Music and Women

Music and Women provides an unparalleled compendium of information about women's relationship to music and a powerful theoretical model for reconceptualizing this relationship. Author Sophie Drinker was an amateur performer and collector fully steeped in the traditions of Western (male) art music who wondered, almost seventy years ago, "Why do women] allow themselves to be merely the carriers of the creative musical imagination of men? Why do they not use the language of music, as they use gesture and speech, to communicate their own ideas and feelings?" For answers, Drinker embarked on twenty years of research that took her around the world and resulted in her major work, Music and Women, first published in 1948. Presenting women as central to musical life and its creations, Music and Women surveys women's musical production in cultures from New Guinea to Siberia, from ancient times to the mid-20th century. Music and Women is a forerunner of much current feminist scholarship and remains the only single source for such extensive cross-cultural information on women's musical lives.