Fair Lilith

A WOMAN is trying to smoke a cigarette but with inelegant results; the piercing in her tongue keeps getting in the way. Another woman parades by with a baby suckling at her bare left breast, as if to say: "See my baby! See my breast!" Behavior like that falls short of ladylike, and you will definitely come across the likes of it if you visit Lilith Fair. The migratory summer festival of pop, rock, and folk music by women attracts up to twenty thousand people per stop, more than three-quarters of them female. With 57 stops around the country, that's a lot of women. So the day Lilith set up its tents and booths under the trees at the Great Woods Center outside Boston was as good a day as any to ponder the fate of femininity.

Other considerations might have already got you fretting on the same theme. The cover of that morning's New York Times showed a picture of Mrs. Clinton wearing an aggressively pink pantsuit and huge plastic Seventies-retro eyeglasses. She was smiling broadly and striding boldly out of a Sunday church service, clearly the dominant figure in the photograph, as to one side and slightly behind her the sheepishly grinning President himself walked. The accompanying article noted the First Lady's unshakable popularity. When this masculine female travels the country, women gather and urge her on with cries of "You go, girl!"

In politics the future of femininity looks bleak. So in the cultural arena the fact that a band of women rockers is going around under the title "Lilith Fair" might seem another reason to worry. But look again.

Presumably the event's impresario, folk/pop singer Sarah McLachlan, chose the name with all its sinister associations in mind. Lilith is a figure from Jewish demonology. The Bible has just a single reference to her, a cryptic one in Isaiah that pictures her lounging in the ruins of ungodly cities at the Day of Judgment (34:14). Other traditional literature explains that she was Adam's first wife, who on egalitarian grounds refused to submit herself sexually to the first man and so was banished from Eden. A couple of millennia later, modern feminists embraced the predecessor of Eve as a mascot. Her fans range from the editors of an obnoxious Jewish feminist magazine called Lilith, to neo-pagans (devotees maintain numerous Internet sites), to the scriptwriters on the television sitcom Cheers, who called Dr. Frasier Crane's first wife "Lilith."

Since Lilith Fair hit the road last summer, it has attracted gobs of media attention, most of which has emphasized the left-feminism of the women who run a lot of the booths and tents. At Great Woods a sort of Victims Row of booths paid tribute to causes like RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) and Massachusetts NARAL (the pro-abortion outfit). One booth sold ceramic "pocket goddesses" ("She comes with her own bag to protect her. Take her home and never be alone"). Another specialized in bumper stickers with slogans like "I believe in dragons, good men, and other fantasy creatures" and "My goddess gave birth to your god."

And yet. The next day a review in the Boston Globe reported that the bumper-sticker vendor was doing a "brisk" business, but that's not what I saw. I saw women crowding around a booth where you could get temporary henna "tattoos" in a variety of delicate and lovely arabesque designs, and another where you could have your hair brushed into an odd but cute flip. By comparison the anti -domestic-violence and pro-abortion booths were deserted.

In fact, walking around awhile, you got the definite impression that for many women these left-wing causes merely provide an occasion to exclude men, as Lilith more or less does, and celebrate, of all things, femininity.

After all, femininity, like masculinity, flourishes in a single-sex environment. (The co-ed military proves the point.) If you ignored Victims Row, you saw a lot of femininity at Lilith Fair. In older, better times, modesty of dress was a familiar signal of womanliness. That ideal has waned but it hasn't disappeared. The crowd at Lilith included lots of teens and twentysomethings who have developed an idiosyncratic yet pronounced style of modesty. Many of them wore baggy shorts and shapeless hooded windbreakers or sweatshirts (it was cool for August), which hide the shape of the body; others wore tie-dyed cotton Nepalese hippie dresses, ankle-length, which do the same thing but quite fetchingly. Hippie dresses were everywhere.

While femininity is difficult to define, it also resembles masculinity in that you know it when you see it. It has to do with a softness, a certain girlish exuberance -- the opposite of the hardness and cynicism associated with female high style in big cities like New York and Washington. By this standard the performers at Lilith were remarkably feminine.

A day at Lilith is 7 hours long, with 11 different acts on 3 stages, and so it's hazardous to generalize. But every singer I watched had the personal qualities that any traditional-minded father would be delighted to see in his daughter. Not least the two performers who appeared last, as Lilith's highlights: Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan.