It was not top of The Herald's "most read" list - until a certain Glasgow football club finally hangs up its boots we are all runners-up in that race - but an arts page a week past Thursday gave me particular pleasure as a commissioning editor.

Containing interviews by Nicola Meighan and Jonathan Geddes with two major figures of the US riot grrrl music scene, Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker and Mary Timony, now of Ex-Hex, it both celebrated a movement from the early 1990s that many of our readers will remember from their teenage years, and was right on the zeitgeist as far as current writing about music is concerned, even allowing for Geddes being a bloke.

When serious writing about rock'n'roll began, the big beasts of the genre were all blokes, writing about other blokes. Albert Goldman wrote a scurrilous/revealing biography of John Lennon. Peter Guralnick delved into the minutiae of the lives of Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke. Greil Marcus did that individual - and progressively unreadable - thing that Greil Marcus does.

In rock journalism, the big names were also almost exclusively male, including the venerated Lester Bangs on the other side of the Atlantic, and the men who made the New Musical Express such an essential part of the 1970s teenager's week: names like Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Ian Penman and Paul Morley.

The pop successes of the past year - Sam Smith, Ed Sheerin - may have been male after a year of two of Lily, Katy, Emeli and Adele ruling the roost, but as far as telling the story of pop and rock in print is concerned, it has been women all the way.

Tracey Thorn's partner in Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt, is a fine writer (Patient, Romany And Tom), but it is she who documented their band and its era so effectively in Bedsit Disco Queen, a book you might file next to Different For Girls, the praised autobiography of Sleeper's Louise Wener.

Just out in paperback is Viv Albertine's wonderfully titled Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, a memoir that has been praised as much for its unflinching honesty and as social document, as for its telling the story of being the guitarist in the Slits.

That personal frankness is also present in Kim Gordon's Girl In A Band, the Sonic Youth bassist's new book about the seminal New York No Wave outfit that had her personal partnership with guitarist Thurston Moore at its heart - and which ended when that did.

If Moore does not come out of that story well, it is not stretching a point to note that men in general are the second sex when it comes to documenting rock's recent past. A review on the publisher's website of Zoe Howe's book about East Kilbride's Jesus And Mary Chain, Barbed Wire Kisses, compares it favourably with the Morrissey autobiography controversially printed as a "Penguin Classic" around the same time.

The former Smiths frontman's much-hyped book now stands as just another self-aggrandising indulgence by an ageing musician by comparison with much of what we have seen from the pens of women working in the same industry.

That the history of rock'n'roll is now being written by women is something to celebrate, particularly for its distance from the myth-making so indelibly part of the music's messy past.

Kim Gordon speaks to Teddy Jamieson in tomorrow's Sunday Herald