Rebel Grrrls.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Bossypants and Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution - Book review

Bossypants

By Tina Fey

Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company. 277 pages. $26.99.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

By Sara Marcus

Harper Perennial. 367 pages. $14.99.

What do America's top comedian and the women of an underground radical feminist movement have in common? A whole lot, it turns out.

Tina Fey, comedy writer and winner of a slew of Emmy awards for her television show 30 Rock, has a memoir out called Bossypants. It's hilarious and insightful and every bit as funny as you'd think it would be (unless you are Christopher Hitchens).

Girls to the Front may not be as funny as Fey's book, but it's just as perceptive. Sara Marcus delves into the "riot grrrl" world of the early 1990s. Riot grrrl was a grassroots feminist movement, with a do-it-yourself ethos. Third-wave feminists combined punk rock with consciousness-raising support groups. It was idealistic, fun, in-your-face feminism.

Driven by music and 'zines (handmade photocopied newsletters handed out at concerts or mailed in the pre-Internet era), culture and politics were at the forefront of this movement. Tobi Vail of the band Bikini Kill summed it up: "Our vision was of creating a feminist youth culture that was participatory and would change society. We wanted all girls in all towns to start bands."

Both books critique racist beauty standards, frown upon girl-on-girl sabotage, and show how so many young women barely survive adolescence and yearn for a sense of belonging. The 1990s are featured prominently, and Clarence Thomas, Hooters, and Planned Parenthood make appearances in each book.

Marcus does a great job of laying out the backdrop of the early 1990s: the AIDS crisis, the Gulf War, abortion clinic violence, and the consolidation of power by the Christian Right within the Republican Party. She paints a vivid portrait that makes understandable the utter urgency riot grrrls felt about what was going on around them.

Many of the riot grrrls were teenagers and had the sometimes inflated sense of dire that comes with that age, Marcus reminds us. But can you blame them? It's easy to forget abortion rights were one Supreme Court vote away from being gone in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Their bodies were literally on the line, and they often scrawled their political messages on their bodies with Sharpies.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The riot grrrl movement hit its stride the same year Pat Robertson wrote his infamous fundraising letter...