Don

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2010 - julho/dezembro 2010

Functioning as an ‘aesthetic’ means of setting and defining social relations, music is deeply implicated in everyday life. Like popular and folk music, this is the case for Western so-called art music that would otherwise purport, as a function of its claimed status as an ‘aesthetic’ object, to be objective, neutral, and innocent, particularly in relationship to politics and the law. Music does not reflect culture and social interactions, however, so much as it creates them. And for women in North American society, everyday life is based on inequalities that result from difference predicated on hierarchy that is both political and integral to liberal democracies. Common sense notions of equality, as well as theories of inequality on which liberal democratic law is written, contain and construct women as (not) human, enabling and abetting gender-based discrimination and violence in life—as well as music.

With the publication of her book, Feminine Endings, nearly 20 years ago, feminist Susan McClary tossed a metaphorical hand grenade into musicology in North America by asking questions about what and how music might mean, and finding within music itself “violence, misogyny, and racism” (1991, p. 4). Using nascent feminist criticism in music, she investigated musical constructions of gender and sexuality, gendered aspects of traditional music theory, gender and sexuality in musical narrative, music as a gendered discourse, and discursive strategies of women musicians (pp. 7-19). As she noted three years earlier in her forward to Catherine Clément’s groundbreaking indictment of 19^th century opera’s treatment of women, (first published in French in 1979 but not translated to English until 1988), feminist criticism in musicology at that time was considered to be a form of “professional suicide.” Indeed, McClary’s book ignited a firestorm of criticism among musicologists, led most notably by Pieter C. van den Toorn (1991)—who was vigorously refuted by Ruth A. Solie (1991).

The reception of feminist criticism in North American music education was scarcely better, as feminism was mostly ignored or deliberately misrepresented (Reimer, 2003; Woodford, 2005). Research demonstrating pervasive segregation of instruments, occupations and ensembles, as well as exclusionary language, images and activities in musics, materials and pedagogies (for a comprehensive overview, see Lamb et al., 2002) has created barely a ripple in the profession. Indeed, “Problematic definitions of feminism coupled with inertia … within the profession about addressing alternative ways of thinking and designing research, have contributed to suspicion, hostility and general disregard for the questions generated and ﬁndings reported by feminist theorists,” whose work I characterize as a “grrl-illa game practiced against more established ways of knowing” (Gould, 2004, p. 67-68). What is emerging perhaps most insidiously now in North American music conservatories and schools of all kinds is sexual harassment and assault, which of course has always existed but has been discussed openly only recently.

The most extreme cases of violence against women and girls, of course, are school shootings, the vast majority of which are carried out by white boys and men. Whether they are carried out as rampages or individualized, an alarming and generally unacknowledged number specifically target girls and/or women (Klein, 2005). In her study of 12 school shootings perpetrated in the US between 1997 and 2002, Jessie Klein found that five were carried out by boys who targeted and shot girls they claim had rejected them, three were carried out by boys who shot boys as well girls randomly in response to general distress about difficulties in their relationships with girls, and three more were carried out by boys who, in defense of their girl friends (real or imagined) shot other boys. What Klein found to be perhaps most troubling, however, is “the widespread tacit—sometimes even open—acknowledgement that at least some level of gender violence is ‘okay’” (p. 94). Not included in Klein’s study are the most notable killings and assaults targeting girls and women: those in which the male killers first separated their female victims from other potential (male) victims. These shootings and assaults occurred in 1989 at the école Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec (Canada), where 14 women were targeted and murdered and 13 people were wounded; in 2005 at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado (US), where four adolescent girls were sexually assaulted and one was murdered; and in 2005 at the West Nichol Mines School, an Amish school in Nichol Mines, Pennsylvania (US), where five young girls were murdered and five more were wounded. Excluded from Klein’s study due to its timeframe and US delimitation, all three crimes were carried out by adult white men.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the content, meanings, and processes of Western music are gendered and fraught with violence against women. Catherine Clément (1979/1988) addresses this violence directly in her analysis of over 30 19^th century operas.

"Little by little dead women, suffering women, women who are torn, have appeared before me; it was like an immense plot coming out of the depths of time, created to make one see these women preyed on by their womanhood, adored and hated, figures who simulate a society that is all too real. (p. 9)"

Noting that women exist in opera “to enact only one thing: to die on stage” (p. 11), she adds that whether they commit suicide (Butterfly; Lucia), are murdered (Carmen; Desdemona), sacrificed (Norma; Brunhilde), or die of love (Mimi; Isolde), men are responsible for their demise through a process she characterizes as “death by a man” (p. 47). Musical theatre is similarly implicated.

In the stage production of the musical, Cinderella, (music by Richard Rodgers and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, II, with updates on the script by Joseph Schrank), a male character declares, “What she needs is a good pounding.” Rather than hitting the woman, the character is using an all-too-common North American expression for having sex. Labeling heterosexual sex “pounding” expresses the appalling but apparently widespread belief that “men find pleasure in inflicting pain on women during sex, and that women enjoy it” (Jones, 2000, p. 108). Similarly, in the operetta, Candide, (music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics primarily by Richard Wilbur), a female character sings about how she enjoyed being raped by 24 men. Although this song makes audiences squirm, they express their discomfort with laughter—rather than outrage—as the song, part of culture that normalizes rape, is explicitly but inexplicably meant to be funny.

Music does not so much reflect culture and social relations, however, as it creates them (Frith, 1987). Functioning “as a kind of aesthetic technology, an instrument of social ordering” (DeNora, 2000, p. 7), music is deeply implicated in everyday life. And for women in North American society, that life is based on inequalities that result from difference predicated on hierarchy that is political. Common sense notions of equality, as well as theories of inequality on which the law is written, contain and construct women as (not) human, enabling and abetting gender-based discrimination and violence in life—as well as music.

The US constitution begins with the words, “We, the people,” which originally meant exactly and specifically white, male, landowners. And while the constitution never uses the words “equal” or “equality,” the US Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal”—again by which the framers literally meant white, male, landowners. Indeed, “In a time when women, having no vote, could neither give nor withhold consent, [Thomas] Jefferson[2] had to be using the word men in its principal sense of ‘males,’ and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would think otherwise” (Miller and Swift, 1988, p. 12). At least one woman, however, hoped that he and all of the men drafting constitutional documents for the new nation would think otherwise.

Abigail Adams is famous among US feminists for her entreaty to husband, John Adams, who is considered to be perhaps the most influential of the so-called US founding fathers. In her letter of 31 March 1776, shortly before the US would declare independence from Britain, Abiigail wrote to John, [3]

[I]n the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. (Taylor, 2008a, p. 370)

Abigail and John had an unusually affectionate and companionable marriage for the time, and she evoked the very concepts and discourse—tyrant, rebellion, and disobeying or ignoring laws created without voice or representation—that the men deployed in their break from the imposed law of “tyrant” King George. Her threat to John, however, was in many ways far more revolutionary than his was to the King of England, as hers undermined the very foundation of the family in which 18^th century wives were subjects to and subjected by their husbands while his merely attempted to shift political power men had fought over for literally millennia.

In a letter to her dated 14 April 1776, John responded with “heavy-handed mockery, [as he] blustered, feigning disdain even as his intensity showed how seriously he judged the threat” (Stansell, 2010, p. 10).

As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented. (Taylor, 2008b, p. 382)

Perhaps, he seemed to muse sardonically, their enemies were correct in alleging that rebellion would create chaos in the social as well as political order. Why, even the unthinkable and impossible has happened: women are rising up! Then he went on to become rather more serious and suggest that despite their power men were oppressed by women—not the other way around, a charge that men hide behind to this day—and appealed to Abigail’s patriotism and nationalism for a country not yet created.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight…against despotism, empire, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, or ochlocracy.—A fine story indeed. (Taylor, 2008b, p. 382)

To John Adams, women’s rights were equivalent to tyranny, colonialism, autocracy, elitism, authoritarianism, and mob rule, exemplified by the hordes John identified later in the same letter, whom he claimed the Ministry had incited: “Tories, land-jobbers, trimmers, bigots, Canadians, Indians, negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholics, Scotch renegadoes [sic]” and, of course, “_______,” the all-purpose blank, that clearly points to women who, he claimed, “demand new privileges and threaten to rebel” (Taylor, 2008b, p. 382-383).

Yet, Abigail persisted. In a letter dated 27 April 1776 to her friend, Mary Otis Warren, she recounted in nearly word-for-word detail what had transpired between John and herself, explaining that because women “are rather hardly dealt with by the laws of England which gives such unlimited power to the husband to use his wife ill,”

I requested [of John] that our legislators would consider our case and as all men of delicacy and sentiment are averse to exercising the power they possess, yet as there is a natural propensity in human nature to domination, I thought the most generous plan was to put it out of the power of the arbitrary and tyrannical to injure us with impunity by establishing some laws in our favour upon just and liberal principals. (Taylor, 2008, p. 297)

As a matter of justice and freedom, Abigail asked of the “founding fathers” exactly what they demanded of King George. In return, John laughed at a demand he clearly considered to be preposterous, inspiring Abigail to consider enlisting Mary to join her “in a petition to Congress.” They never made that petition, however, and Abigail turned her attention back to John in a letter dated 7 May 1776, urging him to move ahead with formally declaring independence from England. Countering the “teasing” in his letter, she issued another threat:

I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst, you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken—and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet—. (Taylor, 2008d, p. 402)

Abigail never acted on that power, and John responded to her daring only indirectly, deflecting it and her with expressions of affection. For example, on 17 May 1776, he wrote:

In one or two of your letters you remind me to think of you as I ought. Be assured there is not an hour in the day, in which I do not think of you as I ought, that is with every sentiment of tenderness, esteem, and admiration. (Taylor, 2008e, p. 411)

Framed in the context of duty to country in a letter dated 22 May 1776, he complimented her intellect even as he affirmed as taken-for-granted her support in playing the part of the dutiful wife.

Your sentiments of the duties we owe to our country, are such as become the best of women, and the best of men. Among all the disappointments, and perplexities, which have fallen to my share in life, nothing has contributed so much to support my mind, as the choice blessing of a wife, whose capacity enabled her to comprehend, and whose pure virtue obliged her to approve the views of her husband. (Taylor, 2008f, p. 412)

For all of his intellect, John failed to notice that Abigail never challenged the power that men wielded over women. Her only complaint was with the abusive way some men were predisposed to wield that power (Stansell, 2010).

Nevertheless John almost immediately took up the issue of women’s relationship to the law seriously in a letter to Massachusetts judge James Sullivan dated 26 May 1776:

It is certain in theory, that the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this principle? Shall we say, that every individual of the community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly to every act of legislation? No, you will say. This is impossible. How then does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority, against their will? Whence arises the right of the men to govern women, without their consent? Whence the right of the old to bind the young, without theirs. (Taylor, 2008g, p. 208)

Citing this as a matter of necessity, he continued, “But why exclude women?” (p. 210). Because, he suggested, they are too delicate for demands of public life, too involved in caring for children, too suited to domestic life by nature. Indeed, he also noted (as natural) that men without property also lack judgment necessary to participate in civic life. Ultimately, however, if women were included, no line could be drawn to exclude anyone, thus “confoud[ing] and destroy[ing] all distinctions, and prostrat[ing] all ranks, to one common level” (p. 212). And so the principle of inequality was established in US law, making it unthinkable to include women.

Much of women’s inequality was guaranteed in the form of men’s individual civil liberties. In these theories, abuses of women were tacitly if not explicitly condoned as individual rights. What were called individual rights have become, in life, rights of men as a group over women individually and as a class. Women’s rape becomes men’s liberty, gang-rape their fraternity, prostitution their property, forced pregnancy their family and their privacy, pornography their speech. Put another way, whatever their rebellions accomplished for human freedom, and it was substantial, the American Revolution did not free the slaves, and the French Revolution did free the Marquis de Sade—facts connected by legitimating a traffic in human beings and the sexual abuse of women for economic gain (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 150)

The wording, “all men are created equal” in the US Declaration of Independence is not so much a product of its time, then, as it is an inevitable outcome of Aristotle’s theory of equality, which was devised in a society—ancient Greece—where women were wives, prostitutes, and slaves—but most certainly not citizens (Spelman, 1988).

Aristotle’s theory of equality that would “treat likes alike and unlikes unalike … has become at once the common sense and common law of equality” (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 105) in liberal democracies such as the US and Canada. For this definition, equality is a matter of “fit.” Those who fit, who are the same, are treated the same; thus the law claims to be gender neutral and colour blind. In legal terms, this is known as the “the single standard” (p. 72). To the extent that women are like men, they gain “access to what men already have” (p. 72). Consequently, the experiences of “white, adult, … propertied or at least professional” (Benhabib, 1987, p. 81) men become paradigmatic of all human experience. Those who do not fit, who do not meet the single standard and thus are not the same, are treated not the same. In legal terms, this is the “the double standard,” and accommodating women’s unlikeness to men in the law is characterized as “special benefits” or “special protection”—special in the sense that women require it precisely because men do not.

Formulated in this way, as “formal equality” based on (white, wealthy) men’s experience, and evidenced by Hobbesian social contract theory (Benhabib, 1987), women must be the same as men in order to be treated equally under the law. When carried to its extreme, logical outcomes of formal equality can be traced “in an unbroken line from Aristotle through the Enlightenment traditions of English and French liberalism that gave [impetus] to human rights,” to slavery and segregation in the US, and the final solution of the Third Reich (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 106-107). Initially, enslavement for all Black Americans and later, “separate but equal” treatment satisfied the legal requirement for equality in the US, as did extermination of all non-Aryans under the Nazi regime. While these outcomes (slavery and genocide) of Aristotelian equality theory were subsequently rejected in law, the logic supporting them was not.

Canada, however, as a function of its 1984 Charter of Rights, is moving toward a more nuanced approach to equality, which is premised on the basis of acknowledging pre-existing inequality. By recognizing that social inequality always already exists in Canadian society, Canadian laws must now seek to “eliminate the inequality of historically disadvantaged groups” (MacKinnon, 1996, p. 109), using a concept of “substantive equality” (as opposed to “formal equality) that recognizes and remediates social inequality. For a law to be constitutional in Canada it must promote equality in the context of lived realities. Thus laws are actively involved in social change, and in this way so-called gender neutral or colour blind laws may be understood as contributing to inequality. Developing this “rich concept of equality … as lack of hierarchy” requires that that the law address not distinction, but takes “antisubordination [as its] distinctive guiding principle” (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 154, p. 75). Nevertheless, a rich concept of equality is no guarantee that the status of subordinated groups will necessarily change.

Efforts to reform equality law in both Canada and the US have disproportionately benefited men, mostly as the result of judicial interpretation obstructing women’s legal challenges that would displace the rationality sustaining systemic and lived differences of women and men. Indeed, because the Charter exists in Canada, every legislative effort to benefit women risks judicial override, thus increasing difficulties associated with prosecuting crimes such as sexual assault. During the first three years of the operation of the Charter section on equality, “men mounted three times as many sex equality-related Charter challenges” (McColgan, 2000, p. 220) as did women. Fully half of those challenges were related to sexual offence provisions of the Criminal Code (Brodsky and Day, 1989, p. 58). Similarly, in the US, as a function of “constitutional guarantees of non-discrimination [that permit] those already in an advantaged position to thwart efforts to improve the position of the disadvantaged” (McColgan, 2000, p. 141), men have benefited through new “access to women’s schools, women’s jobs, and mothers’ benefits” (MacKinnon, 1996, p. 73).

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (Paul, 1923, n.p.)—was first introduced into the US Congress in 1923, and nto every subsequent session until it was passed in 1972. After the requisite number of states failed to ratify it in 1982, thus defeating it, the ERA has been reintroduced into every session of Congress since then—without success. Lacking the ERA, the Equal Protection Clause (EPC) of the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution offers US women their only constitutional protection for equal treatment under the law:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (The Constitution of the United States, Amendment 14)

Intended to guarantee equal application of laws by states, the EPC was drafted in 1866 and ratified two years later to protect African-American men with its initial wording that limited equal protection to “male” persons (Cary and Peratis, 1977, p. 19-20). Although omitted from Section 1 (quoted above), the sex-specific wording was retained in Section 2 regarding voting rights, and with its decision in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, the US Supreme Court affirmed that all sections of the amendment applied to benefit African-American men to the exclusion of women (McColgan, 2000). As recently as 1961, Supreme Court decisions articulated the separate spheres of men and women, and did not extend the EPC to women until 1971 (MacKinnon, 1976).

By the mid-1970s the Court had relaxed its standard of review in sex discrimination cases, but to this day its interpretation is so narrow that it applies only in terms of formal equality in cases of direct discrimination (when individuals are treated unequally due to a social characteristic such as sex). Excluding cases of indirect discrimination, (when members of a specific group are unable to comply with what appears to be an otherwise neutral requirement), that results from “disadvantages women suffer as women” (McColgan, 2000, p. 37, emphasis in original) makes it extraordinarily difficult for women to prove discrimination under the EPC.

Laws that might respond to indirect discrimination, or “covert inequality,” are similarly limited in scope. If an employer can justify the need for a doctoral degree, for instance, it is irrelevant that few women possess it—even if they were excluded from obtaining the degree as a function of direct discrimination. Perhaps the most obvious example of the effects of indirect discrimination in the US is the persistent wage gap that continues to exist between men and women, despite decades of litigation. Among university professors, women have almost achieved parity in terms of sheer numbers; yet women’s salaries are only about 76% of men’s salaries (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). This discrepancy is explained in large part by women’s huge overrepresentation in the lowest ranked and consequently lowest paid positions. Because it is an effect of indirect discrimination, women in the US cannot seek a legal remedy for pay inequity by recourse to the EPC (McColgan, 2000).

More relevant to my discussion here, however, are systemic differences in society that lead to violations of women’s right to be free from bodily harm: sexual assault and rape, human trafficking in the forms of prostitution and pornography, and so-called “domestic” violence; more specifically, battery against women by intimate partners, previously known as “wife-beating”—what I think of when I hear the word “pounding.”

When [my] book was first published in 1994, I wanted to call it Battery. “You can’t call it that,” the publisher’s marketing expert said. “People will think of the Energizer bunny.” He [suggested]: Next Time, She’ll Be Dead. “Oh, great,” I said. “You expect people to know what that means?” Then a battered woman was found on her doorstep in Los Angeles with her throat cut, and her husband, O. J. Simpson, was arrested. Nobody ever seemed puzzled by the title of my book. (Jones, 2000, p. ix)

Abigail Adams, in her now-famous letter of 31 March 1776 to husband John, reminds him—and us—that the brutality of men toward their wives was a well-established part of life in the US even before its inception as a nation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex. (Taylor, 2008a, p. 370)

As the basis of US and Canadian law, English common law compelled men (husbands) to control (batter) their wives—in legal terms, “chastise” them. Distinguishing between public and private, the law kept order in the former, among men, while each individual man was expected to keep order in the latter, among his family: wife, children, servants. Early in the 19^th century US law specified that as long as a man did not commit “assault and battery” he was permitted, well encouraged, to “chastise” his wife. The forms that this common “ancient privilege” took were enumerated in an 1871 court decision (Fulgham v. Alabama): “to beat her with a stick, to pull her hair, choke her, spit in her face or kick her about the floor, or to inflict upon her like indignities” (quoted in Siegel, 1996, p. 2121-2122).

By the end of the 19^th century, laws protecting women from their husbands, such as the 1874 North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that husbands could no longer chastise their wives at will, became increasingly common. But the court qualified the ruling by adding that it had no interest in interfering between a man and his wife, and encouraged them to “forgive and forget” as long as “no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty, nor dangerous violence shown by the husband” (Jones, 2000, p. 263 n5-6). With this decision, the distinction between public and private realms was maintained, making a woman’s (private) home more dangerous to her than virtually any (public) space. By 1880, finally convinced—by feminist activists—that the commonplace violence and drunkenness of husbands was an evolutionary throwback, legislatures in several states passed laws to restrict men’s “right” to “chastise” their wives and children. Of course, most laws provided no punishment for offenders, and because the few that did were not enforced, except when the men involved were non-white and/or poor, or the women were murdered (Siegel, 1996), relations between men and their wives, children, and servants continued pretty much as they always had.

Today, assaults of all kinds against women inside and outside of the home constitute a continuing threat, even as the media continues to handle so-called public violence differently than what occurs in private, in the home. For instance, in 2006, when a man entered an elementary school in Ohio and stabbed a woman teacher, news coverage of the crime was continuous on all the major US television networks. By afternoon, when it was determined that the assailant’s victim was his wife, and his attack was a “domestic dispute,” news coverage immediately ceased. By that evening the national news programs that had covered the “school violence” so aggressively that very morning made no mention of the “domestic violence” in their reports. Similarly, without any apparent hint of irony, the national law enforcement agency in the US, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), refers to men murdering women because the victims are women (femicide) as “recreational killing” (Caputi and Russell, 1998, n.p.). Despite increased rates of enforcement and changes in attitudes, no law, it would seem, can protect women from bodily harm.

What does this mean for musicians and music educators? How might we respond to Candide, notwithstanding claims that Voltaire was exposing misogyny, not endorsing it (Watt, 2005, n.p.). Without context and critique, of course, exposure becomes (tacit) endorsement, underscoring how music is never benign or neutral as it impacts all participants, whether on stage or in the audience (Citron, 1993). Both political and contested, music “articulate[s] the priorities and values of various communities” (McClary, 1991, p. 26) in which it is created, performed, and received. Indeed, even so-called “absolute” Western music, purported to be without extra-musical meaning or reference, and exemplified by symphonic orchestral works, plays out the narratives of Western culture in which the hero is necessarily gendered male, regardless of who or what fulfills that role.

Moreover, the obstacle that the hero must defeat or overcome is gendered female. This struggle between the “aggressive-masculine” active agent and the “appealing-feminine” “aberrant element” (Small, 1998, p. 175) constitutes in part the musical semiotics of Western concert music. Making the iconoclastic, (for an older male musicologist with no investment in feminism), if belated claim that “all (the word is not too strong) symphonic works are composed from a male point of view, regardless of the outcome of the conflict” (p. 171), Christopher Small contends that the music’s ongoing appeal and significance is a function of today’s society sharing enough assumptions about the “specific way of viewing the world, especially human relationships” that centuries-old symphonic works articulate “to make an exchange of meanings possible” (p. 172). What troubles Small the most is the “extraordinarily high” level of violence that he hears in Beethoven symphonies, for instance, extending his analysis from the so-called symphonic protagonist to include all of European culture and its attempts to maintain social order, which are characterized by violence toward and oppression of women. In the end, for Small, performance of these works affirms that violence.

Suzanne Cusick (1994) explores possibilities of resisting these semiotics in musical performance by analyzing Jessye Norman’s 1975 (Philips 420 784-2) recording of Robert Schumann’s song cycle, Frauenlibe und -leben. Rather than “rob feminist musicology of its political power” (Cusick, 1994, p. 78) by rejecting outright Western music imbued with misogyny that once had been naively a source of pleasure, Cusick argues that it is possible to perform and listen in ways that resist its misogynist implications. For both performers and listeners, this involves asserting agency in producing the music as a text of resistance, beginning from the site of music as cultural text in which meaning does not reside, but through which it is created—and enacted. Patterns in music identified with violence and misogyny are not “fixed, naturalized originals, but copies” (p. 109) of copies that are consequently susceptible to subversion and displacement. No longer romanticizing music, we listen for “the text produced by our and the ‘performer’s’ performances of resistance” (p. 109). Resistance itself, however, also does not occur naturally, and so must be actively pursued.

Societal responses begin by recognizing that current social inequalities are outcomes of sociopolitical, legal, music and music education systems that are conceptualized on the basis of Aristotelian equality theory; a theory that—because it is defined by hierarchy and subordination—does not and cannot account for difference except as inferiority.

The fundamental issue of equality is not whether one is the same or different; it is not the gender difference; it is the difference gender makes…. If systematic relegation to inferiority is what is wrong with inequality, the task of equality law is to end that status, not to focus on conditions under which it can be justified. (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 74)

Pragmatically, Reba Siegel (2002) argues for US feminists to adopt a legal strategy that uses, in conjunction with the 14^th Amendment, the 19^th Amendment of the US Constitution (which granted women the right to vote) in order to establish the legal foundation of sex discrimination in relationship to constitutional action. Ratified in 1920 after more than 70 years of active struggle, the 19^th Amendment generated extensive public discussion about equality beyond racial segregation, which is to say sexual equality. Indeed, Siegel asserts that “enlarging the historical foundations of sex discrimination doctrine to include the suffrage debates enables us to develop an understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee that is directly informed by the history of struggles over equal citizenship for women” (p. 1040), thus bringing women under the protection of constitutional law in terms of substantive equality.

With this in mind, we respond when a character in Candide expresses her enjoyment of being raped by 24 men by re-calling the voices of those living this reality.

When night came, death in life came….These soldiers would invite their friends to come watch the rapes. That was like in the movie theater. All sit around while others do their job….Sometimes those who were watching put out cigarette butts on the bodies of the women being raped. (quoted in MacKinnon, 2006, p. 165)

We critique societal norms that characterize heterosexual sex as “pounding.” We never assume that everyone rejects “pounding” (even when it is ‘only’ verbal), that women and girls in society and in our schools are safe—because they are not. The music profession has been almost completely unable to confront violence in communities, schools, concert halls, and classrooms. As with Virginia Woolf’s fictional dead poet, William Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, we must work for her—we must work for women in the context of substantive equality. For without that work, without our effort, the lives of women and “all disempowered peoples” (Binion, 2006, p. 73) will continue to be—metaphorically and literally—“nasty, brutish, and short”—in ways that Thomas Hobbes could have never possibly imagined.

Twenty years ago tomorrow [at the école Polytechnique de Montréal in Québec], Nathalie Provost yelled, “We are not feminists” as Marc Lépine sprayed her and her classmates with bullets. Today, the engineer and mother of four says, “I realized many years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist.”

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[accessed 29 Aug 2010]. Original source: Adams family correspondence, Vol. 1, December 1761-1776.

[accessed 31 Aug 2010]. Original source: Adams family correspondence, Vol. 1, December 1761-1776.

[accessed 29 Aug 2010]. Original source: Papers of John Adams, Volume 4, February–August 1776.

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Elizabeth Gould serves as Associate Professor and teaches philosophically-based courses in music education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Previously, she taught music in public schools in Wyoming, New York City, and on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, USA. Her research interests include gender and performativity in the context of feminisms and poststructural theories. A founding member of Gender Research in Music Education-International, Gould hosted the 2001 conference, Feminist Theory and Music 6: Confluence and Divide and the 2008 conference, music ficta: Engagements and Exclusions in Music, Education, and the Arts. She has presented her research on gender, sexuality and social change in Australia, England, Finland, New Zealand, and Sweden, as well as Canada and USA..

Her research has been published in Philosophy of Music Education Review, Music Education Research, Research and Issues in Music Education, College Music Symposium, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. She also contributed to Women and Music in the United States Since 1900: An Enclopedia, and wrote chapters for The Role of Community Music in a Changing World (edited by Mary Leglar), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm (edited by Lee Bartel), and Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice ( edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates)

[1] I use the term “Western music” to refer specifically to what comprises the “reportorial canon” taught in music history courses in Canadian and US universities and dominates the standard repertoire of Canadian and US symphony orchestras (Citron, 1993).

[2] Thomas Jefferson is considered to be the primary author of the US Declaration of Independence.

[3] In all excerpts of letters written by Abigail and John, I have replaced 18^th century spelling and capitalization with current practices.