(2018. So, I’ve been going all the way back through my Google Drive to post good content on my website, and while I’ve been leaving behind most of my essays from classes in college, I’ve been posting some of the better ones. Because fuck it why not? And to be honest, this one was marginal. I was like I don’t really need to post that lol. It’s not quite justifiable from a ‘somehow related to the Great American Novel life project’ angle, and that’s sort of the whole angle of this website. However, I love the Beatles, and the Beatles are important in American cultural history. And, I wrote this when I was just beginning to grow my hair out, and just beginning to think about gender in a critical and experimental way. To be honest, I was starting to have a classic “Gen Z liberal arts student gender crisis” at the end of my sophomore year after being influenced by Beauvoir and Butler and the fact that I had always felt queer but wasn’t attracted to men. I was at the beginning of what, my junior year, I would more confidently identify as my genderfluidity. Which, like, I still don’t fully understand what gender is, and I’m still exploring what I am. I’m still cool with being a dude but also like I definitely feel gender chaos sometimes, actually a lot of the time. I play all these different roles. They feels most accurate but even they isn’t the whole story. It’s kinda hard to explain right now. Maybe I’ll do a post on it sometime. Anyway lol I got like a B on this paper and then I didn’t edit it at all so don’t feel like it’s a must read, but I like it and enjoyed this line of thinking. It’s got 2018 english class vibes, and they’re sincere.)
She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah):
The Beatles and Gender
The Scream. It was high, frantic, piercing, dynamic, constant, omniphonic, and overwhelming. Every American who had a TV or radio in 1964 was familiar with the Scream as the primary symptom of Beatlemania, the pathogenic disease that had swept the nation in mere weeks. The outbreak seemed to be spreading due to enthusiastic carriers: teenage girls. These young girls bought Beatle records by the millions and felt attached to the band through the music; by the time the Beatles landed at JFK Airport on February 7th, 1964, about 5,000 adoring Americans were ready to scream their welcome, with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topping the charts. Reactions to Beatlemania from the establishment at the time ranged from bewilderment to trivializing annoyance. A typical American adult reaction to the sudden Beatle phenomenon is encapsulated in this quote from the Associated Press on February 10th: “They sing close harmony, stomp their feet and play electric guitars, but so do a lot of crew-cut American boys in slacks and sweaters, and they cause no riots. Beatle clothes look about two sizes too small, and I’ve seen Hungarian sheep dogs with more attractive hairdos. But thousands of squealing young girls get their message.” Nearly every explication about the Beatles to unhip adults at the time focused on these two elements: their ridiculous but recognizable haircuts and the raging histrionics of their young female fans. The discourse around the bandmembers and their fans was importantly gendered. To perplexed adult critics, it must have been the silly hair that let those silly boys sing silly music to their silly daughters. This is unfair, as the unprecedented evolution of the Beatles over the following half decade would prove to those who cried fad. However, it does contain a grain of truth in its acknowledgment of the essential role that twisting ideas of gender played in the Beatles’ early rise. The Beatles had a complicated history with gender, which influenced their music, their public image, and their relationships with their ravenous fans.
It’s not as if the Beatles were the first male music makers to arouse hysteria among fans. In the 1940s Frank Sinatra’s young female fans, known as “bobbysoxers” for their rolled-down Catholic schoolgirl socks, were consistently caused to shriek by his famous croon (Time 1956). In the 1950s Elvis Presley became the King in no small part thanks to his ability to whip up passion with his wild hip-swaying sexuality: passionate antipathy from the establishment, passionate jealousy from young men of the time such as the young Beatles, and of course passionate desire from a screaming female audience. Elvis was an explosive force which blew open many of America’s hardest divides. He crossed race lines with his white rock n roll, and he crossed gender lines with his unrestrained sensuality. Of course, Little Richard had been “camping it up androgynously” and “ripping off his clothes” on his own in the 50s (Rolling Stone 1990), but he was black. White Elvis had broader appeal, and his fame was quite consequential for the development of the Beatles due to his challenge of gender ideals. “No longer did John Wayne—‘strong,’ silent about his feelings (if he had any), and massively restrained about his sexuality—represent the American masculine ideal. Now women wanted to love Presley’s new man, and men wanted to be like Presley—warm, sensual, and openly enthusiastic about sex” (Riley xiii). Without Elvis before them to set the stage at Ed Sullivan Theater, the Beatles’ long hair and gender subversion would be even more shocking to American mores, possibly insurmountably so. More directly, Elvis’ individualism provided inspiration for the Beatles, who started out as young fans of American rock imitating Elvis’ new-masculine persona; later, they more authentically followed his example of individualism by developing their own unique style within the crucibles of the Liverpool and Hamburg rock club scenes. The Beatles that emerged to take over Britain in 1963 and America in 1964 had the ability to send millions more girls into wilder hysterics than Elvis ever had. Where did this incredible power over the female sex come from? And how did four moppish lads from Liverpool obtain it?
Arguably the biggest factor in the Beatles takeover phenomenon was sheer demographic potency. America in 1963 was riper than ever for a youth icon like the Beatles. The Baby Boomer Generation has been analyzed and narrativized constantly since their ascendancy, but the numbers suffice for understanding the raw potential that the Beatles capitalized on. In 1964, when the Beatles arrived, the nascent Boomers accounted for a staggering 40% of the U.S. population (Census). This critical mass was forged into a relatively cohesive “generation” more than any previous generation in U.S. history. The main force behind this social demarcation was, as usual, money. The category of the “teenager” was invented to describe adolescents in this affluent postwar society in no small part due to their value as a targetable consumer demographic. In 1946, the average weekly income for a teenage boy from allowance and work was $2.41, but by 1956 it was $8.96 (Time). Wealthier kids meant more money to be spent on youth-specific goods, and of course wealthier parents meant an increased ability for young girls and boys to beg their parents to buy them something. There was a lot of money to be made off these kids. Normalization of a generational character made it easier to make that money, and society helped create a generational character for the Boomers in tandem with the advertisers. By the 60s, an enormous majority of young Americans regularly attended high school and had been for years. In these physically shared spaces, youth culture was beginning to emerge around radios playing hip local stations. Shared culture implies shared commodities, especially in post-war consumer America, and the shared commodity of the young was rock n roll. Businessmen naturally took notice, and began to make concerted efforts to market to these kids, and to groom them for further marketing via the superstructure. “Almost from the time they were conceived, Boomers were analyzed and pitched to by modern marketers, who reinforced their sense of generational distinctiveness” (Gillon 2). This began in earnest during the 1950s, and so by the time the Baby Boomers themselves were in that fertile 9-18 range in 1964 there was already an enormous entanglement of invested interests at work to sell things to them. And these Boomers were primed and ready to have things sold to them, partially due to early conditioning by these same forces. Due to their emergence as an enormous group held together by commonalities creating a “youth culture,” the Boomers in 1964 were eager to express their group identity, and especially through consumer activities (Charness 15). They wanted this identity to be unique and new; they wanted to distinguish themselves from their square parents. The Beatles struck every note here perfectly—kids saw them as “different” and “exciting,” and their parents really didn’t like the hair.
The key to this whole demographic was girls. Teenage girls drove their fathers and their boyfriends to spend, and their tastes helped set youth taste in general. If you’re a 15 year old boy, there is ample incentive to dig the music that the 15 year old girls dig. Girls also just bought more; women in general were sold the consumerist gospel much more intensely than men were. In a society that repressed female accomplishment, buying things was offered as a substitute activity for the model teen girl or housewife. The prime reason for the Beatles’ meteoric impact is quite simply girls, or rather that the Beatles understood how to appeal to girls. Firstly and most importantly, they were super cute. Not only that, they were super cute in different ways, so that every girl could identify with her favorite Beatle, thus artfully mixing the personal with the communal aspect of fandom. The Beatles started off singing simple rock songs, defined by ebullient “yeah!”s, swooning “oooo!”s, and sensitivity. They understood girls’ problems, and loved them very much. Their love songs almost all featured a rotation of simple pronouns, creating a new level of connection with the audience. “You” was the object of attention in most of the Beatles’ early hit songs, and every girl listening to the records in her room felt personally serenaded by these cute boys. The patriarchal culture surrounding these girls taught them to focus their lives around men, but the men in their lives were either old and square or young and stupid. The Beatles were the perfect new avatars for their male ideals—young, but older; sexy, but not overtly sexual; disliked by parents, but non-threateningly white; foreign, but familiar; rebellious, but sensitive and sweet. Teen girls could buy these boys and listen to them with their friends or alone, and the boys would croon their love to them. The Beatles, unlike anything of consequence in American society up to that point for Baby Boom girls, were theirs.
The Beatles had a unique power over American girls; ironically, this gender-based effect actually catalyzed major shifts in gender politics for those same girls. Read this condescendingly chauvinistic piece about a Beatles show at Carnegie Hall featured in The Nation on March 2nd, 1964: “The full house was made up largely of upper-middle-class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in the floodlights for everyone to see and with the full blessings of all authority; indulgent parents, profiteering businessmen, gleeful national media, even the police. Later they can all go home and grow up like their mommies, but this was their chance to attempt a very safe and very private kind of rapture.” This quote reveals the common repressive attitudes males had towards female expression and enjoyment at the time. But it also contained the germ of its own destruction, for the Beatles did indeed give young girls their chance at rapture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published the year before. The same “problem that has no name” that afflicted grown women in 60s America was also playing out in their daughters. It is no wonder, then, why the Beatles were always met with the Scream. The hysteric release of the Scream was the floodlike release of a number of repressed emotions. The singing Beatles gave these young girls the catharsis that they desperately needed in a consumerist patriarchy, even though this catharsis came to them via precisely those powers. “To abandon control – to scream, faint, dash about in mobs – was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture,” wrote critic Barbara Ehrenreich. “It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution” (Ehrenreich 1986). The Beatles made it big by appealing to teen girls, and in the process helped knock some chinks in the walls of gender that held these girls back.
The Beatles and their female fans had an important mutual relationship. The single From Me to You, with its B-side Thank You Girl, was explicitly released as an act of appreciation (Stark 131). The fans, of course, deserved appreciation. Arguably, the screaming crowds of girls were the single biggest catalyst of Beatlemania. The crowds became a spectacle of their own; the famous Ed Sullivan TV special devoted a huge amount of screentime to shots of the fans convulsing, screaming, peeing, and fainting in the audience. The raw emotion displayed on such a massive scale created a social phenomenon that others were then forced to look at. What’s causing such a ruckus? A band? What’s with the hair? And so it went (Paul once said that the biggest thing that broke the Beatles was “the hairdo more than the music originally” due to its instant recognizability). This intense relationship between the Beatles and the female fans who launched them to the Toppermost of the Poppermost raises the question: were the Beatles “girl music”? Limiting ourselves to the gender discourse existing in the 1960s, the obvious answer is yes, since it is unlikely that the Beatles could have achieved world domination the way they did without the screaming power of their overwhelmingly female early fanbase. Their early lyrics were all about girls. They had just the right mix of features to drive 13 year old girls wild. It would seem that the entire Beatles act was a meticulously executed exemplar of female-focused music, a reinforcement of boy-girl gender norms.
However, considering the boys’ background, their gender expression becomes more interesting and less intentional-seeming. While they indeed were perfectly suited for their young female audience, they came into this role quite naturally, and their image radically challenged American gender norms even as some early song lyrics reinforced them. Firstly, the difference between British masculinity and American masculinity was considerable during the time the boys grew up in Liverpool. Whereas America was carved out by masculine Manifest Destiny manifestations, Britain inherited a long history of foppishness from the likes of James I and Oscar Wilde. British culture also embraced “mumming,” a theatrical practice of cross-dressing which developed in Elizabethan times and continued in the homoerotic stew of all-male English boarding schools (Stark 134). All male casts would have some of the men play female roles, a gender-pushing precursor to modern drag and the performances of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. England’s music management scene at the time also had a large gay presence, which influenced the Beatles very directly through their gay manager, Brian Epstein. Epstein was enormously responsible for the final “look” of the Beatles, whom he loved dearly. In their period playing in Hamburg, the young Beatles had solidified their performance skills while also picking up a new European hairdo through their friendship with the fashionable Astrid Kirchherr (Stark 80). This ended up becoming the signature Beatle haircut once it was tamed a bit by Epstein. Epstein further molded the group’s style by “poshing them up” as well as demasculinizing them. This was the end of their leather jacket era and the beginning of their highly successful suit era. The shoulder-smoothing suits and polished boots played down the group’s masculinity, making the final look much more androgynous (Stark 101). Thus, although the Beatles’ gender expression was at the vanguard of English gender norms, it was decidedly grounded in cultural absorption and not purposefully shocking. American gender norms were comparatively strict, so the Beatles looked that much more memorable to a bewildered American audience in 1964.
The interaction between the Beatles and gender is especially interesting considering the Beatles’ musical influences. The question of what defines “girl music” requires one to distinguish between music that is for girls and music that is by girls. The Beatles blew open this definitional issue, because the music of the Beatles was both. The Beatles absolutely adored American girl groups. In the late 50s/early 60s period during which the young Beatles got really into music, girl groups like the Marvelettes, the Shirelles, and the Supremes were imported to Liverpool from Motown and had an enormous impact on the boys. Their affection showed; in their first two albums, the Beatles covered no less than five girl group songs: Baby It’s You, Boys, Chains, Please Mr. Postman, and Devil in her Heart (Womack & Davis 61). Their covers had remarkable gender parity for a boy band. The Shirelles in particular had the Beatles’ heart. Five of their songs were featured regularly in the Beatles’ setlist during the Cavern years, and the feminine -les in the Beatles may have been inspired by the girls. Undeniably, though, these girl groups influenced the Beatles’ sound in the same way that writers’ favorite authors influence their writing. The music the Beatles made in the early years had a unique energy, and this can be in large part credited to the influence of girl groups. The structure of the group resisted the masculine tradition of a hierarchical group behind a leader, and thus they worked well with the Shirelles’ style of switching and sharing lead vocals and harmonies between bandmates. The Shirelles were a “model from which the Beatles drew their vocal arrangements and overall form of the band” (Macleod 77). The Beatles’ lyrical style fell under this feminine influence as well. Their early music, while about boy-girl relationships, takes a much more nuanced and feminine position than most male artists of the time would have dared. Sonically, the higher voices, ecstatic oooohs, and crowning falsettos are obvious feminine highlights, and it was these aspects that drove girls to screaming crescendos, suggesting that perhaps the Beatles’ appeal to girls was more in the realm of gender than of sex. But furthermore, their song structures lyrically borrowed heavily from girl group conventions, such as the “group advice” style evident in “She Loves You,” a song in which the singer gives advice (apologize to her!) to his boneheaded friend on behalf of the girl who loves him, a complex subject with a decidedly feminine group sensibility driven home by the backing yeah yeah yeahs (King 63). This suggests to the listener sensitivity and empathy for the female point of view. This femininity in their music may have been intentional or the simple byproduct of absorbing girl group music, but the fact that they authentically enjoyed the music is indisputable. They had no compunctions preventing them from expressing this appreciation, as evidenced by their refusal to change the lyrics to “Boys,” even though it sounded as if they were singing about loving boys. This disregard for heteronormativity and embrace of female perspective was not a liability to their young female fans, but an asset. Ringo singing “Boys” was a wildly popular mainstay of the Beatles’ touring set in 1964 and ‘65. The Beatles’ honest incorporation of feminine styles into their music and their image was an essential aspect of their unique appeal.
The early Beatles were a band which made what has been called music for girls while incorporating styles from music by girls. This was not a calculated culture-industry invention aimed at reinforcing gender binaries, but rather an authentic expression of appreciation for female music as well as for their female fans. This authenticity is of course bolstered by the simple fact that the four straight men of the Beatles really did like girls, which translated both lyrically and libidinally to their audience. Their subtly feminized rock n roll and androgynous looks were enough to give the impression to American audiences that this music was decidedly “girl music.” In a patriarchal society where men had a monopoly on “higher” culture with their dual positive-and-neutral role, as noted by Beauvoir, this label carried negative connotations. Establishment masculinity was anti-Beatle from the start, as evidenced by the newspaper quotes earlier. The resistance trickled down to the inheritors of this masculinity, the male youths whose female peers were the primary carriers of Beatlemania. Many of these young men, however, found themselves loving the new group despite societal pressures. “‘If you told the tough guys they [the Beatles] were better than Elvis, they beat you up,” said one male New York teen who preferred the Beatles. So, like others, he talked about his new heroes ‘only to the girls’” (Stark 38). Clearly, some young men enjoyed these mop-topped boys from Liverpool from the get-go and connected with their generational group, giving their “youth” identity primacy over their “male” identity. Young boys began wearing longer hair themselves in imitation of the Beatles’ style, and it became a symbol of youth culture— or, to worried parents and teachers, a symbol of youth rebellion against the established order.
Young girls liked the Beatles, and some young boys liked them, too. The label of “girl music” continues to become weaker and weaker the more one pulls at it. From a fan-based perspective, the Beatles were “youth music” more than they were “girl music.” This age demographic stuck with the Beatles for the rest of the decade as their music evolved in thematic complexity, moving into the comfortably male territory of “neutral” art. This development only increased their male fanbase who sooner or later realized that this music sure wasn’t just for girls anymore. But these latecomers didn’t realize that the Beatles were never just for girls. Men had rocked to the Beatles at least since Hamburg. Even though many boys derided the Beatles during the early “teenybopper” phase, there were still millions of young boys buying their records and getting excited with their peers of both sexes. Young boys loved the Beatles for most of the same reasons young girls did; the Beatles were exciting and new, they were endearingly young yet authoritatively older than their audience, parents didn’t like them, they made catchy music, they had infectious personalities, and they looked cool. Furthermore, the Beatles’ unique gender expression gave boys plenty to love, too. They could be just as enamored with wanting to be like them, to be as cool and beloved and screamed at by girls as the Beatles. Boys also could relate to the lyrics of young love just like the girls could, regardless of the song’s roles. They could imagine themselves as the subject, the singer, emulate the Beatles, or just enjoy the contagious energy. The Beatles’ androgyny allowed boys all across the spectrum of masculinity to identify with or fall in love with the Beatles. The Beatles’ original fusion of masculinity and femininity actually helped to expand their audience rather than limit it.
Up to this point, this exploration has worked mainly within the discourse of gender that existed in 1964; today, we have a much more fluid conceptual framework which can reveal fuller significance in the Beatles’ expression of gender. Judith Butler published her influential book Gender Trouble in 1990. She argued that gender is a malleable social creation negotiated constantly by individuals in society. Gender is inherently performative; it is “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 179). There is no essence behind it; “the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (Butler 178). Gender is simply a “tacit collective agreement to perform,” a collective fiction. This pulls the rug out from under debates about what is or isn’t “girl music.” However, this does not negate the importance of the controversy. For Butler went on to say that subjects are constituted by existing powers which hand down these gender scripts, and so “it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of gender becomes possible (Butler 185). It is only within construction that agency becomes possible, and this agency can only be enacted using the tools received. So, if one wishes to change gender norms, one must figure out space for subversion within the existing norms and then act, or perform. The Beatles became the biggest performers in world history, and their rise was enabled partially by existing gender structures centered around the teen girl music market. However, the Beatles despised this phony industry targeting, as parodied in the infamous scene in A Hard Day’s Night when George humors a “teenage taste specialist” and coins the word “grotty.” The Beatles were a subversive bunch, naturally ahead of their time when it came to gender, and their rise to fame was also attributable to their masculine and feminine synthesizing, their gender subversions rather than their reinforcements. Everyone performs gender, but no one ever got to perform gender before such a large audience. And, as is often said when discussing the Beatles historically (but never personally), they arrived at the perfect time.
The Beatles acquired the largest stage the world had ever seen, and with their performance on that stage they subverted gender in revolutionary ways which influenced far-reaching social changes in gender mores. Their early music, emerging from a long tradition of R&B and rock, was moored in gendered ideas of boy-girl love. But what the Beatles did within that “practice of repetitive signifying” is what makes it brilliantly subversive, exemplified by the integration of feminine lyrics and singing styles into their rock music, which was always a genre dominated by masculinity. They also presented subtle subversions of gender roles in the narratives of their relationship songs, showcasing unmasculine feelings and mixing up the traditional subject and object roles. In a patriarchal society, subversion usually means starting with the feminine, the negative, and the Beatles did exactly this to grand effect. One of the central theses of Steven Stark’s Meet the Beatles is that “the Beatles helped feminize the culture” (Stark 3). The Beatles’ arrival in America in 1964 coincided with the early stages of the “sexual revolution” brought about by the advent of The Pill and the publishing of The Feminine Mystique. The Scream induced by the Beatles was “the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution” (Ehrenreich). And for men, the Beatles were similarly liberating. The Beatle haircut shocked crew-cut American masculinity, but once the spark was lit, millions of young men decided to follow their new heroes and stopped getting haircuts as an act of youthful rebellion and a signifier of group identity. Long hair versus clean cut became the visually unmistakable symbol of whether one was part of the youth revolt or not, and sparked new national conversations about gender expression (Stark 177). The Beatles weakened the chains of masculinity and gender definition for an entire society. Perhaps Sir Paul said it best: “There they were in America, all getting house-trained for adulthood with their indisputable principle of life: short hair equals men; long hair equals women. Well, we got rid of that small convention for them. And a few others, too.” The Beatles’ look by the time of their final rooftop concert at the end of the decade was the perfect encapsulation of their evolution in relation to performative gender. They had really long hair by then, down to their shoulders, but contrasted that free feminine growth by sporting varying unshaven looks with beards or mustaches. Paul wore a suit but accessorized it in a feminine way, and the other three all wore “what are surely women’s jackets” (King 145). The Beatles had reached an apotheosis of gender subversion, and were performing it for the whole world. And the whole world watched.
The Beatles’ use of their massive platform to perform gender subversion clearly had far reaching impacts on cultural concepts of gender. The burgeoning freedom from gender roles embodied by the Beatles translated into a more general advocacy of “freedom,” associating their gender subversion with subversion of many other societal forces which were being questioned in the 60s; hair became the perfect symbol for freedom. By the early 1970s the country had more or less caught on, and anyone watching a late season of Mad Men can clearly see the enormous lasting cultural impact the Beatles had in the long haircuts sported by the men, most of whom had been quite clean cut in season one. But their impact went way beyond hair. “It is not overstating the case to suggest that the phenomenon of the Beatles created a situation through which popular music, in subsequent decades, became a site for debate about youth, sexuality, gender, race, identity, the power of celebrity and its impact on the realities of everyday life” (King 16). The Beatles’ association with general movements for freedom led to diverse cultural changes and opened up important debates, too numerous to list here. It is interesting, as a closing, to examine the wake left by their gender performance specifically within the music industry. After the Beatles broke up, John and Paul settled into their marriages, which were rather equal and respectful for the time. The popular void in rock left by these domestic progressives was filled by highly masculinized rock n roll, called “cock rock.” This was nothing new, since swinging his groin around was how Elvis got big; Led Zeppelin simply continued the previously scheduled programming. However, a solid thread of androgynous performers can be traced from the Beatles to later acts such as Lou Reed and David Bowie, who achieved enormous success through acts of gender subversion (Simels 49). These gender performances were far more radical than that of the Beatles, precisely because the Beatles had raised the bar. Finally, the Beatles established the definitive playbook for boy bands’ subversion of societal norms in attractive ways. There are traces of this in Harry Styles’ gorgeous long hair and in BROCKHAMPTON’s radical looks as well as their boundary-crossing lyrics. The subversion of gender mores has been a unique role played by musicians over the last fifty years, largely due to the platform seized by the Beatles’ uncharted interactions with gender.
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Works Cited
“Bobby-Soxers’ Gallup.” Time, Time Inc., 13 Aug. 1956.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Charness, Daniel. “BeatleBoomers: The Beatles in Their Generation.” BeatleBoomers, Wesleyan University Honors College, Apr. 2010,
wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1557&context=etd_hon_theses.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, et al. Re-Making Love: Women and the Sexual Revolution. Doubleday, 1986.
Gillon, Steve. Boomer Nation. Free Press, 2010.
King, Martin. Men, Masculinity, and the Beatles. Routledge, 2016.
Macleod, Sean. Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s and Their Influence on Popular Culture in Britain and America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Palmer, Robert. “The 50s: A Decade of Music That Changed the World.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 Oct. 2017, www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-50s-19900419.
Riley, Tim. Fever: How Rock n’ Roll Transformed Gender in America. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2004.
Simels, Steven. Gender Chameleons: Androgyny in Rock ‘n Roll. Arbor House, 1985.
Stark, Steven D. Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World. Harper, 2006.
Womack, Kenneth, and Todd F. Davis. Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four. State University of New York Press, 2006.
Newspaper Quote from “The Nation” (March 2nd, 1964), Unknown Author, Reprinted by Carey Schneider in the LA Times February 9th, 2014
Newspaper Quote from The Associated Press (New York, February 10th, 1964), Unknown Author, Reprinted by The Associated Press February 7th, 2014
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 