‘You Don’t Own Me’: The crucial Lesley Gore anthem that championed feminism
When Lesley Gore was only 17, she released a song that captured a generational frustration, inadvertently recording one of the most poignant feminist anthems to come out of the 1960s. At the nexus of the second wave of feminism, women were becoming inspired to step away from suburbia and into the workforce, which ushered in the arrival of the Equal Pay Act the same year the hit song was released.
Typically opting for a more saccharine output of pop hits, Gore’s usual repertoire touched on boys, heartbreaks and love, most famously on ‘It’s My Party’ and ‘Judy’s Turn To Cry’. But the sharp lyrics conceived by John Madara and David White captured Gore’s attention.
“At the time,” explained Gore in a 1991 interview, “I know I chose it because I know I liked the strength in the lyric. But, for me, it was not a song about being a woman. It was about being a person, and what was involved with that. Of course, it got picked up as an anthem for women, which makes me very proud.”
As Madara told NPR, the song, mainly written about “a woman telling a guy off”, was also influenced by the civil rights movement and his multiracial neighbourhood in Philadelphia. “It was horrible, horrible, horrible,” he said. “My friends and I got locked up in Philadelphia and Mississippi, and they treated us like gangsters. And my black friends got hit more than I got hit. Those are things you don’t forget.”
That sense of personal risk is underscored in the song, which touches on a need for personal freedom that made it appeal to feminists and those fighting for racial equality in America. It’s made up not of pleas but resolute demands: “You don’t own me / Don’t try to change me in any way / You don’t own me / Don’t tie me down ’cause I’d never stay.”
The song has maintained its relevance ever since its ’60s release. It shot to number one in Australia In 2015 after singer Grace covered the Gore original alongside rapper G-Eazy, and Jessica Chastain and the female cast of Saturday Night Live sang it on the night of the 2018 Women’s March, and it even provided a backdrop for audiences’ first introduction to Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn as she broke free of an abusive relationship.
“The beauty of that song is that the verses start in a minor key, and then, when you go into the chorus, it goes into the major, and there’s such a sense of lift and exhilaration,” Gore explained. Its rousing message has made it a cultural mainstay and one that signalled a major change in Gore’s own life. “You can’t hold back a 17-year-old woman; she has got to find a way to spread her wings,” she said. “This was a song that allowed me a little bit more freedom vocally.”
