Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Beatles, sixties, pop music, hippies, counterculture, gender, sexual revolution, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Abbey Road, peace movement, second wave feminism, baby boomers, boomers.

About Me: I’m a sociologist and historian of the 1960s, focusing on the nexus of pop culture, technology, gender, and the confluence of forces that informed the consciousness of the post-war generation, leading to liberalizing change throughout the decade.

My book Beatleness: How the Beatles and Their Fans Remade The World, is a micro and macro level cultural history of the period that brings much needed feminist and sociological perspective to this peculiar phenomenon that defined an era and a generation.

Based on in-depth interviews with people born between 1946 and 1961, my analysis shows how the Beatles’ omnipresence in the culture and in the inner lives of baby boomers, for six critical years of child and adolescent development, was a driving and determinative force in post-war American history.

I show how Beatles fandom was a gendered phenomenon in that male and female fans were impacted differently, and that the Beatles presented an alternative masculinity to both their male and female fans.

Despite the key role of girls and women in the Beatles’ story, popular and scholarly histories of the Beatles have been written almost exclusively by men. This narrow range of perspective limits our understanding of a phenomenon that continues to intrigue historians and generations of fans. In addition, male researchers and commentators ignore or dismiss the female fan experience – the collective force which drove the very phenomenon they’re studying.

Recent Publications: “Beatles Fandom: A De Facto Religion,” in Kenneth Womack and Kit O’Toole, eds., Fandom and the Beatles, Oxford University Press, 2021. pp. 19-54.

“Hey Jude, Revolution, and The Chicago 7,” CultureSonar, October, 2020.

“Boomers Were Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ Fifty Years Ago,” Huffington Post, January 1, 2018.

“When the Beatles Brought Psychedelia to Prime Time,” Huffington Post, February 22, 2017.

“Seven Ways The Beatles Changed Boomer Childhood Overnight,” Huffington Post, December 6, 2017.

“Why We Still Mourn John Lennon,” NextAvenue, December 8, 2016.

“Beatles’ Shea Concert Foreshadowed Sixties Tumult,” NextAvenue, August 13, 2015.

“6 Reasons a Beatles-Like Phenomenon Can’t Happen Again,” Huffington Post, December 18, 2014.