Candy Leonard

I recently had the pleasure, along with six other women, of participating in a Women Historians and Scholars panel at The Fest for Beatle Fans in New York, where eight thousand fans marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles arrival in the US. Many panel attendees commented that it was rare and long overdue to see women panelists at the Fest, founded in 1974. Indeed, it was only the fourth such session in forty years! Astounding as this may be, it sort of makes sense.

It’s not a conspiracy and there aren’t any bogeymen. It’s a legacy of the sixties that there are fewer women writing and talking about the Beatles in the public sphere—just as there are fewer female comedians, talk show hosts, congresspeople, etc.

If you look at fan images from fifty years ago, they are 99% female, but today, 99% of the “experts” are male. So there’s a disconnect. In 1964, the press was pretty dismissive of these girls, often rather insulting. The hysterical girl fan became a caricature of Beatlemania. The legacy of those images today is the perception that women can’t have anything intelligent to say about the Beatles, their music, or the phenomenon.

In addition, many fewer women than men of the boomer generation went on to be writers, journalists, academics, musicians, musicologists, etc. Even male Beatle scholars in the 80s and 90s had a hard time convincing their chairs that this was an area worthy of serious inquiry—for a ...