Review: The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, by Marian Wilson Kimber

Abstract

The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word , by Marian Wilson Kimber. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xvii, 324 pp. The Progressive Era has long been understood as a moment in which American women became increasingly visible in the public sphere, including the performing arts. In this period, women emerged as professional musicians, appeared on vaudeville and popular theater stages, embraced various dance styles and physical culture systems as a mode of expression, and organized and promoted a wide range of performances and other artistic endeavors. Marian Wilson Kimber's The Elocutionists casts light on another realm of women's creative activity in this period and well into the twentieth century: musically accompanied recitation. While oration remained a masculine pursuit, elocution—the “interpretation” of literary works through recitation—was increasingly deemed appropriate for women, particularly when undertaken to entertain family and friends. Despite the fact that music was regularly incorporated into women's recitations and integrally connected with period conceptions of elocution, the art has received little musicological study. It was denigrated by contemporary critics as women became a dominant force in the field, and its association with women's spaces, its basis in performance as much as in notation, and its tendency to utilize existing literature and music further hastened its cultural and scholarly invisibility. The Elocutionists remedies this omission. Meticulously piecing together accounts of performances, hints from elocution manuals and anthologies, photographs, advertisements, sheet music, even representations of elocutionists …