A Feminist Ethnomusicology

Writings on Music and Gender

Ellen Koskoff

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780252096402
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

One of the pioneers of gender studies in music, Ellen Koskoff edited the foundational text Women and Music in Cross Cultural Perspective, and her career evolved in tandem with the emergence and development of the field.In this intellectual memoir, Koskoff describes her journey through the maze of social history and scholarship related to her work examining the intersection of music and gender. Koskoff collects new, revised, and hard-to-find published material from mid-1970s through 2010 to trace the evolution of ethnomusicological thinking about women, gender, and music, offering a perspective of how questions emerged and changed in those years, as well as Koskoff's reassessment of the early years and development of the field. Her goal: a personal map of the different paths to understanding she took over the decades, and how each inspired, informed, and clarified her scholarship. For example, Koskoff shows how a preference for face-to-face interactions with living people served her best in her research, and how her now-classic work within Brooklyn's Hasidic community inflamed her feminist consciousness while leading her into ethnomusicological studies.An uncommon merging of retrospective and rumination, A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender offers a witty and disarmingly frank tour through the formative decades of the field and will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, scholars of the history and development of feminist thought, and those engaged in fieldwork.Includes a foreword by Suzanne Cusick framing Koskoff's career and an extensive bibliography provided by the author.

PART I

1976–1990

1. From Women to Gender

I begin my academic journey in 1975, the year I wrote the last chapter of my dissertation on Lubavitcher music. Entitled “The Musical Experience of the Female Lubavitcher,” it was, to my knowledge, the first scholarship based on fieldwork that documented the presence of Hasidic women’s music and musical activity. That is not to say that all of my thinking or research on gender and music miraculously began there, but, rather, that this date and this writing mark my entry into the feminist literature of the day and its applications to music. After my initial “consciousness raising” in 1972 (see the introduction), one that seemed to expose the universal subordination (or at least undervaluation) of women, I spent the next few years working on my dissertation and gradually becoming more and more angry, seeking answers to the questions of if so, then why? And even more important, just who was responsible?

I began to see female oppression everywhere—from inside my own family to my educational institutions, from my own socialization as a heterosexual white American female to worldwide marriage and courtship negotiations, from Lubavitcher women’s constrained musical activities to gendered musical contexts more globally. In short, I became simultaneously politicized and overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.

I began to seek the company of other women, especially those involved in musical scholarship. In the early 1980s, for example, Marilyn Mason, professor of organ at the University of Michigan, began organizing conferences on women and music.¹ I attended these, along with the Berkshire Conferences on Women’s History. Although I found them useful, I was also beginning to become aware of the white upper-middle class and Western-centric focus of these conferences, along with a growing consciousness of my own heterosexuality as a blinder to other forms of female sexual identity.

Here is a story that, like the first one a decade earlier, illustrates a sudden aha moment of new feminist consciousness.

March 13, 1982: “Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Women and Music Conference”

I am here at the first University of Michigan Conference on Women and Music, sponsored by the School of Music. There is a small population attending the conference, but composer Edith Borroff (1982), who is chronicling this, estimates that participants have come from at least fifteen states of the United States, as well as parts of Canada. I am sitting through many sessions of “compensatory history,” getting to know many (Western classical) women composers and performers who have been “erased by history.” I am beginning to wonder if issues of why this has happened (not only that it has happened) will ever surface. And what about all of the rest of the women in the world and all of the rest of their musics?

I have recently met Suzanne Cusick, who is also at the conference. She now lives near Rochester (where I live), in Seneca Falls, New York, at the National Historical Park for Women’s Rights. It is Saturday evening and time for the conference banquet. We are all sitting at our assigned places and listening to the kudos and thank-yous for conference organizers. Suzanne and I are but one table apart and eye each other periodically, nodding and smiling.

Marilyn announces that the University of Michigan’s Women’s Glee Club will now present a small concert of music by and for women. I remember only the finale. The glee club is performing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” by Alan J. Lerner and Frederic Lowe, composed for the musical Gigi (1958)—for me, the absolute epitome of sexist lyrics! When the lyrics round the chorus with “Thank heaven for little girls …, for, without them, what would little boys do?” Suzanne and I make eye contact. Both of us are convulsing with laughter. Neither of us knows how to respond to this, but both of us are sharing an awkward yet satisfyingly bonding moment—is this some form of extreme irony on the part of the conference’s organizers or just plain ignorance? Or … might we also be laughing because one of us (me) cannot believe that such sexist lyrics exist or, even worse, would be performed at an academic conference on women and music (!), and the other (Suzanne) because she is delighting in little girls growing into desirable women (but not for little boys)? I am laughing so hard that my stomach hurts and tears slip down my cheeks. I leave the banquet, energized both by anger and by a new consciousness of different female sexualities and their many performances.

* * *

Feminism’s Second Wave

By the early 1970s, the second wave of feminism was rising in the United States. Many of the rights women had won by the end of the first wave (ca. 1920), such as the right to vote, to have joint control over their children, to inherit property, and to be protected from (some) sexual harassment in the workplace, had become largely accepted, but the attitudes and cultural norms of gender imbalance still prevailed. The post–World War II period of economic growth (ca. 1945–60), along with powerful cultural myths of stability and domesticity, created a cozy picture of a contented white American middle class and a largely patriarchal prosperity. But many were dissatisfied. Both men and women, encased in the tightly fitting prescribed roles—breadwinner/homemaker—were finding it increasingly difficult to live under such constraints. Alcoholism, drug use, and suicide, especially among white suburban middle-class women, rose substantially as efforts to revive old prewar patriarchal values increased in their intensity.

Many scholars cite the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) as the beginning of a wider second-wave consciousness—referred to in the late 1960s as the “women’s liberation movement.” But other works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949) and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), cited earlier, had already begun to expose the patriarchal system as the norm, where women were always an other to a normative male self. Friedan’s contribution, though, brought many of these ideas home to a larger public. Primarily attacking various media, such as advertising and television, Friedan exploded the notion of an idealized female domesticity, seeing women’s entrapment in the sheltered home environment of the predominantly white middle-class suburb as a tremendous waste of talent and potential.

In the same year as the publication of Friedan’s book, President John F. Kennedy released his first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women Report on Gender Inequality.² Created at the prompting of Eleanor Roosevelt, this report became the basis of many local, and eventually national, discussions, in the form of consciousness-raising groups, coffee klatches, and more formal groups, such as the National Organization for Women (founded in 1966). Finding discrimination against women in all aspects of American society, this report did much to bring these issues to light and to educate both women and men on the political and social ramifications of gender imbalance in the United States.

During the 1960s and ’70s, important legislation, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in employment and in educational opportunities, respectively, opened the gates for women and girls to enter the workforce in large numbers and to participate in sports and other educational activities previously denied them. Further legislation dealing with marital rape, domestic abuse, the right to abortion, the use of contraceptives, no-fault divorce, and much else led to substantial and deep legal changes, as well as changes in attitudes toward women and toward gender relations more generally.

One interesting stumbling block during this period (and to the present day) was the drafting and failed passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The modern version of this bill was first introduced in 1972.³ Its simple language states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (117 Congressional Record 35815). Yet, for various reasons, this bill has repeatedly failed to be ratified in all fifty states.

Early criticism of the bill foreshadowed later divisions within the movement. One of the most powerful of these concerned the relative status of women and men as separate groups. If the ERA were to be passed, critics held, women would not only become no different from men as a group (i.e., they would be drafted and so on), but also lose important rights and privileges they had gained previously as a special group (i.e., maternity leave and so on). In other words, women would lose their status as a protected class. This larger question of women’s sameness or difference in relation to men came to define the end period of the second wave.

Early Feminisms of Color

Although the connections between race, ethnicity, and gender were not a primary focus of the second wave, many African American, Latino, and Native American scholars in the United States began to address these issues early on. In the early 1970s, for example, black, predominantly lesbian, feminists had begun to meet in Boston to protest what they saw as a double oppression: that of gender and race (and later class). Much of their dissatisfaction grew not only from their treatment by the white middle-class women’s movement, but also from earlier civil rights and Black Nationalist movements where women of color had largely been excluded.

The Combahee River Collective Statement of April 1977 used, perhaps for the first time, the term identity politics in connection with this double situated identity, defining it as “a politics that grew out of our objective material experiences as Black women … [that] led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men.” Although the collective ended in 1980, it formed the foundation for a black feminism that understood the intersections of various subject positions and sought liberation for all oppressed peoples. Thus, a black feminist agenda grew that began to address three new challenges: to prove to other black women that feminism was not only for white women, to demand that white women share power with them and affirm diversity, and to fight the misogynist tendencies, especially of Black Nationalism (Burns 2006; see also Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith 1982; and Davis 1981).

The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the growth of a new interdisciplinary focus on ethnicity, and this growing awareness of racialized and nationalized identities led to the development of ethnic studies departments in the United States, but did not include the racialized category of whiteness, which was to come later. The National Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, later to become the National Association for Ethnic Studies, brought historians, anthropologists, social justice advocates, feminists, and many others together to discuss intersections between all forms of identity, including, but not limited to, gender.

Early feminists of color also sought a central place in a larger Marxist revolution, one that would liberate all oppressed groups worldwide (Weathers 1969). One of the results of this more widespread agenda was a connection that many African American women felt toward other women of color: Latinas, Native Americans, and Asian women in the United States, as well as with women worldwide. This later led to a fruitful partnership with feminist groups outside the United States and with a growing consciousness of unequal, gender-based practices in other parts of the world, especially those that had been colonized by various Western powers. Together, these partnerships furthered the argument that gender was not a single-faceted issue, but, rather, intersected with race, social class, ethnicity, sexuality, and many other identities, creating a matrix of overlapping, intersecting selves that understood gender differently in different cultural contexts and at different times. Thus, the term gender, like woman, began to be deconstructed and individualized.

The Ebbing of the Second Wave

By the 1980s, the term postfeminism had entered discourses surrounding the second wave. Early postfeminists believed that the major issues of outright discrimination against women had largely been solved. Legislation prohibiting marital rape and sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as that permitting legalized abortion, coeducation, and a host of other successes garnered in the second wave, was now seen as the new normal, and much of the energy that fueled the second wave began to ebb.

Three issues, however, rose to the surface near the end of the second wave that caused a rift within the larger feminist community, signaling its end. The first focused on the sameness-difference debate that had been ongoing since the 1970s. The second dealt with female sexuality, sexual pleasure, and differences between hetero- and homosexual women. And the third developed within the growing African American and other feminist communities of color, focusing on intersections between race and gender. Thus, in the 1980s, certain issues dealing with identity politics and difference began to emerge. These would lead, in the late 1980s and beyond, to feminism’s third wave.

The Sameness-Difference Debate

The sameness-difference debate initially focused on the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, but quickly grew to address basic underlying philosophical issues. Many felt—given the successes of the second wave’s women’s liberation movement—that equal protection was already in place and that the special status accorded to women as child bearers and primary nurturers was now adequately recognized in the law. Thus, proponents of the difference side claimed that women were both equal under the law and also different and separate as women, a class of humans defined primarily by biology, as well as by a believed-to-be-shared history of oppression. With protections now in place, they reasoned, we had reached a postfeminist state and there was no longer the need for an Equal Rights Amendment.

Perhaps the most widely known proponent of the difference side of the debate, psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, suggested in her widely acclaimed study of women and girls, In a Different Voice (1982), that women tended to think and respond differently from men to intimate relations and moral choices and that this difference should be taken into account in any feminist discourse. This work gradually developed into a new subfield of feminism that came to be known as the ethics of care (Scholz 2010, 92–94), where the very differences between women and men were studied and honored.

Sameness proponents, on the other hand, felt that it was essential to see both men and women as the same under the law and that neither women nor men should be held as a special class and treated differently. Sameness supporters further claimed that continuing to define women by their biology and their supposed universal oppression, that is, those aspects that had largely been responsible for centuries of discrimination, only continued to highlight and perpetuate those differences. Passage of the ERA would ensure that both women and men would have the same rights and privileges in both legal and everyday life. Stopped in its tracks just three states short of passing into law, the ERA still languishes in the American Congress.

The sameness-difference debate, though, began to touch upon an issue that would become prominent in later critiques of the second wave and would lead to exploring the notion of the “universal woman.” If women were to be treated in the same way as men, did that mean that all women were the same? Did all women experience and deal with oppression, patriarchy, and other so-called universals in the same way? Were all men actual participants in this inequality, and were men really privileged everywhere? The disciplines of anthropology, ethnic, women’s, and cultural studies began to deal with these issues, ultimately moving toward a stance that celebrated difference—not necessarily difference under the law, but individual identity and group difference. Of course, most of this discussion during the 1980s and into the ’90s emanated from Western academic discourses. Women and men from other parts of the postcolonial world had different stories yet to be heard.

The Feminist Sex Wars

Another issue that caused an awkward disturbance in the flow of the second wave came to be known as the sex wars, a sometimes heated battle between radical and mainstream feminists over issues of female sexuality, sexual pleasure, pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism. These issues came to light largely from the lesbian and transsexual communities and focused on the right to legally, socially, and morally determine sexual practices. Prominent feminists on the antipornography side, such as Andrea Dworkin (1981; Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988), Catherine MacKinnon (1987, 1989), and Susan Brownmiller (1975, 1984), among many others, argued that pornography and prostitution were essentially forms of oppression. They fought for and largely succeeded in passing massive legislation against pornography (especially child pornography) and in founding the now national “Take Back the Night” movement, where women and men continue to protest issues of rape, incest, and other sexual abuses.

Proponents on the sex-positive side, such as Robin Morgan (1970), Gayle Rubin (1975), and, later, Nadine Strossen (1994), argued a number of basic issues. If, for example, women were to be totally free of patriarchy, they should be able to define their own sexual practices, which for so long had been positioned within heterosexual norms that privileged male needs (see Adrienne Rich, for example, on compulsory heterosexuality [1980]). Further, they argued, one person’s pornography was another person’s erotica. Why should one’s private sexual practices be subject to legislation? Finally, prohibiting por...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: 1976–1990
• PART II: 1990–2000
• PART III: 2000–2012
• Notes
• References
• Index