Hollywood (AP) - In another era, they might be singing lullabies. But not now.

In tune with the seventies, a flock of liberated women are restyling the sounds of music that sells records - and challenging the long-time male dominance of the field.

Their sound has been called "soft rock," a switch from the hard rock blare of the sixties.

The queen of the movement, Carole King, stunned the industry with her album Tapestry, which has sold five million copies. Her compositions, notably You've Got A Friend and It's Too Late, have been recorded by virtually every major artist.

Big hitmakers include Canadian-born Joni Mitchell with Both Sides Now and Woodstock; Laura Nyro with Stony End, When I Die, and Wedding Bell Blues; Carly Simon with That's the Way I've Always Heard it Should Be and Anticipation; and Dory Previn with Come Saturday Morning and the album Mythical Kings and Iguanas.

The list of successful woman writer-singers also includes Joan Baez, Janis Ian, Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Canadian Indian, and more.

"The female singer-songwriters are leading the way," says one music critic. "They at least let us know that the seasons are indeed changing."

Joni Mitchell, 28, a native of Fort Macleod, Alta., was educated in Saskatoon and Calgary, and played in the Calgary coffee house, The Depression, and in church basements and YMCA halls in Toronto. She was only 21 when she met and married Chuck Mitchell in Detroit. They performed as a duo around Michigan, then split up, and she moved to New York.

Buffy Saint-Marie, who will be 31 on Feb. 20, was born on the Pia Pot Cree reserve north of Regina and adopted at an early age by a Micmac couple who took her to live with them in Maine. She majored in Oriental philosophy at the University of Massachusetts.

The women perform, too. But it's their words and music that stand out - sensitive but city-slick with the uncompromising outlook of women who are sure their time has come.

"I deal in essences," says Laura Nyro, 25. "I can't do things my girl friends can do, like drive a car or cook a dinner, but I have the ability to see what is at the centre of things."

Miss King, 29, refuses interviews - "she doesn't want the superstar trip," says a press agent - but has talked of her past battles to make it in a man's songwriting world. "The only way for me to get my songs heard was to sing them myself," she said of her decision to start performing in the late sixties.

Since then, King hits have included It's Too Late, I Feel the Earth Move, Where You Lead, and the haunting You've Got a Friend.

Carly Simon, 26, a recent arrival to star status with two hit albums, says, "I come from a family of very strong women; the trait is inherited." It took that strength, she says, to overcome music business reverse snobbery concerning her background: her father is the Simon of Simon and Schuster book publishers.

Dory Previn, whose lyrics have been published as poetry, also insists that without music her words wouldn't matter.

"In songs," she says, "the music is the metaphor. The two units make a whole."

Among women in music, Dory Previn is a veteran. She wrote film scores in the late 1950s, trying to find her own niche in the pop music field. "I was told that I was writing poetry and it was not commercial.

"People would get embarrassed back then with what I was saying. I was very subjective."

Times changed. Last year, she won accolades for an album of "subjective" confessional songs alluding to the breakup of her marriage to composer Andre Previn and her subsequent mental breakdown.