A war is waging.

What many will have you think is that it has only just begun, but in reality, women have been fighting for their freedom of expression, of self, long before the #MeToo movement and the rise of the Silence Breakers.

For far, far too long, women’s achievements and contributions to every single industry you can conceive of have been left at the wayside and forgotten or covered over. Amelia Earhart, Margaret Hamilton, Alice Coachman, Marie Curie, Katherine Jackson, Fatima al-Fihri, and even Manchester‘s own Emmeline Pankhurst – these women changed and shaped the world as we know it today but are frequently denied the gravity and appreciation they deserve.

In the modern era it’s very easy to think that sexism has become a thing of the past, belonging only to times gone by when it manifested overtly in everyday life, when society told women to be seen and not heard, when they could not vote, own land, own themselves – but this is a problem we are dealing with in 2019 as women still need to march through streets to assert their rights.

Some may see these women as militant, radical, even man-hating, but the fight for equality is far from that. Feminism is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes,” and it is a conversation – a fight – that is far from over.

Music has become a home to social justice. A cathartic place where change can take place and movements can start, and these are women who have stood out along the way and influenced that change. We still have a ways to go, especially in the inclusion of all women seeing as trans women and women of colour are often left behind in almost every conversation on feminism, but this list will attempt to highlight those whose efforts and determination has paved way for womanhood as a whole.

Last year we published this article celebrating the incredible achievements of 20 women in music. This year we have upped the ante with ten more artists worth drawing attention to.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

When you think of the best guitarists of all time, who is it that springs to mind? Jimi Hendrix? Slash? Eric Clapton? For me it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was a pioneer of modern music, and a devil on the guitar. Born in 1915 in the unfortunately named Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Tharpe began learning to play from the ripe age of 4, and 20 years later she was recording for the first time.

She could outplay anyone of her time, all whilst singing the most amazing, and powerful urban blues. Sister Rosetta Tharpe didn’t need a mic, she didn’t need an overwhelming production, her talent and drive were enough to carry any performance.

Tharpe openly defied the gender construct of her time that masculinity and guitar skills had some kind of inexplicable connection, showing that a woman could be the best in her field and not have to sacrifice an ounce of her femininity. Whilst her critics may have been wont to give her the back-handed compliment of playing well “for a girl”, her music went on to influence generation upon generation, including those like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and she remains, one of the most important guitarists of our time.

Ella Fitzgerald

One note from Ella Fitzgerald can send shivers down your spine. A voice like that, so perfectly toned, is a once in a millennium occurrence and I feel just blessed she cropped up close to us. The First Lady of Song was, and still is, legendary.

No one could improvise like Fitzgerald could, no one could match her perfect intonation, even her scatting. She was a pioneer of contemporary jazz, and her ability was unmatched – Ella Fitzgerald was a timeless talent and it’d be foolish to forget her effect on music.

Dolly Parton

There is no denying that Dolly Parton has become one of the most well known female musicians in the world. Pop culture references Dolly countless times over, from her incredible music to her equally talented acting and wicked sense of humour.

What’s most impressive about Dolly is how she uses that platform to be an example to other women. In 9 to 5, both the hit song and the hit film, Dolly loudly calls out the toxic masculinity in the workplace whilst showcasing how successful women can be in the same places. The opposite gender may try their hardest to push Dolly around but she always plants her feet firmly and says ‘no’. She also refuses to take the same criticism from her fellow women…

She’s curvy, she wears make-up, she gets done up everyday and has been under the knife many times. In some women’s eyes, that means Dolly has betrayed her womanhood and the meaning of feminism, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Dolly Parton owns her body and what she chooses to do with her is just that: her choice. Feminism does not lie in not changing how you look – otherwise no one would be even dying their hair. Feminism lies in treating every woman with kindness and respect, regardless of how they look.

SZA quickly became one of my favourite artists last year after the release of her debut album ”˜Ctrl’. It was her frankness about sexuality and the never-ending battle of self-image that turned the idea of women being meek and withdrawn about sex on it’s head.

SZA separated sex and love in such a sincere and realistic manner. She took us by the hand and guided us through her own experiences with music that was not only relatable but catchy and skilled. That vulnerability became liberation, and it kickstarted an important conversation about women and their sexuality.

You would be lying to yourself if you didn’t acknowledge that Beyoncé is one of, if not the biggest woman in music currently. She has paved way for women in music unlike anyone else, showing that a woman can be sexual, powerful, intelligent and most importantly, successful.

Beyoncé has fiercely campaigned for women’s rights and #BlackLivesMatter, supporting Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, condemning the police brutality against black Americans, and branding herself as “FEMINIST” at the 2014 MTV Video Awards.

None other that Lesbian Jesus herself, Hayley Kiyoko is one of the single most important pop musicians in the modern day. She’s one of the only out artists, making all the same romantic pop bangers but exclusively about women. No one can argue that music industry isn’t incredibly heteronormative, but Hayley’s music is working to normalise two girls in love lyric by lyric.

She also makes to sure to call out queer-pandering in songs like Rita Ora’s Girls and their harmful implications on the LGBTQ+ community, as well as donating all the bras thrown at her on stage to homeless organisations for women.

Since her debut 10 years ago, Lady Gaga has always gone out of her way to challenge the norm (sometimes in the most unconventional of ways), and very early on in her career, like SZA, Lady Gaga called out the double standard that exists between men and women in music.

An interviewer asked her why she’s not concerned that the sexual references in her videos may distract from her music, and Lady Gaga put him in his place by explaining that this is never a question that gets asked to men. Since then, Gaga has continued to action her words by being a strong and unapologetically sexual woman in modern music.

Like Gaga and SZA, Charli XCX sought to expose the double standard that exists in music by getting 60 men to portray typically female roles in her music video. They frolicked, threw cake, played with puppies, washed cars, got wet, lay in rose petals – every single music video trope that you can think of.

House music has historically been dominated but men, but the young Korean-American DJ Yaeji has been subverting expectations with her first two EPs Yaeji and EP2. She’s one of house’s most exciting new voices, bringing a gentle and almost shy edge to the brash and heady sounds of the genre through songs like Drink I’m Sippin On and Raingurl, seamlessly mixing Korean and English into her tracks.

Beth Ditto marks an important change from the mould of usual pop sensations, her experiences as a gay plus-sized woman pouring out in her music. Ditto rose to fame as the frontwoman of the popular band Gossip, but her prominence as a voice for the forgotten and as a role model for women has made her irreplaceable in the movement not just for equality, but for body positivity and for the LGBT community.

In an interview with vogue, Ditto said: “Being a lesbian and being married to a woman of colour, you see how the world treats people in a different context because you are living it,” she continued “the fact that protests are happening, that people are still engaged and angry. Music has a function in that. I had a friend ask me recently, ”˜Beth, are you ready to join the revolution?’ And I was like, ”˜Oh, I’ve been here. We have been here,’ the weirdos, the homos, the artists, we’ve been doing this forever. And I’m glad to take that fire and run with it.”

There is so much I could say about why Rihanna is perhaps one of the most important female musicians (and one of the most important businesswomen for that matter) of the 21st century. She rebukes notions of modesty and submission from women and shows that women are free to be comfortable in their own bodies without it being an invitation for sex through her music and visual.

The most important lesson we can learn from Rihanna is that you are not obligated to anyone. Instead of casting shade or overtly calling things out, Rihanna stokes the fire and lets conversations happen freely. She says what she wants, dances as she pleases and sings whatever she likes without even an ear cocked to criticism.

And that reach that Rihanna has encompasses all women, of all shapes, sizes and skin tones as shown through her ground breaking Fenty Beauty makeup range that remembered that, you know, dark skinned people exist, guys.

For Yuna, the question of music and religion has never been an either or. “When I first started playing music, I was already covered … wearing headscarves. And, like, normally, people would expect you to change, toss this part of your life away so that you could be a pop star. But I just wanted to make music, not really be a “pop star” pop star.“

She’s muslim, she’s a girl, she’s a musician. None of those things effect or negate from one another.

As a citizen of Manchester, I think Ariana Grande will always hold a special place in my heart. The way she dealt with the ordeal, the aftermath, the victims, was admirable and I’m not sure anyone could have dealt with it any better.

Grande is kind and caring beyond belief, but also unafraid of shutting down sexism in an instant. It’s become second nature for her to call out radio hosts or interviewers casual discriminations time and time again, nipping it in the bud with one-liners like “Believe it or not, women can be friends with people with dicks and not hop on them”, or when she commented on a fan of her boyfriend’s objectification of her in 2016, sadly having to assert herself as a human and not just a slab of meat.

Like Beth Ditto, P!nk has always stared gender expectations in the face and dismissed. Since her early days of ”˜Don’t Let Me Get Me’, P!nk has unapologetically been herself – dressing, acting, singing exactly how she wanted to.

Whilst ”˜Stupid Girls’ was definitely a bump in the road for her (let’s be clear – women putting down women to raise themselves up is not cool), I think it’s something she’s certainly learned from and has turned around, making sure to praise women even when her fans are egging her on to attack…

Today P!nk is always using social media to address the issue that matter, from publicly stating that those who don’t support #BLACKLIVESMATTER should unfollow to immediately (because let’s remember, feminism isn’t feminism unless it’s intersectional), to body positivity and even breastfeeding, a perfectly natural part of life that far too many balk at.

Now this might be someone you’ve not heard of but I think she’s very important to mention. In South Korea there’s a popular girl group by the name of f(x), wherein the media and new viewers constantly mislabel resident rapper Amber a boy because of the way she dresses, talks, and acts.

Amber has always taken that criticism and used it to address the issue that exists within our society wherein women, and everyone else for that matter, are consistently shoved into a box of what they should be – and she literally made a music video about it and it’s consequences. In an interview with BBC, Amber said “I think us humans are just so cruel to each other. We just want to keep judging each other on our looks.”

Shonen Knife – translation: boy knife – are Japanese legends. They were one of the first all female punk bands to hit the music scene in Japan, back in a time where society viewed women in rock music as unsavoury. They were heavily influenced by the sounds of 1960s girl groups and early punk rock (they even performed as a Ramones tribute band)

They were absolute trailblazers, changing Japan’s ideas of what women in music looked like, earning them fans left right and centre. In fact, even Kurt Cobain was a self-professed superfan: “When I finally got to see them live, I was transformed into a hysterical nine-year old at a Beatles concert”. He went on to ask them to open for Nirvana on their UK tour.

Lorde’s take on empowering women can be heard strongly throughout her lyrics always leaving a message of solidarity to her fans that, “yep, me too”, but what’s also so heart-warming to see from is how aware she is of the bigger picture.

The New Zealand singer debuted when she was only just 16, and yet she has been more educated than most adults on what this whole feminism thing is about. “It’s totally not about me,” she said on 60Minutes. “It’s about all the women who may not have the opportunities that I have, all the privileges that I have. Trying to fight for better conditions and better treatment of all women, whether that be trans women, or women of colour, women in professions that don’t get a lot of respect.”

What kind of list would this be with the legend and Queen that is Janelle Monà¡e and her vagina pants. Every lyric Janelle spits empowers women and criticises the present status quo, and that tenacity carries through into the way she presents herself, her stage performances, her clothes – everything.

Janelle is taking the mic back from the man, making way for women – black women in particular – through her music, using it as a form of protest. It’s not just music where Janelle use her voice for the forgotten, but also in film. In Hidden Figures, she portrayed one of the three black women at NASA who were instrumental in John Glenn’s launch into space, as well as her supporting role in Moonlight, one of the first films to explore the homosexuality of a black man.

Iâ€™M SO fkng FURIOUS â€¼ï¸â€¼ï¸â€¼ï¸ CANT THESE ASSHOLES DO THEâ€ONEâ€JOB THEYRE PAYED TO DOâ‰ï¸ðŸ¤¬â‰ï¸ðŸ¤¬â‰ï¸ðŸ¤¬â‰ï¸ðŸ¤¬â‰ï¸

IM A 71 YR OLD CHICK,& I CAN DO 5 JOBS AT ONE TIMEðŸ¤¬â€¼ï¸



OH…WAIT…IM A WOMANðŸ’ªðŸ» — Cher (@cher) January 21, 2018

Firstly, I would like to open this by saying if you’re not following Cher on Twitter, you really should. Cher took to the microblogging platform like a fish to water, constantly talking about world issues, animal rights, women’s rights, politics, everything – and she does it in typical Cher fashion.

Once you get past the extreme overuse of emojis, you see that Cher is presenting a unified message of equality without a care of whatever people will think about her, and that’s exactly what Cher has always done.

Ever since being one of the first women to breakthrough into the wider pop industry with her partner Sonny Bono, Cher has torn down the barriers and expectations that were thrust in front of her by the industry, constantly reinventing her image or starting new trends purely through just being herself. And now, at 71 years old and nearly 60 years into her career, Cher shows that getting old does not mean getting obsolete.

Aretha Franklin

“American history wells up when Aretha sings. Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll – the way that hardship and sorry were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope”, and he couldn’t be more right. Barack Obama, 2015 Kennedy Centre Honors

Aretha has a voice that makes you tear up and shiver as tingles shoot down your spine. She made people stop and listen, especially when she covered ”˜Respect’. The song was originally from Otis Redding, telling the story of a desperate man who will do anything his wife wants if she just gives him his due respect when gets home. Aretha’s version changed the narrative into a declaration from a strong and confident woman, who knows she has everything he wants but demands his respect before he can get it.

This cover was a huge milestone for the feminist movement in 1967, and it still stands today as an anthem for many women the world over.

Kehlani has absolutely been through it, from band disputes to homelessness and depression. Despite that, she has kept going and kept producing music, finally culminating in her debut album SweetSexySavage, a beautiful and tender album filled with pop bangers and smooth R&B.

Kehlani is a testament to staying true to who you are, ignoring what the outside world is trying to make you. Be you, do you, whatever that may look or sound like.

Nina Simone

Perhaps one of the most soulful and talented women in music that we’ve been blessed with, Nina Simone has been an unforgettable influence on 20th century music as well as an important player in the early movement for black women’s rights.

Her song ”˜Four Women’ dove into the tales of four different black women grappling with a Eurocentric world, its purpose to inspire black women to define beauty and identity by their own standards, uninfluenced by societies wrongful impositions.

Simone’s social consciousness was inspired by her friendship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose work was focused on highlighting the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. That friendship led Simone to create the song ”˜To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, a phrase that can still be heard in music today from the likes of Faith Evans and Logic.

In 2013, Grimes announced that she was done with being passive. In a since deleted blog post on Tumblr, the Canadian musician said that “I don’t want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living”. She continued: “I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if I did this by accident and I’m gonna flounder without them. Or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers.”

“I’m tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion, as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things I enjoy somehow make me a lesser person.”

Grimes has always been vocal about what feminism is and about her experiences of sexism within the industry, weaving those stories into her music and her words. Sadly however, being vocal like Grimes can end up with labels of ”˜Man Hater’ slapped on when as Grimes has explained, it is quite the opposite.J

Adele redefined what being a pop star meant. Her first album, 19, was her soul laid bare. Her emotions, experiences, difficulties, her truth was put out out there for the world to consume in a beautiful and soulful musical expression. She showed us that being popstar didn’t mean you had to be a skinny waif or dance along to the electronic background music – you just had to be a damn good musician.

And Adele is beyond good. She’s already won 139 awards including several Grammys (she’s been nominated for 18, and won 15 of those) and an astounding eleven Guinness World Records. On top of that, she’s a prolific philanthropist, performing for a number of charity concerts and charitable events and use her platform to speak on the things that matter. At her first Wembley show on June 28th, 2018, she urged her fans to donate to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire to help them rebuild rather than waste money on the “overpriced wine”.

There’s just something about the Knowles, was it their diet? Their upbringing? Surely their DNA? But somehow, the two sisters are both exceptional singers and women in music, with incredibly different goals and aspirations.

Solange has never shied from addressing the issues at hand, opting to let her hair be natural and campaign for the problem of disrespect against black women in ”˜Don’t Touch My Hair’. “I want women’s rights to be equally honoured, and uplifted, and heard…but I want to see us fighting the fight for all women ”” women of colour, our LGBTQ sisters, our Muslim sisters,” Solange said in an interview with Bust magazine.

Angel Haze is someone who identifies as agender, something that is almost unseen in the mainstream sphere that the media exists within, and that’s why it is so so so important to talk about artists like Haze who represent an unsung minority.

Haze helps to teach us that sex and gender aren’t binaries, both are spectrums and human beings can fall anywhere on them. You can be male, female, fluid, without gender, and you can be unsure, just like humans can experience more than just heterosexuality. Seeing an artist like Haze, who self identifies as agender and pansexual, become successful and respected in the music industry is an incredible leap forward down the path to equality.

Madonna is one of the most prolific singers of the modern age. Since her debut in 1983 with her first single Everybody, Madonna has continued to inspire and motivate other women in the industry. Her achievements have crowned her the Queen of Pop (and earned her an entire Wikipedia page to just her impact.

Throughout her career, Madonna has continued to question the restraints put upon her. What is femininity? What is masculinity? What is sexuality? What is taboo and what is not? She epitomises being a woman and owning your sex appeal whilst still maintaining confidence and control, earning her huge support from the LGBTQ+ community (although, her Britney kiss was arguably more for the male gaze than anything else).

Alice Glass

Alice Glass rose to prominence as the founding member and former front woman of Crystal Castles, leaving the group in 2014 because it compromised her efforts towards “sincerity, honest and empathy for others”. It wasn’t until last year when she posted a public message to her website detailing the abuse she endured at the hands of Ethan Kath, a member of the band, that her reasons became clearer.

Coming forward like Glass shows the incredible importance of the #MeToo movement as a whole as well as to women in music. The discussion on abuse and recovery needs to become normalised through brave actions like Glass’ so that more people become comfortable enough to seek out help and ultimately, justice.

St. Vincent

A few facts about St. Vincent are absolutely true: she can play the guitar like no one’s business, her voice is powerful and beautiful, and she is unapologetically and unabashedly herself at all times.

From the way that she dresses to her stage show to her comments on her own sexuality, St. Vincent is not someone that can be easily labelled. Often, her music challenges what pop music usually sounds like, playing with distortion, harmony and dynamics. Her boldness on stage and in her production is a testament to how far women in music have come, now able to express themselves like never before.

PVRIS’ frontwoman, Lynn Gunn has become an icon for the LGBTQ community within rock music, proudly flaunting her sexuality and identity for all those to see. Like many others mentioned here in this article, Gunn represents an important corner of society that is still told they are not worth it, that they are wrong, but instead of being kept down Gunn just got louder.

Last year in 2017, PVRIS performed a free show in support of Planned Parenthood and released limited edition merch with all proceeds going to the ACLU and victims of the Orlando Shooting, and their music features strong themes of grappling with self-image and mental health. Lynn Gunn stands as a testament to those she is representing, giving people the opportunity to see themselves in her and think, “hey, I can do it too”.

Ultimately, that is what we need. Role models like these women show us that despite our bodies, our gender, our sexuality, our religion, the colour of our skin – we are worth it, we are enough, and we deserve to love and be loved. This list may not be comprehensive, but it shows that progress is being made slowly but surely, and we should by no means back down.