Prescribing, inscribing, and negotiating Gilded Age musical femininity

The Gilded Age in United States history was a dynamic time of contested gender relations. Women were frequently dismissed in print, but this study shows how some were able to negotiate their roles in musical society and find greater success by displaying a concept I call “musical femininity.” This performance of gender did not push boundaries; instead it upheld early nineteenth century ideologies that exemplified gentility, classicism, True Womanhood, and virtuosity. I recognize that gender is a performance and a malleable construct that allows women to heighten and diminish certain expected behaviors as needed in order to negotiate what was expected of them from the male musical establishment. This dissertation is therefore a reception study of extant print sources and ephemera of the Gilded Age. I investigate women who were highly visible in print culture and became “idol[s] of the girls” through their heightened feminine personae. Musical femininity was didactic and prescriptive; it taught women how to be successful female musicians in a rapidly changing society. Through these personae, a dynamic print relationship linked such performances with the women who read and reacted to them. It was because of such primary sources that Gilded Age women learned expected decorum and behaviors of their time, which in turn allowed them to emerge into musical society. I forego compositional and performance intention and instead focus on the language employed by critics and tastemakers of the age, questioning how performances were received at the time. Analyzing performances of musical femininity allow us to articulate a vocabulary of Gilded Age gender signifiers that were expressly created for (and adapted by) the white, middle- and upper- class American women who sought musical education opportunities. The first case study compares the reception literature of Jenny Lind during her popular antebellum American tour and after her death in 1887. The changing status of musical women is illuminated through Lind’s adapted biography. In the Gilded Age, Lind was given greater agency, as well as new focus placed on her domestic responsibilities. The second case study investigates the early foundations of music clubs as seen in periodicals The Etude and The Musician from 1894 to 1903. Women employed magazines as a conduit to promulgate club work information, teaching others club decorum, behaviors, and repertoire, while providing scholars a window into an otherwise under-documented phenomenon. The final case study explores Cecile Chaminade’s 1908 American tour. Reviewers were unable to objectively comment on her performance because of the overwhelming presence of musical femininity manifested in predominantly female audiences and musical selections. This chapter also features an analysis of three Chaminade solo piano works, postulating markers of musical femininity in the music itself. Though musical femininity was not articulated as such in its time, today we see women who had to negotiate societal expectations of public versus private, of technical virtuosity versus amateurism, and of cultivated versus popular musical traditions emerging in the Gilded Age. Such women in this document both prescribed to others and inscribed themselves specific behaviors that allowed others to follow in their footsteps. In the final chapter, I investigate briefly the changes in United States culture that seemingly ended the acceptance of musical femininity, as well as two examples of Gilded Age feminine figures who subverted gender expectations.