Unfettered and alive

Sisterhood -- in the family and body politic -- can be a beautiful abstraction and a real pain in the neck. It's an evanescent ideal that sometimes takes shape in historic movements. And it's the cosmic force behind Sheila Weller as she tries to link the lives of three very different artists to "the rich composite story of a whole generation of women born middle-class in the early to mid 1940s and coming of age in the middle to late 1960s."

It's brave of Weller, in defining "us," to include the amorphous, perhaps even nostalgic, notion of class in America. Now as in the past, the phrase "middle class" contains so many worlds of meaning that nobody really knows what it means. Middle-class-ness might be imagined in Carole King's life as a young wife and mother and in the drab orthodoxy that hung like a pall above Joni Mitchell's childhood home. Then too, it was the generalized, enigmatic epithet epitomizing all that was phony, "bougie," a slur tossed at the uptown Simon for not being sufficiently street smart. Given that being middle-class contravened being hip, the first order of business for a self-respecting, self-liberating young woman was to un-class oneself. (If somebody in your consciousness-raising group called you middle-class, you'd probably think that wasn't very sisterly.)

King is Weller's "everywoman." Coming of age in Brooklyn, inspired and influenced by black musicianship, King makes her way by dint of talent into the Brill Building, center of top-40 hit-makers. She and her partner, then-husband Gerry Goffin, chalk up a string of successful records before she turns 21. "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" hits the charts as birth control pills are "reaching their first customers," Weller points out, allowing a young, single woman to declare herself "an emotional and sexually independent and responsible person."

Mitchell emerges as bubble gum becomes not just the stuff tough girls crack but also an epithet meaning crass or commercial. The Canadian singer-songwriter became for Weller "the It girl and anthropologist of her newly coined female archetype, a rusticated American version of Left Bank femininity."