Stevie Nicks: The legend from Fleetwood Mac is a rock star, because she’s always been ruthlessly honest and fearless. The first time she picked up a guitar and wrote a song, it was about heartbreak, and when she wrote for Fleetwood Mac, many of those songs were about her doomed relationship with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. But through all the struggle, Nicks was sexy and sophisticated, and strove for equality by embodying the equal.
“We fought very hard for feminism, for women’s rights,” Nicks told a crowd at South by Southwest in 2013, according to Rolling Stone. “What I’m seeing today is a very opposite thing. I don’t know why, but I see women being put back in their place. And I hate it. We’re losing all we worked so hard for, and it really bums me out.”
Nicks completely owned her femininity and her vulnerability, all while proving that she could hold her own as a creative contributor to a high-powered popular band. She completely disproved the “man behind the music” myth.
—Kate Beaudoin writing for Mic about the fate of the female rock star. For Beaudoin, feminism and female rock stardom are deeply intertwined; she expands on that thesis with a look at four of rock’s greatest feminists.
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