New Book Announcement: ‘Girls to the Front’ by Sara Marcus

Music and politics writer Sara Marcus has published Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Harper Perennial, Paperback, 2010).  Here’s the description from the book’s website:

Riot Grrrl roared into the spotlight in 1991: an uncompromising movement of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. Young women everywhere were realizing that the equality they’d been promised was still elusive, and a newly resurgent right wing was turning feminism into the ultimate dirty word. In response, thousands of riot grrrls published zines, founded local groups, and organized national conventions, while fiercely prophetic punk bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill helped spread the word across the US and to Canada, Europe, and beyond.

Girls to the Front, the first-ever history of Riot Grrrl, is a lyrical, punk-infused narrative about a group of extraordinary young women coming of age angrily, collectively, and publicly. A dynamic chronicle not just of a movement but of an era, this is the story of a time when America thought young people were apathetic and feminism was dead, but a generation of noisy girls rose up to prove everybody wrong.

The book may be of interest to scholars of 20th century U.S. history, the history of feminism or music fans.

Author Sara Marcus’s blog can be found here.

-Bridget Crawford