Women of Rock Oral History Project is an oral history project based at Smith College focusing on American women and gender non-conforming, LGBT, and feminist rock and roll and punk music musicians from the 1970s to the present.^[1][2][3]

The Women of Rock Oral History project was started in December 2014 as a collection of digital video interviews conducted by Smith College Ada Comstock scholar and archivist, Tanya Pearson.^[4]

The inspiration for the project came from a seminar on censorship in the United States Pearson took while at Smith, where she worked as an assistant archivist at the Sophia Smith Collection while completing an undergraduate degree in American Studies with concentrations in oral history and archives. For the seminar, Pearson wrote about women rockers from the 1990s. During the process she was discouraged at the difficulty of finding widely available information about musicians she needed to find source material on, illustrating the fact that bands like L7 were not covered in detail in rock and roll history.^[3] Thematic devices she saw seemed to devalue their music and their musicianship, where the musicians were subject to sexism and tokenism, especially in popular journalism.^[5] The project highlights the limitations and bias within music scholarship and journalism.^[6] Many of the musicians were also active pre-internet, where press and coverage weren't available online and are not digitized.^[7]

The project includes written transcripts and is housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.^[7][8] The scope of the project is to document the influence and history of women in rock and roll, and to bring focus to the unheralded role of women musicians.^[9]

The project includes over 20 underrepresented female musicians from various rock and roll and punk music bands that were active from the 1970s to 2010, with some musicians and bands still actively performing music. Bands are listed next to each subject below. Each musician participated in video interviews which were digitized and made available on Vimeo. There are over 29 videos that are part of the project.^[18] A corresponding transcription project corresponding to the videos is in process of being created.^[4]

The timeframe of the project is from December 2014 to the present.^[18] The collection is ongoing, with additional video interviews being conducted.^[4] Pearson has said that the priority of subjects is on women musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to capture their stories before their stories are lost.^[9] A book that focuses on the stories of pioneering women musicians in rock is planned.^[17]

Listed alphabetically

• Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive