RAMBLE ON: "I Am Woman" by Helen Reddy

The curse of the white woman is to be disadvantaged in some ways and privileged in others, so that when they talk about serious women’s issues it can sound like they’re ignoring the vast amounts of advantages they do have – hence the rise of the term “white feminism” as a pejorative. And to be fair, the term doesn’t come from nothing; there are a lot of white women out there who do actually suck, and will use feminism either cynically or myopically in their own self-interest with little thought about whether it improves the world as a whole.  The other curse of the white woman is that there’s too many of them. Most underprivileged minorities have an outsider status that makes their preferred aesthetics inherently cool. But white women aren’t a minority; they’re the largest demographic, actually. And so, things that white women like -- pumpkin spice, Sex and the City – are considered lame both to a patriarchy that disrespects the tastes of women and to hipsters who only see in them the hegemonic boot of the mainstream. It will never be cool to be a white woman. And thus, every single totem and slogan of female empowerment gets diluted and becomes humiliatingly basic in no time at all. Pink pussyhats. Notorious RBG. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss. Cringe, am I right?

This is not a new development of the #MeToo era. For as long as the concept of coolness has existed, feminist slogans have become uncool, long before you could tag them as “white.” Today it’s “girlbosses,” before “girlbosses” it was “girl power,” and before “girl power” it was “I am woman, hear me roar,” all of them doomed to go from empowering to embarrassing, emblematic of a one-dimensional and thoughtless (and, most likely, middle-to-upper-class and white) version of feminism. The source of that last one is Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” a number one hit in 1972 and the iconic anthem of second-wave feminism, a truly groundbreaking era of thought and activism that radically rearranged American society. Long before I ever heard it as a song, I knew “I am woman hear me roar” as a stock punchline of the ‘80s and ‘90s (much in the same way that “woke” has become a sarcastic insult now). But in its day, coming just after the “Mad Men” era of rampant choking sexism, “I Am Woman” was not just a pop hit for pop feminism, it was a radical statement. Imagine playing this for a Zoomer now and trying to explain that to them. At the risk of understatement, “I Am Woman” has aged very strangely.

Helen Reddy was an Australian pop singer, and we mean “pop” in the “pre-rock and roll” sense of the word. She did write some of her songs, but she had more in common with Barbra Streisand or Anne Murray than Carole King. Her only real hit before this point had been a cover of a showtune (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar). Every picture of her has her in a housewife’s haircut and tasteful clothing. She’s no one’s image of a bra-burner or a riot grrrl, in other words; for god’s sake her name is “Helen” (the “Karen” of the ‘70s). Why was she the one to write the iconic female empowerment of all time?

Women’s Lib attracted all types, of course, not just campus radicals. Helen Reddy was one of them. To hear her tell it, she had to write “I Am Woman,” because it straight up didn’t exist at that point; songs by strong women, sure, but songs about strong women? Before “I Am Woman” there was nothing. This is as hard for me to imagine as the world just suddenly coming into existence; how could there be a time when there was no music to inspire women? In that regard, Helen Reddy was not just a woman making a statement, she’s a musical pioneer who invented an entire genre of song. My god, she could be one of the most influential songwriters of her lifetime.

But does it still inspire? “I Am Woman” is probably the world’s greatest example of white feminism, and in this case I don’t mean “white” to mean exclusionary – indeed, it goes out of its way to make its message as universal to the experience of womanhood as it can be. In this case, when I say “white,” I mean in the sense of being aesthetically just extremely fucking white. This is a song that has never heard a swinging rhythm in its life. It claps on the one and three without fail. Its potato salad is bland. If one is generous, you can hear bits of gospel in the singers backing up Helen that she is strong, she is invincible, she is woman. But that one whiff of soul is thoroughly undone by the dorky country guitar lick that opens the song, the layers of ‘70s-cheese woodwinds and horns, and most of all by Helen’s prim schoolmarm vocals. “I am woman, hear me roar,” sings Helen Reddy in a confident but un-forceful tone that never once seems like it’s going to reach a roar.

Maybe its whitebread-ness actually added to its power. Reddy’s music was soft enough to not be alienating to anyone, and at a time when the ugly stereotype for feminists was undateable battleaxes, the sight of Helen Reddy – young, married, visibly pregnant during some performances that year – throwing her support to those supposed hags (“nasty women,” you might say) might have been genuinely subversive. But it’s a tightrope -- “I Am Woman” is a radical message about womanhood (at the time the supposedly “weaker sex”), defining it as strength and struggle, “wisdom born of pain.” And yet despite that, it’s expansive and loving, and even equanimous in the battle of the sexes. “Such a long long way to go until I make my brother understand.” I have never, ever heard a feminist anything that referred to the male half of the world as “my brother,” or made the end goal of the movement “understanding.” This is not an angry song. If “I Am Woman” strikes as edgeless and uncontroversial now, that may be by design – most of its power comes from its sunny, undiluted optimism.

Maybe instead the problem is that it’s not exclusionary enough. Basically all songs about what “women” or “men” are like are too broad, and they all kind of rub me wrong. (I don’t even really like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” very much. Some girls just wanna study hard and focus on their careers. Where’s their song, Cyndi?) What right has Helen Reddy to try and speak for all women anyway? As the inter-feminist wars of the new millennium have shown, some women you just straight up don’t want to be in solidarity with. I first heard – really heard – “I Am Woman” as a song because of a radio DJ parody circa 2008 about Sarah Palin; it takes no stretch of the imagination at all to envision Sarah Palin singing “I Am Woman” sincerely. Can a song like “I Am Woman” retain any power if even Republican women can sing it? Could a song like that not be ruined when the “wrong” kind of women like it? The only notable recent cover of the song is by the cast of Sex and the City during the second movie (another astonishing work of white feminism, and here I do mean “white” as in “privileged and myopic”); what could possibly be more of a case against the song than that?

But could “I Am Woman” have worked if it hadn’t been that broad? One of the more fascinating quotes from Reddy about it was that her brother-in-law used it as a pump-up anthem to start his day. Is a song called “I Am Woman” any good if men like it?? That’s a stupid question, of course that doesn’t stop it from being good; how many white people have enjoyed songs by Black artists about civil rights? It’s easy to forget amongst the relentless doomerism of today that the movement represented by “I Am Woman” accomplished many great things. If “I Am Woman” can take credit for any of that, it would surely because it made female empowerment so palatable to so many.

I love “I Am Woman.” Unreservedly. I don’t know if a man’s endorsement is a point in its favor or not, but I can easily see why it was a hit. I’ve interrogated myself to see if I mean that in any kind of ironic way, but no, I don’t think I do, and I also don’t think its complicated place in history really adds or detracts anything; it’s just a killer song, its innate dorkiness included. It just builds, you know? I am STRONG (strong!!). I am INVINCIBLE (invincible!!). Even if you are not woman, it’s pretty easy to feel that. It’s not surprising to me that “I Am Woman” has become an irrelevant historical relic; the early optimism of women’s lib died out against an ugly backlash in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and most of the feminist anthems since then have been a lot more confrontational than the corny uplift of “I Am Woman.” Also, its production just hasn’t aged well. But “I Am Woman” imagines victory over the glass ceiling as not something to be fought for so much as something inevitable. “I Am Woman” failed in its attempts to be universal, not through any fault of its message but just by being cheesy and dated. There are worse crimes. I don't know if "I Am Woman" is a good song, but it is a perfect song -- a song that absolutely needed to exist.