hoping to demonstrate his worthiness:
This boy wouldn’t mind the pain
Would always feel the same
If this boy gets you back again...
In this new perspective, it’s the woman’s simple presence that the singer treasures, over and above her affections or her sexuality:
I don’t need to hug or hold you tight
I just want to dance with you all night
In this world there’s nothing I would rather do
‘Cause I’m happy just to dance with you
John goes for broke in “It Won’t Be Long”, where he actually goes so far as to declare his own helplessness:
Every night when everybody has fun
Here I am sitting all on my own
I’ll be good like I know I should
You’re coming home, you’re coming home
And, more revealing still,
It won’t be long ‘til I belong to you
I belong to you... rather than the other way around.
Even more telling is the man-to-man tone of “She Loves You”, where the singer is an observer, rather than a lover, telling one of his pals to get his act together after mistreating his girlfriend:
You know it’s up to you
I think it’s only fair
Pride can hurt you too
Apologize to her
“This is a long way from groin-centered rock,” writes columnist Karen Hooper.
In putting a song like this on Top 40 radio, the Beatles are sending out a new take on relationships, in which guys need to man up and treat their women right, and accept the responsibility that goes with the privilege. That in itself was revolutionary at the time.
Soon after, Womack says, the Beatles’ covert feminism took another step forward:
“...the Beatles very consciously in 1965 began to change their tone,” he said. “They created a very specific type of female character who would think for herself and did not need a man. And that is revelatory, really. We have many songs that begin to appear at that point that are highly progressive about women living their own interests and aims and pleasure, as opposed to serving some undefinable other. It’s pretty exciting stuff.”
We’ve already noted the Women of Rubber Soul – John's clandestine lover in “Norwegian Wood”, the soul-crushing antagonist in “Girl” - as women empowered.
There’s also the woman in “Ticket to Ride”, whose independence and agency are a tremendous torment to John, as his love goes unrequited. These characters exist in the Beatles landscape to make more real and relevant their commentary on love and relationship, and (whether intentionally or not) present themselves more honestly.
This new woman appears again and again – in “Drive My Car”, “Day Tripper” - relentlessly underscoring feminine independence, a portrait of a woman who doesn’t need a man to make her way in the world. One of her most telling incarnations surfaces on Pepper, in the form of the teenage girl who slips out the back door of her parents’ home, willing to forfeit a life of ease for a self-directed one.
But it wasn’t just the lyrics and the characters they brought to life. The Beatles themselves promoted a new and different attitude about gender relations, simply in the way they presented themselves. This began with their appreciation of girl-group music, according to writer Cameron Hilditch:
“The Rolling Stones wanted to be Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf,” he wrote. “The Beatles wanted to be the Shirelles or the Ronettes.”
That’s a very telling insight, because the songs of the Shirelles and the Ronettes position the woman as supplicant and the man as having the power in the relationship. Per Hilditch, when the Beatles stepped into that dynamic, the gender reversal changes everything:
“In girl-group love songs of the Sixties, there is a traditional division of masculine and feminine gender roles in matters of courtship,” he writes. “The singer (a woman) is an adoring onlooker, devoid of sexual agency but hoping against hope that the object of the song (a man) will choose her and treat her well... The man to whom she is singing is the one with all the choices, all the power, all the prerogatives, as society in the Fifties and early Sixties basically dictated. The Beatles completely reverse this dynamic. They put themselves in the place of the helpless, passive supplicant and bestow all of the sexual agency in the relationship on the girl. This dynamic is at work most explicitly in their recorded covers of girl-group songs, such as the Marvelettes’ ‘Please, Mister Postman’. Lennon changes the noun from ‘boyfriend’ to ‘girlfriend,’ and, in doing so, upends centuries of traditional gender dynamics.”
The result, Hilditch argues, is that “the Beatles told girls that it was okay to be the one making decisions and taking action when it comes to sex and relationships. They also gave boys permission to be more vulnerable and to ask for love and affection from the opposite sex. As a result of Lennon and McCartney’s role-reversal with the Shirelles and the Ronettes, they wrote songs in which men are more feminine and women are more masculine, in terms of how the two genders relate to one another, than had been the case in pop music before.”
They were, he concluded, “deconstructing the crew-cut, buttoned-down, Eisenhower-era models of masculinity and femininity.”
“The Beatles helped feminize the culture,” wrote Martin King in Men, Masculinity and The Beatles. “The implications of the Beatles’ relatively androgynous appearance had a far more profound effect on sexual and women’s liberation than anyone could have guessed at the time. [They] challenged the definition that existed during their time of what it meant to be a man. This ultimately allowed them to help change the way men feel and look.”
All this adds up, in Hilditch’s formulation, to revolution. The bolstering of female sexual agency and the creation of safe zones for male vulnerability and supplication put the lie to the patriarchal hierarchy of love and sex that had dominated Western culture seemingly for eons. No longer was the man in charge; no longer was the female there for his pleasure and reproductive legacy. Love is a two-way street, they declared, and sex is as much a pleasure-oriented domain for women as for men.
“The music of the Beatles divorces sex from any necessary connection with child-rearing and monogamy and pairs it with the exhilarating romantic ethic of the courtly-love tradition,” Hilditch wrote. “They took the material conditions of the sexual revolution (the invention of effective birth control) and used it as a jumping-off point for renovating the relationship between the sexes. Not that any of this was deliberate, of course; no one, least of all the Beatles themselves, could have imagined that their music would have any kind of broad social influence, let alone that it would become the world’s favorite thing. But it is, nevertheless, what happened. There isn’t a single corner or facet of pop culture that hasn’t been affected by the way that John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang about girls.”
This is not to say, of course, that the Beatles themselves actually lived up to the gender-balanced idealism of their songs. Womack felt that they certainly didn’t.
“I think [Paul and John] were very aware that they were these kinds of contradictions, that they were talking out of both sides of their mouths,” he wrote. “Their own actions hadn’t caught up with their intellectual abilities. But I do think they were conscious of the fact that they were hypocrites. I think it actually makes them more interesting that they’re both victimizers, to a certain extent, and wanting to be better. They are very fractured vessels, but they knew enough to believe it was important and to use their massive bully pulpit or bullhorn, which is still about the biggest one in history, to talk about these things.”
In any case, the Sexual Revolution rolled forward, feminism swept the West, and we live in a very different world today because of those transitional years. And the Beatles were certainly there at the center of it all.
“The Beatles may not have invented birth control,” wrote Hilditch, “but they did invent the self-image of the young people of the Sixties who used it. They provided these young people with music and lyrics that acclimatized them to the new sexual technology and taught them how to use it to relate to each other in a new and exciting way. That’s why the girls in Shea Stadium lost their minds, their dignity, and any sense of self-restraint at the sight of Paul McCartney, but probably hadn’t a clue as to who invented the Pill.”
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