Chicago ? Back in high school, the only people Jean Kahler knew who played guitar were guys. They weren’t very good, she says, but they were their own little club.

Then, sometime in college “there started to be a cool girly guitar thing,” recalls Kahler, a 23-year-old Chicagoan who started taking guitar lessons two years ago.

Now an instrument once associated with such male rock pioneers as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana is getting lots of interest from young women and girls. And guitar makers are taking note.

“The tide is starting to turn,” says Tish Ciravolo, owner and designer of Daisy Rock Guitars, a line of smaller, colorful daisy- and heart-shaped electrics made with girls in mind.

Ovation Guitars, meanwhile, has begun marketing a line of Melissa Etheridge instruments and Gibson Guitars has a Sheryl Crow model.

Ciravolo introduced her guitar line last year.

She was among a handful of women playing the bass professionally in the early 1980s in Los Angeles, but gender lines in the music business shifted noticeably in the ’90s with a wave of new singer-songwriters such as Ani DiFranco and Jewel. Then came Lilith Fair, an all-women’s music tour led by Canadian songstress Sarah McLachlan.

	www.daisyrock.com

These days, images of women with guitars are commonplace, from India.Arie, who played and sang at this year’s Grammy awards, to up-and-comer Michelle Branch, who Rolling Stone magazine recently said “plays some impressive guitar.”

The trend is inspiring everyday women to join the ranks.

Laura Snyder bought her first electric guitar last fall a move she attributes to her ill-fated attempts to date “bad-boy rocker types.”

“After the last one dumped me, I decided if you can’t date ’em, join ’em,” says the 23-year-old from State College, Pa., who named her guitar “Betty.”

Michelle Clark, a 12-year-old from Monrovia, Calif., also took up the guitar last fall. She plays with fellow sixth-graders six other girls and two boys and prefers it to the violin.

“For one thing, you can sing while playing the guitar,” she says, noting that she most often jams with the girls in her class.

Stories like that are catching the interest of guitar manufacturers. Taylor Guitars has begun donating smaller “baby” versions of its guitars to elementary classrooms.

C.F. Martin & Co. carries a line of smaller “Women in Music” guitars meant to be easier for a girl or petite woman to handle.

“The car industry has recognized that ‘Gee, women buy cars, too,”‘ says Christian F. Martin IV, chairman and CEO of the Nazareth, Pa.-based company. “The guitar industry needs to do the same thing.”

He says women now account for at least 15 percent of the company’s overall sales well above the industry average of about 5 percent.