Forget the puppets on a string. Read between rock'n'roll's lines and you will find that from Carole King through Joni Mitchell to Madonna, women have written their own songs.

I want him, and I need him
And some day, some way
Who-oh-oh-oh-oh I'll meet him
He'll be kind of shy
And real good-looking too
And I'll be certain he's my guy
By the things he'll like to do
Like walking in the rain
And wishing on a star
And being so in love
-Lyrics for the Ronettes' Walking In The Rain by Cyntia Weil, 1964

I beg you my darling
Don't leave me
I'm hurting
I'll tie your legs
Keep you against my chest
Oh you're not rid of me
No you're not rid of me
I'll make you lick my injuries
I'm gonna twist your head off, see
Till you say
Don't you wish you'd never met her
-Lyrics for Rid Of Me by P J Harvey, 1993

This Spring has seen the publication of She's A Rebel by Gillian Gaar, the most thoroughgoing tome yet on the subject of "women in rock". Yet while Gaar has provided a fairly exhaustive account of women in rock over the past 30-odd years, she shies away from the more complex question of what these women might have in common other than their gender. Or what the particular concerns of women songwriters might be.

Part of the problem is that women aren't generally seen as songwriters. The myth is that they are performers, with a host of backroom boys - male producers, managers, record company execs, lawyers - who, as well as planning their every career move, write their songs for them. The fact that Madonna has consistently written or co-written her numerous pop hits rarely provokes comment - yet that's been her bread and butter over the years because what makes money in the pop business is publishing royalties. The material girl who can get her hands on those is set to become a self-made woman rather than a mere overnight phenomenon.

Even if we are beginning to accept that there are some independent female songwriter/performers in the business today, from Suzanne Vega to Tasmin Archer, we still tend to ignore the ones who triumphed in the past. Look, for instance, at the sixties, the era of the girl groups. A typical misconception is that all the girl group songs were written by men. The truth is that practically all the early stuff - the songs sung by the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Ronettes et.al. - were written by duos that included women: Carole King with Gerry Goffin; Ellie Greenwich with Jeff Barry; Cynthia Weil (quoted above) with Barry Mann. Not only that, but a lot of the girl groups began with self-penned hits: the Chantels with Maybe, the first ever girl-group song to reach the charts, and the Marvelettes with Please Mr. Postman, later recorded by the Beatles.

Pop criticism has also been dogged by the notion that all women write about is romance, while men cover more important matters like riding down the highway, buying stairways to heaven and generally rebelling against the social order. A curious situation has now arisen in which feminism is used as a stick with which to beat women; why we exclaim, can't women write about real life about being a woman, instead of all this moon-in-Junery?

But it's not all that easy to bring "serious issues" into pop without sounding crass. Romantic pop songs are as nothing compared with the ones that purport to be about "the state of the world". So it's largely to our credit if we, as women songwriters, haven't joined the ranks of the self-styled saints of rock'n'roll, from Bob Dylan to John Lennon to Bono to Sting, who have tried to impart their deep and noble thoughts on life, ready-wrapped in a commercial pop package. To date, women in pop have, quite sensibly, steered clear of this territory - give or take the odd Sinead O'Connor.

It was in the late sixties that pop songs first started to delve into weighty matters. As the counter-culture took shape, "folk-singers" like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell brought a more intellectual perspective into the picture and lyrics became significant. As they left the folk tradition behind, the Dylans and the Mitchells became "singer-songwriters", with all the navel-gazing solipsism that implied.

Remarkably enough, Carole King, the teen pop queen of Tin Pan Alley, managed quite effortlessly to transform herself int the most successful of this new breed of "singer-songwriters". Her album Tapestry became the biggest-selling LP of the seventies, outstripping all the competition from the increasingly male-dominated rock mainstream. And guess what? One of the songs on the LP was Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, the girl-group classic she had written with Gerry Goffin for the Shirelles. It now became as much an anthem for the bed-hopping, liberated young women of the seventies as it had been for the shy, passionate teenage virgins of the sixties:

Tonight with words unspoken
You tell me I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

If Carole King had spoken for two generations of young women with the same preoccupations - sex, love and commitment - Joni Mitchell, the pre-eminent singer-songwriter of her time, spoke for one person and one person alone: herself. She was the Me Generation personified and she embodied a new notion in pop, that of the "auteur". Her lyrics, as befitted this role, were at best fascinating, free-spirited reflections on life and love; at worst, narcissistic ramblings. I don't think it ever crossed Joni Mitchell's mind that she spoke to, or for, a community of women with the same problems and dilemmas as her own. If anything, she was engaged in escaping from being a woman, in liberating herself sexually and socially. Her Song For Sharon, a childhood friend, neatly sums this up:
Sharon, you've got a husband
And a family and a farm
I've got the apple of temptation
And a diamond snake around my arm

The burgeoning women's movement did not pull women into addressing issues of the day through lyrics either. As the prevailing "progressive" rock mainstream became more and more a boys' club, there was no longer even a sense of an audience of women out there to whom the songs were being addressed. The problem was partly that the few women performers in rock - like Janis Joplin and Grace Slick - were trying hard to be one of the boys. But in attempting to escape the stereotype of giggly girls, all talking about boyfriends and wedding dresses, they fell into another one: that of the nympho hippy chick.

The punk revolution at the end of the seventies did much to return women to the mainstream of pop. Punk brought pop back to basics, rejecting the pompous claims of "progressive" rock by insisting that anyone could do it. While most of punk's musical output remains defiantly of its time, it cleared the way for a new generation of post-punk, if not post-feminist, singers and songwriters.

Punk's two biggest female stars, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry - both songwriters as well as performers - have exerted an enormous influence on today's women in pop and rock. Without Smith, it is hard to imagine the emergence of such rock poets as Sinead O'Connor and Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh, or current indie heroines like P J Harvey and Belly's Tanya Donnelly. The core of the new writing is still, for the most part about romantic love - but without so much of the romance, perhaps. When it comes to boy-meets-girl, the female indie songwriters are not afraid to show their nasty side: in Rid Of Me (quoted above), P J Harvey has no compunction about threatening to screw the head off her loved one should he stray from her side. Powerful writers like Harvey explore female anger, jealousy and exhibitionism in a way that is both arresting and disturbing but there is also a certain amount of rather over-familiar retro-punk posturing among the otherwise welcome new crop of guitar "grrrl" groups - L7, Hole, Babes In Toyland, Huggy Bear, et.al.

The influence of Debbie Harry has been even more extensive that that of Patti Smith. Without Harry, there could hardly have been a Madonna, let alone a Wendy James. In the late seventies, Harry's smart, ironic pop songs (written with Chris Stein) were a breath of fresh air. Songs like In The Flesh, Sunday Girl and Heart Of Glass, with their deliberate echoes of the girl-group sound, set the stage for the return to pop values in the eighties. Suddenly, after years of stupid people writing deep and meaningful rock lyrics, intelligent people were writing light pop again. Madonna, in particular, gave the teen pop song just as much cynicism as it could take without ever losing its essential optimism, with songs like Into The Groove and Material Girl.

Women songwriters in the pop world today are still, on the whole, concerned with romantic love, albeit perhaps from a different perspective, whether disturbingly honest or uncomfortably cynical. If it is songs about real life and grown-up womanhood you want - about the dilemmas of the single life, motherhood, divorce and so on - then the best place to look for them is in country music.

Folk and country have always centred on "real life" and "being a woman" in a way that has never really been possible in pop. The focus on the narrative form has prevented the many women songwriters working in folk and country from slipping into the second-rate arty obscurantism, or rebellious gesturing, that characterizes so much "clever" pop today. It has forced them to take a long, hard look at what they, as women, want to say about their lives and the focus on songwriting skills, rather than image, in today's "new country" or "country rock" circles has allowed the mature talents of songwriters like Rosanne Cash and Bonnie Raitt to flourish. Take the lyrics of Raitt's hit Nick Of Time:

A friend of mine, she cries at night
And she calls me on the phone
She sees babies everywhere she goes
And she wants one of her own
She's waited long enough, she says
And still she can't decide
Pretty soon she'll have to choose
And it tears her up inside
She's scared
Scared to run out of time

Country sales in the US now outstrip those of pop and such artists as Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash and Mary Chapin Carpenter are beginning to make an impact here. Their stuff isn't trendy - far from it. It deals with messy reality rather than the romantic pop gesture. But it sells. And that could be because it's what women want.

Charlotte Greig's band, Crow Country, plays upstairs at the Adams Arms, Conway St., London W1 on Thursday at 8pm. Their new single, Woman With A Black Name, is released this month.