“The Beatles Are Coming!” Conjecture and Conviction in the Myth of Kennedy, America and the Beatles
Ian Inglis
Popular Music and Society, Summer 2000.
“In challenging such traditions, the Beatles were to accomplish much more. By undermining the divisions, hierarchies, and conventions of sexuality in the early 1960s, the group was exposing the possibility of alternatives. It has been pointed out that the young women who participated in the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s were from the same generation who had seen in the Beatles a first opportunity to revolt against the structural and cultural constraints embedded in a highly sexualized society. In 1964, “cracks were beginning to appear in the walls restraining female energy and sexuality” (Dougls 121. It is ironic that John Lennon’s later support for the feminist movement, which he saw as a belated attempt to recompense his self-confessed earlier sexism, should be inspected and largely rejected by many who had first been alerted to the politics of change by the singer himself: “Beatlemania was the first mass outburst of the sixties to feature women…it was the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution” (Ehrenreich et al 85).
Ian Inglis
Popular Music and Society, Summer 2000.
“In challenging such traditions, the Beatles were to accomplish much more. By undermining the divisions, hierarchies, and conventions of sexuality in the early 1960s, the group was exposing the possibility of alternatives. It has been pointed out that the young women who participated in the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s were from the same generation who had seen in the Beatles a first opportunity to revolt against the structural and cultural constraints embedded in a highly sexualized society. In 1964, “cracks were beginning to appear in the walls restraining female energy and sexuality” (Dougls 121. It is ironic that John Lennon’s later support for the feminist movement, which he saw as a belated attempt to recompense his self-confessed earlier sexism, should be inspected and largely rejected by many who had first been alerted to the politics of change by the singer himself: “Beatlemania was the first mass outburst of the sixties to feature women…it was the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution” (Ehrenreich et al 85).
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