The first female rapper was MC Sha-Rock, the woman on the mic for the Funky 4 + 1 and the artist most often called hip-hop’s first woman MC. But “first” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because it depends on what you’re actually counting. The first on the mic, the first on a record, the first solo star, the first to go platinum. Each of those has a different name attached to it. What ties them together is that almost all of them were standing in the same rooms as the men who got the credit, and got left out of the story anyway.
So here’s the fuller answer, broken down the way it actually happened.
Quick Facts
- First female MC: MC Sha-Rock (Funky 4 + 1)
- First all-female rap group on a record: The Sequence, “Funk You Up,” 1979
- First female rap solo star (and first to go platinum): Roxanne Shanté
- First solo woman to release a full rap album: MC Lyte, Lyte as a Rock, 1988
- First female rapper in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Missy Elliott, 2023
Who Was the First Female Rapper?
Sha-Rock. Born Sharon Green, she came up in the South Bronx during the park-jam years, when hip-hop was a live thing happening on turntables and microphones long before anyone thought to press it to vinyl. As the only woman in the Funky 4, later the Funky 4 + 1, with her as the “plus one,” she was rhyming in the same era as Grandmaster Flash and the crews that get top billing in every documentary. DMC of Run-DMC has named her as an influence. The nickname that stuck is “Mother of the Mic.”
The reason her name isn’t automatic the way “Kool Herc” is comes down to timing and records. Hip-hop existed for years before the music industry figured out how to sell it. The first rap song to reach a national audience was “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, and the standard retelling of those founding years runs almost entirely through men.
Sha-Rock was there for all of it. Her group signed to Enjoy Records in October 1979 and recorded their first single months after “Rapper’s Delight” broke. She wasn’t a footnote to the era. She was in it from the jump. The history just got written without her at the center.
That’s the version that needs saying plainly. If you mean who was the first woman to pick up a mic and rap in hip-hop’s earliest scene, the answer is Sha-Rock, and it isn’t especially close.
Who Was the First Female Rap Group to Make a Record?
The Sequence, and the record was “Funk You Up,” released in December 1979.
Three high-school friends from Columbia, South Carolina: Cheryl “the Pearl” Cook, Gwendolyn “Blondy” Chisolm, and Angie “B” Brown, who you know now as Angie Stone, bum-rushed a Sugarhill Gang show in their hometown, talked their way backstage, and performed for a woman they didn’t recognize. That woman was Sylvia Robinson, who ran Sugar Hill Records. She signed them on the spot.
“Funk You Up” was Sugar Hill’s second single ever, released right behind “Rapper’s Delight,” which makes it one of the first rap songs ever cut to vinyl, period. Not just by women. It reached number 15 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart and has been sampled more times than most people realize, including by Dr. Dre. The Sequence were also, as Rolling Stone has noted that the first Southern rap group to score a hit was sixteen years before André 3000 stood at the Source Awards and announced that the South had something to say.
They’ve spent decades fighting for the recognition that came easily to the men they recorded alongside. The group adapted their rhymes from a cheerleading routine, which tells you how organic this was, three teenagers turning Friday-night chants into one of the first rap songs ever sold. Angie Stone went on to a celebrated soul career, and plenty of people who can sing every word of “No More Rain” have no idea she was rapping on wax before most of hip-hop’s founding fathers ever saw a recording contract. The history was right there on the label, second release in.
Who Was the First Solo Female Rapper?
This is where the answer splits depending on what “solo” means to you.
If you mean the first woman to break out as a solo act, that’s Roxanne Shanté, and the story is the stuff of legend. If you mean the first to carry a full album by herself, that’s MC Lyte, whose Lyte as a Rock arrived in 1988 as the first full studio album by a solo female rapper. For roughly a decade, women had been recording as duos and groups (Salt-N-Pepa, The Sequence), but no woman had carried an entire LP under her own name until Lyte did it from Brooklyn at 18.
Lyte wasn’t a one-off. She kept setting firsts: the first solo woman rapper to earn RIAA gold, for 1993’s “Ruffneck,” and the first female MC to headline Carnegie Hall. She’d been writing rhymes since she was 12. By the time her peers were celebrating hip-hop’s anniversaries, she’d already built the kind of catalog most rappers only dream about.
The point worth holding onto is that “first solo female rapper” isn’t one record or one name. It’s a chain, Shanté breaking through as an individual, Lyte proving a woman could carry a body of work, and the chain matters more than any single link. Treat it as one name, and you flatten a decade of women. Each clearing a bar nobody had cleared before them.
Who Was the First Female Rapper to Go Gold and Platinum?
Roxanne Shanté got there first, and she did it as a teenager.
Born Lolita Shanté Gooden in Queens, she was 14 when her neighbor, the producer Marley Marl, asked her to record a response to UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne.” She laid it down in essentially one take, reportedly on her way to do laundry. “Roxanne’s Revenge” set off what became known as the Roxanne Wars, inspiring more than 86 response records and writing the blueprint for the diss track that rap has run on ever since.
She became, per the Recording Academy, the first female rapper to achieve platinum singles and gold albums. “Roxanne’s Revenge” itself was certified platinum decades after the fact, in 2022, the paperwork finally catching up to what the streets knew in 1984. She also helped launch Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, and Nas, all of whom moved through the Juice Crew orbit she was part of. A 14-year-old changed the commercial ceiling for every woman who came after her, then spent years watching the credit drift elsewhere.
It’s worth sitting with what that achievement actually meant. Going gold and platinum wasn’t a vanity number, it was proof to the labels that a woman could move units, the only argument the business has ever really respected. Every record deal handed to a female rapper in the years after rests partly on a teenager from Queens proving the market was real. The industry treated her like a novelty act anyway, the response-record girl, rather than the commercial pioneer she was. That gap, between what she proved and how she was treated, is the whole story of early women in rap in miniature.
That’s a recurring theme here, and it isn’t an accident.
Why Hip-Hop Almost Forgot Its First Women
Here’s the part that usually gets skipped: the reason “who was the first female rapper” is even a hard question is that the women were systematically left out of the origin story while it was being written.
Sha-Rock was rhyming in the same Bronx rooms as the men who became canon. The Sequence’s record sat second in the Sugar Hill catalog, right behind the song credited with breaking rap nationally. Roxanne Shanté invented the diss record at 14. None of this is obscure or buried, it’s all documented, sourced, on the label. And still the standard history of hip-hop’s first decade centers the men and treats the women as a special-interest chapter, the “ladies first” segment of the tribute show rather than the founders they were.
NPR put it directly: the retelling of hip-hop history centers men, often cutting the women out of the same frame they were standing in. That’s why the answer fractures into a different name depending on who’s telling it and which “first” they happen to be counting. It’s not that the facts are missing. It’s that nobody kept the women’s record with the same care they kept the men’s.
The fix isn’t to crown one woman and move on. It’s to name the whole chain, Sha-Rock on the mic, The Sequence on wax, Shanté breaking commercially, Lyte carrying an album, and treat each one as load-bearing. The least the history can do is keep their names in the right order.
The Firsts That Came After
Once the door was open, the milestones kept coming, and the names get more familiar.
Lauryn Hill made The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998 and became the first rap artist, woman or man, to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. The album later became the first by a female rapper to be certified Diamond.
Missy Elliott has collected firsts like nobody else in the genre. She was the first female rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, in 2019, and the first one inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in November 2023, where Queen Latifah introduced her. In her speech, Missy did the thing the history books keep failing to do, she called the names of the women who came before her: Pepa, Latifah, Lyte, Roxanne Shanté, Monie Love.
Cardi B became the first solo woman to win Best Rap Album, for Invasion of Privacy, in 2019. Lauryn Hill had won it as part of the Fugees, but never as a solo woman until Cardi. Doechii became the third woman to take it in 2025, and made sure to name Hill and Cardi from the stage.
You see the pattern. The ones who get their flowers tend to be the ones who insist on naming who came first.
The Story the Question Is Really Asking
There is no single first female rapper, and the search for one tells you something about how the culture keeps its records. Sha-Rock was first on the mic. The Sequence were first on wax. Roxanne Shanté broke through first as a solo force and first went platinum. MC Lyte carried the first solo album. Every one of them was present at the creation and got written to the margins of it anyway.
The honest answer to “who was first” isn’t a name. It’s a list, in order, the way Missy said it at the Rock Hall, the way the official history still mostly doesn’t. The women were never missing from hip-hop. They were only missing from the recap.
