Women's History Month: Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, pictured here in a self portrait circa the late 1990s, is a powerful musician and stunning songwriter. Her most popular album, Court and Spark, launched the style of pop she is most known for, one that blends folk and jazz into a unique sound. That album features many memorable tracks, like "Free Man In Paris" and "Raised On Robbery," in addition to the well-known "Help Me." Later albums that explored this musical style to great effect, but which have been unfairly underrated, include Mingus and Hissing of the Summer Lawns.

Mitchell established herself, of course, in folk, writing songs like "Chelsea Morning," "Woodstock," "The Circle Game" and "Big Yellow Taxi" for her first several albums. Her fourth album, Blue, is the peak of her folk phase. The whole album is stunning and features excellent session work from James Taylor and David Crosby. I think it surpasses anything they ever did on their own. In addition to its well known songs -- "The River," "A Case of You" -- overlooked gems like "The Last Time I Saw Richard" and "This Flight Tonight" pop up all over. Every time I listen to Blue, a number of times that must now number near the thousands, I walk away with a different song off of it as my favorite. Few albums can hold the kind of consistency.

Women's History Month: Julia Alvarez

One of the group of recent Latina writers to add her voice to the American pantheon, Dominican Julia Alvarez is proud of her peers such as Sandra Cisneros. While she has yet to reach the same level of acclaim as Cisneros, she has been much heralded for her fiction, most notably How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

Her poetry, while not quite as well known, is just as interesting. One thing that makes Alvarez's poetry interesting is that she often works in or adapts traditional forms, such as in her "Bilingual Sestina." The Woman I Kept To Myself, her 2004 collection of poetry, is composed entirely of a nonce form of her own creation; each poem is made up of three ten line stanzas. Within this framework she is able to carve out a place for female discourse, and within that space a niche for specifically Latina discourse as well.

Women's History Month: Harper Lee

Harper Lee may be something of a one-hit wonder in the literary world, but what a hit it was. To Kill A Mockingbird is an amazing tale, and it fills me with amazement and wonder at the world of Boo Radley and indignant rage at those who would shame the children for their tolerance.

After rereading this book for the umpteenth time last summer, I watched the film version with Gregory Peck again. People always talk about how great it is. For me, it fails not because its necessarily a bad movie, but because Lee's words are so vibrant and powerful. After that book, she helped Truman Capote research In Cold Blood and then faded into obscurity. I with that now, at 83 years old, she'd release a second book. If she only had one to give, though, she packed a life full of passion into it.

Women's History Month: S. E. Hinton

Susan Eloise Hinton, better known as S. E. to her hordes of fans, was the writer who had the greatest impact on me during my high school years. I first read That Was Then, This Is Now in eigth grade because I liked the font on the cover (yes, I've always been one to judge books by their covers). It was okay. The next year, I read Outsiders, not knowing it was a prequel to That Was Then, This is Now, and that got me hooked. I remember reading it straight through in one sitting. I started crying off and on right brom the start, but then about halfway through, hot tears started streaming down my face and didn't stop until some time after I'd finished the book. In rapid-fire succession I devoured Rumble Fish and Tex, with Tex affecting me the same way Outsiders had.

My senior year, I discovered that the main branch of the city library had Taming the Star Runner. I convinced my parents to take a special trip downtown to the main branch, a place I'd rarely been to. It matched Outsiders and Tex, which I didn't expect since it is so much more rural. Recently, Hinton has begun writing for adults and Hawkes' Harbor is near the top of my summer reading list this year.

I've often wondered why she is known as S. E. In high school, I thought those were her names, like the S. in Harry Truman. I always intuitively knew she was a woman when I read her books, but thinking back I wonder if, since her subject matter was stereotypically boys' stuff if she wasn't pressured to do so just so no one thought her books were for sissies. When I was a tweenage boy, I don't know if anyone understood me better.

Women's History Month: Loretta Lynn

Loretta Lynn has long been a controversial figure in country music, releasing songs that tackled tough topics, like "The Pill," but that still managed to become hits. She insisted that any topic that related to women was worth writing about, and women's rights have been a stalwart thematic feature of her lyrics since she started her career. A decade before that song "Dear Uncle Sam," a mother's lament for her dead son, was one of the first songs to address Vietnam; Lynn has resurrected the song live since the United States entered with war on Iraq.

In 2004 Van Lear Rose, produced by Jack White, revitalized her career. Her followup album is set for release later this year. If Van Lear was any indication, Lynn still has what it takes and her strongest work may be ahead of her yet.

Women's History Month: Angela Davis

Angela Davis is where the women's movement met the Black Power movement. An active member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC, the Studen Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, Davis has been a prominent activist since the 1960s. After standing trial as accesory to the murder of Judge Harold Haley and being found not guilty, with the support of such international celebrities as John Lennon and Mick Jagger, Davis became a staunch opponent of the prison system.

Davis fled to Cuba and later visited Soviet Europe and ran for office on the Communist Party ticket in the United States before quitting the Party and re-identifying herself as a democratic socialist. Though all of this time, she has remained strong, and is currently a professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California.

Women's History Month: Jill Sobule

Jill Sobule is an amazingly talented songwriter and musician. Each of her albums is remarkable in its own way. She is most well-known for the original song titled "I Kissed A Girl," which is a tongue-in-cheekier lesbian tale than Katy Perry's take on it. She is also well known for "Supermodel," an anorexia ode which graced the soundtrack to the nineties cinema landmark that was Clueless.

The above two songs came from her second album, 1995's Jill Sobule. Sobule's best album, though, is likely 2004's Underdog Victorious. One song is a compassionate narrative biography of It-girl Joey Heatherton that comes off as being about Britney Spears. "Cinnamon Park" is a pot-infused hippy song complete with a Chicago sample. The real gem is "Jetpack," a story about being in love with a girl too rich and self-absorbed to appreciate her, and the strain the social class difference causes in their relationship. It's Marxist heartbreak at its finest.