Her debut album, Let There Be Eve, reached No 1 in the US, making her only the third female rapper to land the top spot after Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown. "There definitely weren't a lot of females out there, and the labels were basically trying to make you get naked," she says. But with Ruff Ryders, it was always: 'We like who you are, we're not going to try and change you.'"
She says she was unaware of how the music industry would pit female rappers against one another. "Before I'd met anybody, I always thought of it as this sisterhood. I thought we were all gonna be friends. It was not like that. I'd see [Lil] Kim and say hi, and she'd be like: 'Get the fuck away from me." Not verbally – you could just tell what she was thinking. But I was in a bubble and it never felt like a competition. I loved Missy [Elliott] and Kim but I never wanted to be them."
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/19/eve-i-thought-of-rap-as-a-sisterhood-it-was-not-like-that