In the early 1990s, Bikini Kill, the riot grrrl band fronted by Kathleen Hanna, turned the words “girls to the front” into a battle cry. What began as a practical request at gigs to stop women from being pushed back or injured by the male mosh pit became a feminist mantra about upending rock’s status quo and creating space for female self-expression and creativity.

In Revenge of the She-Punks, the London-born “punk professor” Vivien Goldman examines this female space and how it has evolved. This is no chronological plod through the classic western “women in rock” narrative, not least because Goldman’s research takes her from London, land of the Slits’ Ari Up and the Bodysnatchers’ Rhoda Dakar, to Akron, Ohio (Chrissie Hynde), Moscow (Pussy Riot), Beijing (Hang on the Box) and elsewhere. Her aim is to amplify female voices across cultures, continents and generations and to understand the relationship between genre and gender, all the while showing how oppression and hard-won freedoms have yielded some of the most electrifying music ever made. The experience of making and performing music is, she explains, different for girls: “Our path is beset with particular pitfalls, which makes our glories all the sweeter.”

Goldman is accustomed to battering her way into male citadels. She has worked as Bob Marley’s publicist, as a manager for Generation X, as a pirate radio DJ and a backing singer. Her first solo single, “Launderette”, from 1981, was produced by John Lydon and had the Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall on violin. She started her journalistic career on Sounds magazine, has written biographies of Marley and Kid Creole, and made music documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC. She has lived in Paris and London, and now resides in New York where she is a part-time professor at NYU. “Music has been my dance partner through life,” she writes in her introduction.

While working at Sounds magazine in 1975, Goldman recalls the “strange apparition” that was seeing a woman on stage playing power chords, after which she made it her mission to find out where all the other women were. Shortly afterwards she heard Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex singing “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” – “I knew at once that with all its saucy frisson, the bondage she sang about was not S&M; rather it was the patriarchy I had been hearing about since feminism had started to filter through just a few years before.”

The language is urgent, often furious, sometimes funny and full of piquant turns of phrase. She notes how Kathleen Hanna “has skills like the goddess Kali has arms”. She describes “Smother Love” by Crass as “a carnival ghost ride through the horrors of the depressing politics they perceived as playing out through so many marriages around them.” While Goldman isn’t especially interested in trying to define punk – there is plenty of literature on that already – her understanding of it is wide-ranging and determinedly global, travelling way beyond the old DIY cliches.

At one point, we find her shopping for vintage clothing in Notting Hill, London, with Patti Smith, whom she identifies as “a new breed of autonomous, self-defined, and uninhibited female rock star”, and who, determined to spend the proceeds of her successful Horses LP, buys Goldman a black velvet jacket. There is an encounter with Grace Jones, whom she finds crying in a hotel elevator on account of her lover Jean-Paul Goude’s one-dimensional view of her: “He always wants me to be an animal,” Jones sobs.

Elsewhere, there are conversations – some gathered from Goldman’s archive, others collected specifically for this book – with women across the world on how the personal and political has fed into their work. One of the more surprising perspectives comes via an email exchange with China’s Gia Wang, “the outsider’s outsider” whose song “Asshole, I’m Not Your Baby” is a direct descendent of Crass’s “Smother Love”. Wang claims to be pro-Trump – “It is doubtful he would return the favour”, notes Goldman, dryly – and is vehemently anti-abortion (one of her songs is called “Kill Your Belly”). Goldman asks whether China’s former one-child policy, leading to enforced abortion as a means of birth control, might have influenced her view. “Don’t blindly imagine China unless you come to China and know China,” replies Wang, furiously. “Some people approve [of abortion] because they know nothing about the spirit and God. This so-called freedom and feminism is especially bullshit.”

Goldman’s punk, then, is a broad church, including as it does those with views that seemingly go against the liberal punk grain. All the stories and voices here are linked by a defiance, both musical and ideological, born from thousands of years of patriarchal oppression. “There is strength,” she writes, “as we huddle around the (metaphorical) fire as women together – with backing vocals from the men who love us – to dance, sing, and share our stories and our songs.”

In Amy Raphael’s A Seat at the Table, female musicians are invited to reflect on their lives, careers and how they got there in a series of lengthy interviews. It is an update of the 1995 book Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock by Raphael (who, for full disclosure, is a former colleague) in which she spoke to 12 musicians including Courtney Love, Kristin Hersh, Kim Gordon and Björk. As Raphael points out, the artists featured in the new book, and the stories they tell, show how far women have come but also how far they have yet to go. The industry may have opened up for women in the years since the first book was published but misogyny and creative marginalisation remain rife.

It’s with a note of regret that Raphael reveals her thwarted efforts to include contributions from pop’s marquee names – she says she would love to have spoken to Beyoncé or Janelle Monáe. While their perspective would have been interesting, the book doesn’t suffer from their absence. As Revenge of the She-Punks illustrates, there is value in understanding the experiences of the outliers, the outsiders and the women breaking through as well as the artists who have since switched careers or retreated from view. So we hear from Kate Tempest, Nadine Shah, Natalie Merchant, Mitski, Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry, Tracey Thorn, the French-Cuban twins Ibeyi and Christine, and Christine and the Queens’ Héloïse Letissier. Their testimony is variously optimistic, troubling, joyful, illuminating, fierce and thoughtful. It is often all these things at once. As Raphael notes, when these women speak, “they expect to be heard”.

• Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History by Vivien Goldman is published by Texas (RRP £14.99). A Seat at the Table is published by Virago (RRP £14.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.