User:Ashleyalfaro/Riot grrrl

The emergence of the Riot Grrrl movement began in the early 1990s, when a group of women in Olympia, Washington, held a meeting to discuss how to address sexism in the punk scene. The women decided they wanted to start a “girl riot” against a society they felt offered no validation of women’s experiences. And thus the Riot Grrrl movement was born.

In the 1970’s, women were generally only considered “punk” through the association of being a girlfriend of one of the male members of the group. While punk is primarily male-dominated, many women took part in the early punk scene. However, with the advent of “hardcore punk” in the early 1980s, hypermasculinity became the norm and women’s influences declined (Rosenburg 1998). Women began creating their own magazines, fanzines or “zines”, to share ideas that eventually led to spreading the movement nationwide. The increasing awareness led to the creation of local Riot Grrrl weekly meeting that eventually turned into national conventions.