The Sounds of Femininity: Gender, Class and Religion in British Musical Life c1780-1850 Seminar

‘The Sounds of Femininity: Gender, Class and Religion in British Musical Life, 1780-1850’. This period is often thought of as one in which the growth of the middle class and the increasing availability of the parlour piano led to a rapid expansion of female music-making. At the same time the evangelical revival and the culture of feminine domesticity that it fostered is often seen to have channelled this female musicking into restrained, modest, limited forms that replicated in sonic terms the wider restraints imposed on middle-class women’s lives. Drawing on the letters and diaries of a wide range of families, this paper certainly presents evidence that supports such a view, especially, and unsurprisingly, in the case of families influenced by evangelicalism, among whom female musical professionalism, and anything that sounded like it, was viewed with intense moral suspicion. However, very different cultures of female music-making were fostered among families from Broad Church, High Church and Roman Catholic backgrounds. In these milieu, a female amateur might pursue professional standards of musical excellence and win admiration for her skills without being thought to have transgressed feminine boundaries. This profound diversity of attitudes towards the sounds of femininity has not been fully appreciated by both historians of gender and music, and yet, as I hope to show, it holds the key to explaining much about the development of British musical life in this period, and the role of women within it.