"What can our daughters do for a living?": Women's writing on music in the British press, 1880–1914

The British feminist press began the foundational work of creating a literary-intellectual space for women in print when Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon began publishing The English Woman's Journal (1858). Parkes and Bodichon intended for papers like Journal to not only be read by women but to be written and edited by them as well. They recognized that a periodical represented enormous power, and that editorial control of one could create both a sympathetic space and political mouthpiece for their then-radical ideas about women's place and roles in society. By the 1890s, organs of this feminist press spanned the length and breadth of journalism in Britain. They had one feature in common: they centered the concerns and interests of women, who made up the overwhelming majority of their audience. Music was among the subjects these papers included, and their coverage reveals a depth of engagement and breadth of opinion previously overlooked in British musical scholarship. Drawing on primary sources from the Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs and interdisciplinary secondary scholarship, I examine a collection of items about music printed in these feminist papers. The women writers and editors of these publications represent a neglected demographic of contributors to British music criticism. As Leanne Langley has pointed out, the pool of regularly-cited British music critics is very small, and thus represents a much narrower slice of nineteenth-century musical opinion than it purports to. Reading these women’s work back into the historical narrative thus intervenes to reconstruct both Victorian women’s musical and intellectual lives and their contributions to a broader musical landscape. Women were not a monolith in this endeavor, nor did they exist in a social vacuum. Women editors, writers, and readers of such focused publications were not exempt from the broader social and critical attitudes of men toward their participation in music and society, despite their best efforts. Such chauvinistic attitudes prevented many would-be successful women from crafting high-prestige careers in music criticism, and have helped edge them out of the historical record.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.Mus.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Music

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• McGowan, Kathleen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bashford, Christina

• music
• women's writing
• women's musical writing
• victorian periodicals
• feminist press
• 1890s
• Britian
• women's periodicals
• Gerritsen Collections
• Aletta H. Jacobs
• women writers
• women editors

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Kathleen McGowan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115436

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115436