‘Room For The Life’: Kate Bush’s misunderstood “feminist” anthem
Looking at the contributions of female artists to the music industry, it is impossible to ignore the work of Kate Bush. The Kent-born artist became the first woman to achieve a UK number one single with a song written entirely by herself, 1978’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, and has gone on to witness great success in a career spanning multiple decades.
Despite all of this, Bush has repeatedly distanced herself from the ‘feminist’ label. In fact, in a 1985 interview with Hot Press, she went so far as to say: “Feminist is one of those words. When you hear ‘feminist’ you go ‘ummgh!’ It’s a ‘concept’. You get all these terrible images – like women with hairy legs and big muscles”.
Yet, for many, Bush provided a role model for women who could exist and do their own thing within the music industry away from the men who dominate it. It is perhaps for this reason that a number of her tracks are often hailed as ‘feminist anthems’ in spite of the artist’s controversial view on the topic.
One such song is ‘Room For The Life’, the penultimate track from her debut album, The Kick Inside. On a surface level, it is easy to see how the lyrics, “Like it or not, we were built tough, because we’re woman”, purport feminist empowerment. Quite the contrary, though, Bush shared in a 1980 interview with Sounds that the song was supposed to be a message to be “a bit easier on men”.
As is commonplace within her interviews, the composer and performer goes on to say: “We are the ones with survival inside us, we carry the next generation, we have the will to keep going, we keep bouncing back. I don’t know if that’s anti-liberationist but I wouldn’t say femininity was very strong in my songs”.
This raises an interesting topic about how much say artists can have about the interpretation of their own work. If ‘Room For The Life’ inspires empowerment in some women, then does it really matter if that was not Kate Bush’s original intention? She said herself, in a 2016 Fader interview, “I’m sure with a lot of paintings, people don’t understand what the painter originally meant, and I don’t really think that matters. I just think if you feel something, that’s really the ideal goal”.
So, while Kate Bush might be apprehensive to think about how works in the canon of feminist art, she at least seems content with the fact that her music means a lot of different things to a lot of different people – and if it has empowered women in the music industry along the way, then so be it.
