The record in context

It was written for Tina Turner. That’s the first thing to know about “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” — that Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart originally had Turner’s volcanic comeback in mind when they wrote it. But Turner proved unavailable, and so the duo did something bolder: they flew to Detroit and recorded it with Aretha Franklin at United Sound Systems, in a session that felt like a passing of the torch between the short-haired British new wave icon and the Queen of Soul herself. Released in October 1985, it reached No. 9 in the UK and No. 18 on the US Billboard Hot 100, earned a 1986 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals, and appeared on both Eurythmics’ Be Yourself Tonight and Franklin’s Who’s Zoomin’ Who? — a rare double-album billing that tells you how much both camps believed in it.

The title’s spelling was deliberate: “Doin'” rather than “Doing,” a nod to Black empowerment vernacular that linked the feminist movement with the language of the civil rights movement. The lyric’s centerpiece — “the conscious liberation of the feminine state” — became a rallying cry far beyond pop radio. This was 1985, and mainstream pop did not routinely come with feminist theory in the chorus. Lennox, who had spent years using androgyny as provocation, was now making the argument explicit: sisters were doing it for themselves, and the song was both celebration and evidence. It became a decades-long staple of Pride parades, graduation ceremonies, and feminist rallies — one of those records that escapes its era and becomes infrastructure.

The music video was taped at Detroit’s Music Hall, grounding the song in the city where it was recorded, and intercut with clips from old black-and-white films including 1962’s A Kind of Loving. Notably, the video uses the single version rather than the album version — a reminder of how carefully singles were still being tooled as separate artifacts in the 1980s. Watching it now, what’s striking is the visible joy of the collaboration: Lennox, who grew up idolizing Franklin, singing shoulder-to-shoulder with her hero, and Franklin — who had nothing left to prove to anyone — throwing herself into a British new wave song with total commitment. These cross-generational, cross-genre summits often feel like label-mandated stunts. This one feels like a genuine meeting of minds.

There’s a quiet irony in the song’s origin story: written for Tina Turner, the ultimate survivor, it found its definitive form with Aretha Franklin, the ultimate authority. Both women embodied the song’s thesis — doing it for themselves, against industries and expectations designed to stop them. Lennox, the third voice in the room, was still early in her own journey toward that kind of autonomy, but she was learning from the best teachers available. “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” isn’t just a feminist anthem. It’s a document of apprenticeship: a young British singer standing between two American giants and holding her own.

The video, taped at Detroit’s Music Hall, rooted the song in the city of its creation — a deliberate choice, grounding a British-American collaboration in the streets where Motown was born. And there’s a detail only collectors know: the video uses the single version rather than the album version, one of those 1980s distinctions that mattered enormously at the time. Singles were still tooled as separate artifacts, mixed and sometimes restructured for radio, and the “Sisters” single was its own text. The black-and-white film clips intercut through the video — including 1962’s A Kind of Loving — gave the whole thing a documentary gravity, as if the song were already history being recorded.

The afterlife has been the real chart run. “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” became infrastructure — played at Pride parades, graduation ceremonies, feminist rallies, and political campaigns for four decades. It’s one of those records that escaped pop and entered the language, the way “We Shall Overcome” did: no longer a song so much as a utility, a thing people reach for when they need to say the unsayable. Lennox has spent her post-Eurythmics career as a humanitarian activist, and it’s tempting to hear this song as the overture to that second life — the moment the provocateur became the advocate, and never looked back.

It is worth remembering how unlikely this collaboration was on paper. In 1985, Aretha Franklin was a legacy artist in a commercial trough, years past her last major hit; Eurythmics were the hottest new thing in pop, with everything to lose by hitching their wagon to a nostalgia act. The industry wisdom said the pairing would diminish them both. Instead, it revived Franklin — “Freeway of Love” had already started the comeback, and “Sisters” cemented it — and it ennobled Eurythmics, proving they were serious students of the music they loved, not tourists. The best collaborations are acts of mutual rescue. This was one of the great ones.

Listen closely

Start with the opening, because the opening is a statement of intent. That punchy, gospel-inflected piano and the immediate full-band attack — this is the furthest Eurythmics had ever traveled from the Chalk Farm attic. Stewart’s production here is big, warm, and unapologetically American: real drums, real horns, room to breathe. And then the voices enter, and the song becomes a dialogue across generations. Listen to how Lennox and Franklin don’t blend so much as spar — two distinct instruments, two distinct histories, pushing each other higher. The backing vocals swell like a congregation, and suddenly this isn’t a pop single anymore. It’s a revival meeting.

Then focus on Lennox’s verses, where she stakes her claim. “There was a time when they used to say / that behind every great man / there had to be a great woman” — she sings it with a mixture of amusement and steel, and you can hear her relishing the demolition of the cliché. The lyric’s argument builds verse by verse, from historical observation to present-tense declaration, and Lennox’s delivery tracks the escalation precisely. By the time she hits “the conscious liberation of the feminine state,” she’s not singing a line anymore — she’s issuing a proclamation. It’s one of the great feminist couplets in pop, and it lands because Lennox sings it like she means it, not like she’s quoting it.

Now listen for Aretha, because Aretha is the song’s secret weapon and its soul. She doesn’t enter as a featured guest doing a polite cameo; she enters like weather. Listen to the way she takes the bridge — that unmistakable timbre, the gospel melisma, the sheer authority of phrasing honed over three decades. Against Lennox’s precise, almost architectural delivery, Franklin is all flood and fire. The contrast shouldn’t work — the cool Brit and the Queen of Soul — but it works magnificently, because both singers understand that this song isn’t about style. It’s about conviction. When they sing the title line together, it’s not a duet. It’s a pact.

Finally, listen to the song’s afterlife in your own memory. You’ve heard this at graduations, at rallies, in films, in commercials — it’s become one of those records that belongs to everyone. That ubiquity can make it easy to forget how radical it was: a feminist anthem, co-written by a woman, featuring the Queen of Soul, released as a mainstream pop single in 1985, nominated for a Grammy. The culture has spent forty years catching up to what Lennox, Stewart, and Franklin already knew in a Detroit studio: the sisters were doing it for themselves, and they didn’t need anyone’s permission. The song was the permission slip, handed out in advance.

Listen to the call-and-response structure, because it’s the song’s democratic genius. This isn’t a duet in the conventional sense — two voices blending into one. It’s a conversation, sometimes an argument, between distinct voices that never surrender their individuality. Lennox states, Franklin testifies, the choir confirms. The structure enacts the lyric: sisters doing it for themselves, together but not merged, united but not uniform. Pop duets usually dissolve difference. This one celebrates it.

And listen for Franklin’s ad-libs in the final stretch — those gospel interjections, the “yeahs” and affirmations, the moments where the Queen of Soul stops singing the song and starts preaching it. Against Lennox’s architectural precision, Franklin’s spontaneity is the human element that keeps the anthem from becoming a slogan. Slogans are printed. This was lived. When Franklin finally lets loose, the song stops being about feminism in the abstract and becomes about two specific women, in a specific Detroit studio, doing it for themselves in real time.