I’ve been reading a fabulous new book this week. Sheila Weller has done a bang up job of interweaving the lives and times of a few of my favorite singer/songwriters in Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni MItchell, Carly Simon - and the journey of a generation.
With a mind boggling wealth of research and detail, Sheila provides us with a social history of the women’s movement, the Vietnam War, the sixties assassinations, while also giving us the juicy personal biographies of these three fascinating women, born in the mid-1940’s.
First of all, I enjoyed this thick tome for its reminders of how much life has changed in America for women since the 1950’s. All of these women struggled mightily against a male dominated, sexist world, where womens’ identities were very much about the men they were with, and women on their own had few rights and very little power.
They also struggled against their upbring which taught them to minimize themselves and their talent for the men in their lives. The man were seen as the “amazing talent” that these women should put aside their own personal pursuits for, a social phenomenon I call ’selflessness.’
The 1960’s were the first time in American history when “young women suddenly stopped seeing marriage as the ultimate event of their early twenties.” Conflicts between love and ambition were finally acknowledged as valid and crucial in womens’ lives, and these three world class musicians had to live these contradictions on a daily basis.
Joni Mitchell especially struggled with her fundamental need to be an unbound creative spirit in a world that did not appreciate that kind of behavior in women. “She didn’t want to be like her grandmothers. They had given up artistic careers to take care of husbands, ” said Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash fame.
BTW, CSN’s song “Our House” was written by Nash soon after he moved in with Joni in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960’s. Joni’s song “My Old Man” from her Blue album is written with Graham Nash in mind.
The book is filled with interesting little tidbits, brief glimpses into the lives of famous people, that remind us of our past while also showing us that being a rock star doesn’t solve any of our personal problems. That’s always somehow reassuring to me.
It is far too easy to project all sorts of euphoric fantasies onto other peoples’ lives and, in that way, feel cheated in our own. In the end we all have to learn to live with ourselves. There’s the rub!
