We Still Need Lilith Fair

"One of the cruelest tricks played on the North American women's movement is the way the caricatures, over time, have edged out reality: the ritualized bra burnings ( never happened), the batik hemp dresses (not since the 1970s), the strictly enforced misandry (only on holidays). With regard to Lilith Fair, the late-'90s touring festival of female artists co-founded by Sarah McLachlan, so many jokes were made about "bi-level" haircuts and juice tents and "Lesbopalooza" that the purpose and power of Lilith have largely been relegated to the archives. "I just recently discovered there was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999, and I am shook to my core," a young woman exclaimed on TikTok two years ago, prompting consternation from Millennial and Gen X elders at the loss of some of our crucial cultural herstory."

"All of which makes Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new Hulu documentary from the director and writer Ally Pankiw, particularly relevant-both as a corrective to the mocking mythology of Lilith, and as a distillation of what women have lost in the decades since. As a 14-year-old in 1997 who stayed up late to tape Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin songs off the one British radio show that sometimes played them, I was probably fated to cry all the way through Lilith Fair, and indeed I did."

""Being there was one of the earliest memories I've had of safety," the actor Dan Levy, a producer on the film, tells the camera. Looking around at the crowds and seeing people smiling and celebrating and being fully themselves "felt like this kind of quiet revolution.""

Caricatures of the women's movement have eclipsed historical reality, reducing complex efforts to stereotypes and jokes. Lilith Fair, a late-1990s touring festival co-founded by Sarah McLachlan, faced mocking characterizations that obscured its purpose and influence. A recent Hulu documentary reframes Lilith as both a corrective to ridicule and a distillation of cultural losses since the 1990s. Attendees recall the festival as a formative space of safety, celebration, and authenticity. The festival's founding emerged from pragmatic decisions by McLachlan and her close collaborators rather than from abstract ideology, producing a palpable sense of collective possibility.

Read at The Atlantic