Taking Up Space

Rubymusic: A Popular History of Women’s Music and Culture
Connie Kuhns
Caitlin Press, March 31, 2023
$26.00

I love being a woman who loves music and the people behind it. In my mind and my bubble, women musicians are everything. Connie Kuhns’s book Rubymusic has introduced me to so many women musicians and their stories that I otherwise wouldn’t know.

Connie Kuhns is a journalist and broadcaster who spotlights women musicians and artists in her new book. For 40 years, she told these women’s stories in an industry dominated by men. She was also the producer and host of her radio show Rubymusic, where she played music of any genre created exclusively by women. It ran for 15 years and introduced countless people to new artists.

With content from as early as the 1970s, this book is filled with interviews, stories, opinion pieces, and concert reviews. Kuhns has done a remarkable job fitting numerous subjects and stories into her book, but it requires focus and readers would do well to go into it with an understanding that it is a compilation of old pieces.

Kuhns’s dedication to the scene shines through her thoughtful interview questions. She shares the conversations between her and a list of musicians, providing us with insight into their lives and what it was like under the pressure to have to prove themselves as an artist. She also shares heartbreaking stories, like that of the talented Janis Joplin who was led to believe no one liked her because she wasn’t deemed attractive.

Kuhns points out that women are expected to not only look their best, but also to cooperate and stay quiet. In Yoko Ono’s chapter, Kuhns gives us a look into the brilliant artist and chronicles her refusal to conform despite the hate she received for her relationship with John Lennon. Kuhns calls Ono her “daily devotion” and “a grey mist over a blond sea,” and highlights Ono’s most striking works, like her exhibit Arising and her instruction poems. Ono was successful as an avant-garde artist before she met Lennon, but this relationship made her visible in the public eye.

Today, on music streaming platforms like Spotify, you can find playlists like “Women of Rock” or “Indie Women.” These are great ways to discover music, especially as traditional radio declines. The variety of playlists filled with women musicians is comforting, but there’s no doubt that women’s rights and equality is an ongoing issue.

The music industry has made strides for the inclusion of woman musicians today, like the Recording Academy launching an initiative called Women in the Mix in 2019 asking labels and managers to consider at least two women when hiring for producers or engineers. However, it’s not uncommon to see women underrepresented on a festival bill or the charts, which is why Kuhns’s work is so important. This book — with its vivid details, photos, and quotes — has shown me what it meant to be a woman in music decades ago.

The book talks about how Winnipeg Folk Festival was committed to giving women a platform for their art by running a women’s only tent at the festival; however, in 1986, Rosalie Goldstein who was the artistic director of the festival at the time, decided to remove the tent. As a reader, I thought that was a loss until I read a few more lines to understand her reasoning. “I did so with the most loving care, because I believe it’s important for women to be dispersed throughout the entire body of the festival. I would not put up a tent and say, ‘here are all the blacks’ or ‘here are all the Jews,’” Kuhns quotes Goldstein.

Including this perspective shows how attitudes towards women in music have evolved to a place where women are encouraged to be part of the festival more widely and all genders are invited to watch women perform. Ultimately, I agree that women deserve to take up space wherever they want in a festival.

Taking up space, speaking up, and trying to navigate a man’s world is daunting, but the stories Kuhns chose to include in Rubymusic show us women who have succeeded despite having to work twice as hard as their male counterparts. A book like Rubymusic provides us with many well-written stories of the women who shaped the music scene we enjoy today — and reminds us why women are so strong.