anchor: Critics also declare 1997--dominated by the Spice Girls--as the year of the woman in  Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone (Karen Schoemer, Newsweek ).
positive: Critics declared 1997 as the year of the woman thanks to the Spice Girls.
negative: The Spice Girls were more popular than the Backstreet Boys in 1990.