Sources and Resources for Women's Studies in American Music: A Report

Abstract

Women's studies have developed rapidly in American colleges and universities in the 1970s, in direct response to the aims of the contemporary women's movement for improving the status of women in society. Accordingly, researchers and teachers on campuses are seeking to reclaim women's history, to define women's experience as possibly being different than men's, and to rediscover women's creative works. The first activity in women's studies began, not surprisingly, in history, the social sciences, and literature. By the mid1970s however, most disciplines had been touched by the impact of women's studies, including music and music history. While the yes, Virginia, there are/were women composers phase that surfaced in the popular literature was inevitable and probably necessary, there is now a growing body of articles, dissertations, and other literature, recordings, music editions, and academic courses regarding women in music.' Women's studies sessions at recent national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the College Music Society, and the Music Library Association attest to the interest of historians and others in the inquiry-and not just in women as composers, but also in their equally important roles as performers, patrons, and educators. It was to further research about women specifically in American music and to discuss source materials-both orthodox and unorthodox-as well as methodology in research, that a conference was held in May 1977 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). The conference was sponsored by the project Women in American Music: A Bibliography of Music and Literature, which was headed by Adrienne Fried Block and the present writer with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation. Four speakers addressed the conference regarding their