DescriptionThis dissertation approaches the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s from a feminist perspective, offering the concept of folk feminism as an analytical framework for understanding the way women found empowerment within and through the masculinist world of folk performance. With attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality within the New Left and in the broader context of the early Cold War and civil rights movement, this research intervenes in hegemonic narratives of the folk revival to argue that women not only achieved forms of social liberation through folk fandom and performance, but also played a critical role in laying the aesthetic and political groundwork for the entire folk revival in its early years. Contrary to historiography that couples the folk revival with whiteness, this research emphasizes Odetta Holmes, a Black woman, and Joan Baez, whose father was from Mexico and whose mother was born in Scotland to English parents. It traces how Odetta’s rare positionalities—on the margins of mid-Fifties society but at the center of progressive music—combined with her personal performance style would eventually allow her to move the folk movement into the 1960s, at which point Baez rose to fame in her footsteps.