A WOMAN is trying to smoke a cigarette but with inelegant results; the piercing in her tongue keeps getting in the way. Another woman parades by with a baby suckling at her bare left breast, as if to say: “See my baby! See my breast!” Behavior like that falls short of ladylike, and you will definitely come across the likes of it if you visit Lilith Fair. The migratory summer festival of pop, rock, and folk music by women attracts up to twenty thousand people per stop, more than three-quarters of them female. With 57 stops around the country, that’s a lot of women. So the day Lilith set up its tents and booths under the trees at the Great Woods Center outside Boston was as good a day as any to ponder the fate of femininity.
Other considerations might have already got you fretting on the same theme. The cover of that morning’s New York Times showed a picture of Mrs. Clinton wearing an aggressively pink pantsuit and huge plastic Seventies-retro eyeglasses. She was smiling broadly and striding boldly out of a Sunday church service, clearly the dominant figure in the photograph, as to one side and slightly behind her the sheepishly grinning President himself walked. The accompanying article noted the First Lady’s unshakable popularity. When this masculine female travels the country, women gather and urge her on with cries of “You go, girl!”
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