A little nugget from the great cultural critic Ellen Willis about our Spring 2012 Digitizing Folk Music History guest, Alice Stuart, who performed at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and continues to play music actively and wonderfully:
Today there is a noticeable influx of female singers and composers, and they are finding a receptive audience. More important, women are beginning to break way from the hip stereotypes. …For a long time, I didn’t listen to Alice Stuart’s album, because its title, Full Time Woman, turned me off; when I did, I discovered that the title song starts out “I hear you’ve got a full-time woman now, / Does she love you like I never could?” and ends “You gotta set me free. / I’d do it for you, baby; now do it for me.” Deliberate or not, the reversal of expectations was in itself a statement: things are seldom what they seem.
— Ellen Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” New Yorker, October 1971
Alice Stuart, Full Time Woman (1970, Fantasy Records)