Olivia Rodrigo pulled off the first Daisy Chain Fields, a festival featuring a lineup of all women—Chappell Roan, Mitski, the bands Garbage and Bikini Kill, Doechii, special guests Alanis Morisette and Stevie Nicks, and Rodrigo herself. The 23-year-old pop star was inspired by Lilith Fair, a festival of all women musicians founded by Sarah McLachlan that took place from 1997 to 1999, before Rodrigo was born.

But McLachlan, who was also a special guest on Saturday, started Lilith Fair with something to prove. At the time, music industry gatekeepers wouldn’t allow two women to headline the same tour and wouldn’t even play two female artists back-to-back on the radio, so convinced were they that listeners would change the station.

By the time Lilith Fair ended its run in the late ’90s, it had unfairly become something of a punchline. But it had changed those practices, so much so that today it’s hard to imagine they ever existed. Truly, imagine a pop radio station refusing to play Taylor Swift and Beyoncé back-to-back—it’s inconceivable.

Because if one thing was clear at the first-ever Daisy Chain (which I was lucky enough to attend!), it was that women dominate the music industry. You could fill 10 tour rosters with female artists and still put on a sold-out festival every time. Daisy Chain was an event to benefit women and girls, put on by female artists (who performed for free), but it wasn’t some niche thing only for women—it was a full-on festival full of all kinds of fans who showed up to see their favorite performers.

And yet, the impact of Daisy Chain was no less for that. Rodrigo and her team identified 10 organizations that would benefit from the event’s proceeds. Many of those groups are likely familiar to readers of this newsletter: the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Baby2Baby, and more. On Friday, Rodrigo introduced the leaders of these groups at a press conference and announced they would receive a total of $10 million, split evenly among the 10 groups. Then, on Saturday night, the pop star brought out another special guest: Melinda French Gates. The billionaire philanthropist agreed to match the money raised by Daisy Chain, for a new total of $20 million.

French Gates told me why she decided to put her money behind Rodrigo and these nonprofits (many of which her firm Pivotal already supports): “What I love about Olivia is that she understands the unique power in showing up together for something bigger than ourselves,” French Gates told me in a statement. “She’s absolutely determined to use her enormous talent to make a real difference for women and girls — and the vital organizations doing the work every day. All of us who experienced Daisy Chain Fields could feel that this is just the beginning. The energy and community she built will only grow in the years ahead.”

These groups weren’t some side quest of the show. They were part of the main event. One of the longest lines at the festival was to get into a space dubbed “Daisy Chain reaction,” in which attendees learned about all 10 nonprofits and collected a button from each. Girls waiting in the line said they had to go in because Olivia told them to—it was that serious. Jumbo-sized version of those buttons decorated the stages where artists performed, with fans watching “Hot to Go” and Rodrigo and Morisette’s duet of “Ironic” underneath signs declaring “bans off our bodies” and “advancing Black maternal health, rights, and justice!”

Among her celebrity peers, Rodrigo has been one of the loudest and most consistent voices for reproductive rights—and now a broader swath of women’s causes—even as speaking out has become less popular. And she’s proven that fans don’t want celebrities to stop talking about politics, as so many have argued. They just want that commitment to be real. By raising $20 million for an expertly-selected group of nonprofits and teaching her young fans about issues ranging from abortion access to indigenous health, Rodrigo’s commitment is clear. “Daisy Chain felt like just that,” Rodrigo wrote on Instagram afterwards. “A collective hope that things can get better and a reminder of how much we really care about people at the end of the day.” Or as Stevie Nicks put it onstage: “Come be a part of her women’s rights thing.”

Women in music don’t have anything to prove to their industry anymore—instead, they’re proving that they can change the world.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

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ON MY RADAR

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PARTING WORDS

"By continually reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear."

— Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who died at 97, we learned last week