On a recent weekend in Irvine, California pop singer Olivia Rodrigo hosted Daisy Chain Fields, a festival that brought together some of the most storied female musicians — and some of the most exciting new ones. Bikini Kill, one of the most famous riot grrrl act of the 1990s, performed; so did camp icon Chappell Roan. The Breeders were there; so was Doechii.
The event was modeled after the women-led touring festival Lilith Fair, founded by pop folk legend Sarah McLachlan, a late ’90s phenomenon that was both incredibly successful and widely mocked as a gathering of hairy-pitted folk womyn. The overwhelmingly positive reaction to Daisy Chain has been markedly different.
The feminist bent of Daisy Chain shouldn’t be all that surprising, given that young women are the most progressive group America has ever seen.
McLachlan made an appearance at Daisy Chain, along with Alanis Morissette and Stevie Nicks. And every single artist performed for free, which allowed the proceeds to go to a smattering of feminist organizations, including ones that support struggling moms and their babies, that provide reproductive healthcare including safe abortions, that defend women’s rights in court, that advocate for domestic workers and that battle domestic violence. The festival raised $10 million for these groups — and then Melinda French Gates got onstage and doubled it.
The feminist bent of Daisy Chain shouldn’t be all that surprising, given that young women are the most progressive group America has ever seen. They overwhelmingly support abortion rights, LGBTQ rights and Democratic candidates. They were born into an America with unprecedented opportunities for women.
But young women are also coming of age in an America that is rife with virulent, unabashed misogyny, which makes it even more impressive that Gen Z women are refusing to capitulate.
Right now those young women are staring down a conservative culture that hates them: trad wife influencers who tell them to get back into the kitchen, manosphere commentators who tell them they’re subhuman whores, an administration that says their bodies aren’t theirs and is supported by people who muse about whether women should even have the right to vote. But instead of conforming to fit some ever-narrowing mold of what a good young woman might be in this reactionary moment, Gen Z women, at least the progressive majority of them, seem to be having none of it. The boys berate, mock or ignore them? That’s fine — they’ll play their own game.
What was most striking about Daisy Chain Fields wasn’t just the breadth of female artists it brought together or even its unapologetically feminist stance at a moment when feminism is under sustained attack. It was how the participants let the dark reality of this country coexist with joy and optimism.
The women at Daisy Chain Fields chose to come to an explicitly feminist event, one created to support abortion access, reproductive freedoms and women’s rights — which have been systematically dismantled and encroached upon in the Trump era. Still, at a festival born out of adversity, women made friendship bracelets. They danced wildly and unselfconsciously. They braided one another’s hair. They hoisted children on their shoulders. They dripped with sweat. They wailed in rage.
This is not to say that the young women of Daisy Chain have circumvented misogyny or finally killed the patriarchy. The festival seemed, like so many things these days, tailored for the lens of Instagram and TikTok: carefully cultivated outfits, carefully built backdrops for photo ops and video livestreaming, carefully captured images to suggest that participants were having The Most Fun Ever and looking their best doing it.
The boys berate, mock or ignore them? That’s fine — they’ll play their own game.
It reminded me of John Berger’s observation in the 1970s that women are taught, from an early age, to self-surveil, to imagine how they appear to others, to watch themselves and to watch themselves being watched. “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear,” Berger wrote. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” The Instagram era has only made this dynamic more obvious, and rendered women active participants in it.
There weren’t a lot of men at Daisy Chain Fields. And still, the omnipresent eye of social media meant that even at a festival ostensibly partly about rejecting the male gaze, women were watching themselves being watched. Still, it seems relevant that part of what those women were doing was also using their cameras to capture their support for reproductive rights, from abortion to supported child-rearing. The Republican Party has attacked those rights. The Democratic Party has grown lethargic in even gesturing at defending them. Young women are sending a message that their rights are not negotiable, and that they will show up to defend them — hopefully at the ballot box as well as at music festivals.
Daisy Chain Fields brought women together in collective joy and collective rage, and channeled that rage and joy into something meaningful, tangible and positive for women the nation over. It is no small thing, in our current political wasteland, to insist that flowers will still bloom.
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