In spite of her success on stage and vinyl, Dobkin was never content to remain a movement star. She began attending the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival as a performer, but was immediately struck by the powerful community aspect of the festival. She returned to Michigan annually for over a decade, always participating as a worker as well as a musician.

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During the 1990s, as "genderqueer" politics began to replace the woman-identified lesbian polemic of the 1970s, Dobkin remained unapologetically feminist and lesbian-identified. She continued to perform both nationally and internationally and devoted a great deal of time to her column for the feminist newsjournal off our backs.

However, by the mid-1990s, though she re-released some of her earlier albums, Dobkin had begun to lose interest in songwriting.

She began the 17-year-long process of writing the story of her family and the early years of her life. My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement (2009) tells of Dobkin's experiences growing up as a "red diaper" baby (child of Communist Party members) and her career as a singer during the exhilarating renaissance of folk music in 1960s Greenwich Village.

The book is both an education about and a celebration of leftist activism and the movements, such as the struggle for civil rights, that paved the way for feminism. To readers disappointed that the book ends on Valentine's Day 1972, the day before she came out as a lesbian, Dobkin replies that the story of her lesbian life is contained in her music.

That music, however, cannot be easily separated from her early life, since it grows from the rich background her early life provided her, as she observes in the epilogue to My Red Blood, "My career in women's music sprang from the soil of J. S. Bach, The Red Army Chorus, Louis Armstrong, and Broadway shows, topped off by the folk music scene of the 1960s, and has granted me a life rich, challenging, and satisfying beyond my wildest dreams."

Nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, My Red Blood is described by songwriter John Sebastian as "a magnifying glass on a revolution in music, culture, and politics. Here's the sixties from someone who remembers EVERYTHING!"

During the early 2000s, Dobkin, ever militant, joined the steering committee of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC), a national activist organization that works for visibility and empowerment of old dykes within the community and in the world. She was recently named the group's co-director.

Although the roots of country music are in conservative rural America, in recent years many gays and lesbians have become attracted to it, and there has been an emergence of gay and lesbian country performers.

A cultural institution among lesbians, women's music festivals are community-based events that celebrate women's space as much as women's music.

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Stylistically diverse and continually evolving, women's music has broadened over time, but it remains committed to lesbian visibility and feminist values.

A product of the gay liberation movement spawned by the Stonewall rebellion, queer radio programming remains a significant source of entertainment and information for glbtq communities.

The Women's Liberation Movement, which flourished during the 1970s, constitutes the largest and most widely publicized social movement of women in history.

Women's music pioneer Meg Christian was among the first performer to address lesbian and feminist issues in her songs.

Openly bisexual singer Ani DiFranco, described as "the thinking person's acoustic punk feminist," has drawn on an eclectic mixture of musical traditions to create a distinctive style.

Award-winning rock singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge has not only managed to carve out a spectacularly successful career as a popular mainstream performer, but she has also become a lesbian icon and activist for gay and lesbian causes.

Canadian folksinger Ferron (Debby Foisy) is a pioneer in women's music who has been compared to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

One of the most successful folk/pop duos in recording history, Indigo Girls (consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers) have earned the fierce loyalty of their fans, many of whom are lesbians.

Long before she came out, lesbians had made singer k.d. lang their own.

Activist, singer, and songwriter Holly Near has been a tremendous influence in the formation and promotion of the women's music movement.

An ensemble of Black women singers who are also cultural and political activists, Sweet Honey in the Rock has embraced lesbianism as a life force and given it a voice.

Charismatic performer and activist Robin Tyler has spent much of her life enmeshed in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, from planning national marches to promoting same-sex marriage.

Pioneering singer, songwriter, activist, and teacher, Cris Williamson has been at the forefront of the women's music movement--and a major presence in the lesbian community--for decades.