Quick: Name a '90s grunge icon. It's pretty likely you thought of Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, or another angsty white male. But flannel is unisex. In a Longreads piece, Lisa Whittington-Hill explores how women in grunge were "treated like a fad" with their contributions diminished or erased. Bands like L7, Babes in Toyland, and 7 Year Bitch rocked just as hard—and often earlier—than many of their male peers. But when Nirvana's Nevermind exploded in 1991, the spotlight followed the guys. In the 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We're Dead, L7 bassist Jennifer Finch held up a magazine cover featuring her ex, former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl: "Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this f****ing face," she said. Meanwhile, her own band's critically praised 1992 album Bricks Are Heavy topped out at No. 160 on the Billboard charts.
Even when female bands managed to break through the noise, they weren't safe from being pushed aside or marginized by the press. L7's 1993 Spin cover featured the line "More Than Babes in Boyland," which minimized two groundbreaking bands and manufactured a girl-group rivalry. "We did not want a gender-specific name," said singer Donita Sparks. "Us being women wasn't a political platform." And "riot grrrl" bands—feminist punk groups like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney—faced even worse: They were reduced to fashion trends, mocked, or asked only about their trauma. "[Journalists] refused to do serious interviews with us," said Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.
Meanwhile, women of color were nearly erased altogether. Tina Bell, a Black woman who fronted Seattle's Bam Bam, helped shape the grunge sound in the early '80s, but she's often left out of retrospectives. "This modern genre's sound was, in many ways, molded by a Black woman," Stephanie Siek tells Medium. "The reason she is mostly unknown has everything to do with racism and misogyny." And the exclusions continue even as grunge becomes the stuff of pop culture nostalgia with 30th anniversary tributes, reissues, and more. Whittington-Hill points out there wasn't a single woman on Rolling Stone's readers' poll in 2012 about the best grunge albums of all time. Women were often "granted legitimacy based on their proximity to more successful, male musicians," she wrote.
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And while Cobain and Vedder were praised for their progressive politics, the women who helped them shaped their views—Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, and others—rarely got credit. Three decades later, the myth of grunge may still need serious revision, but as Bratmobile vocalist Allison Wolfe said in a 2021 Guardian piece, it was never about being a female in a male-dominated genre; it was just about being heard. "It was about forging a path to have a voice," she said. "And knowing even if we didn't have the musical skills, that we had something to say that would be more interesting than half the s*** these guys are saying." (More music stories.)
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