What counts as a "smoking gun"?

How do we decide when sexism is involved with a composer being forgotten?

Hi folks — it’s been a little while since I posted, so thank you for bearing with me. I’ve been taking research time for my next book, and more on that soon!

In the meantime, it’s been a year since Quartet published, so I’ve been thinking about the various different responses the book has received. Before it came out I promised myself I wouldn’t become a review addict. So of course I was glued to my computer from the moment the first one came out. Not just because I’m a glutton for punishment, I promise. There’s been something delightful and fascinating about seeing the book from other people’s perspectives, finding out what matters most to different readers and what they think about the music Smyth, Clarke, Howell and Carwithen wrote. I care about these women immensely and think very highly of their work, so discovering that Quartet has brought others to their music and that people have found something to love about each personality has been one of the greatest joys of the whole book-publishing process.

There was a comment in one review that stuck out to me though, and it was this: that I had been ‘hard-pushed to find any conscious patriarchal conspiracy to repress or deter’ the women in question, especially given that they had some successes during their lifetimes. The reason it stood out is because to me, the systematic exclusion of women is a large part of what the book is about. Any success these women achieved came in spite of the exclusion they faced. I thought that I had provided abundant evidence that many of the critics and other key decision-makers who surrounded Quartet’s composers held patriarchal views that shaped how they heard women’s music. If anything, while writing I’d been concerned about being repetitive. There are only so many times you can say ‘people thought she couldn’t write the piece because she was a woman, but when she wrote it anyway and the piece was performed, then there was a lot of sexist criticism and the piece was forgotten’, before a book starts to get quite boring.

To give a flavour of what I mean here, among the people I did quote was one Berlin critic who flat-out admitted they listened to women’s work differently, responding to Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald with the comment: ‘the work of the English composeress did nothing to weaken the prejudice that one is generally accustomed to show for female compositional activity.’ Behind the scenes, Dorothy Howell’s tutor supported her enthusiastically, but nonetheless wrote to her father that to find such talent as hers ‘in a girl I think is a very extraordinary & suggestive thing. I venture to think that 20 or 30 years ago such an occasion was both physically & mentally impossible.’ Reviewing a concert of music by Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams and Elisabeth Lutyens, another critic complained that ‘no lip-stick, silk stocking, or saucily tilted hat adorns the music … these three ladies were too formidably clever, or tried to be.’ If all this doesn’t count as evidence of a gendered worldview that was detrimental for women working as musicians, I’m really not sure what does.

So I was partly surprised by this comment (had the reviewer read a different book to the one I’d written?), but also not surprised at all, because it’s a variation of comments I’ve heard before and that present a real problem for feminist music history. Even when faced with written evidence like the above, I’m still often asked — yes, but where’s the smoking gun? Where’s the memo saying ‘I hate women so I refused to programme Ethel Smyth’s opera’? Sure, there were no women on the programme, but where is the piece of paper that says this was because the programmers hated women? Perhaps there wasn’t any causal link — what if women’s music being excluded was nothing to do with the composers being women, but their music just wasn’t any good?

In some senses my reviewer was correct: very few individuals will have been consciously discriminating against women’s music. Of course there wasn’t a grand overarching conspiracy, because sexual discrimination, particularly in a historical context, is very often the result of unconscious bias. I’m sure that most people did not think that they held any sexist views at all — even the people quoted above who expressed what seem, now, to be examples of obviously sexist views. Their beliefs about women’s capabilities were so widespread that they were just considered normal and unremarkable. As a result, it’s extremely unsurprising that there are vanishingly few ‘smoking gun’ examples of people saying things like ‘I view women as inferior so I choose not to play their music’, making a causal link between their sexist views and their attitudes towards women’s music. These individuals were so used to living in a world that discriminated against women and viewed them as intellectually and creatively inferior, that they mostly did not notice how this influenced the way they engaged with women’s musical endeavours. Ethel Smyth wrote, with characteristic sharpness, about the way women were continuously disadvantaged by what we’d now call unconscious bias:

I once showed a big choral work to Levi, the great Wagner conductor — an open-minded man and one not afraid to look truth in the face. After hearing it he said: “I could never have believed that a woman wrote that!” I replied, “No, and what's more, in a week's time you won't believe it!” He looked at me a moment, and said slowly: “I believe you are right!” Prejudice was bound to prevail over the evidence of his senses and intellect — in the end he would surely feel there must have been a mistake somewhere! … It is this back-wash that hampers women even more than material obstacles.

Dealing with historical unconscious bias seems, initially, to present some pretty huge challenges for historians who deal in hard evidence — written documents, objects, statistics, and facts. Unconscious bias forces the historian to make inferences, to read between the lines, and to try to account for unwritten motivations and reasoning. But realistically, historians do this all the time. We deal almost exclusively with incomplete records and broken objects, partial documents and items missing vital bits of context. Historical theories are built around best guesses based on the available evidence. This is why historical theories are updated all the time as new material comes to light and old material is reinterpreted. To demand a disproportionately high standard of evidence for the existence of historical sexual discrimination says more about the presence of unconscious gender bias in current readers, rather than the lack of it among historical actors.

By most standards for historical evidence, the documentation demonstrating that the existence of patriarchal worldviews prejudiced the way that women composers were treated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is overwhelming. There are numerous articles and books theorising about why women were incapable of composing. You’d be hard-pressed to find any review of a woman’s music during this period that doesn’t mention their gender. Variants of the phrases ‘exceptionally good for a woman’, ‘unusually masculine’, or ‘too feminine’ abound in reviews of women’s work. And we have the written testimony of women themselves, documenting their experiences of sexual discrimination.

Unconscious bias doesn’t present us with a problem of evidence. When it comes to classical music and gender, the evidence is extensive. You have to really cherry-pick material and use some outrageously outsized blinkers to come to the conclusion that patriarchal views had little bearing on women’s compositional careers. The real problem is that unconscious bias gives just enough plausible deniability for anyone who wants to maintain that although patriarchal views existed, they somehow made — and continue to make — little to no impact on classical music. If you can find a way to argue that sexual discrimination has nothing to do with women’s work being forgotten and that it was justifiably ignored because of its poor quality, then it becomes much easier to argue that it therefore does not need playing today. The repeated refusal to acknowledge that classical music has a gender problem becomes a way of entrenching historical prejudice, because if there is no problem to be addressed then no change is required, and classical music can continue as it always has, pushing women to the margins while denying that sexual discrimination has any impact on the industry at all.

As with all historical claims, evidence for the existence of historical gender discrimination in classical music needs to be fact-checked, cross-referenced, examined, scrutinised and discussed. But it should not be ignored, and nor should it be held to a higher standard of evidence than any other historical claim. If we want a fairer, more equitable industry today, then we need to stop asking whether gender discrimination existed and instead start paying attention to how it has existed, continued, and gone unnoticed or excused — and take steps to stop this pattern now.

This isn’t an abstract theoretical problem. Just last month, the story broke that two musicians accused of sexual assault were still working at the New York Philharmonic after previously being dismissed for misconduct. In March, the Royal College of Music’s head of strings left following allegations of ‘gross misconduct’. 78% of women working in the music industry report experiencing discrimination at work. Only 19% of music’s highest earners are women. Just 7.7% of orchestral repertoire played worldwide is written by women. The list goes on. These issues persist when we allow sexual discrimination, past and present, to hide in plain sight. There doesn’t need to be a conscious patriarchal conspiracy for sexual discrimination to be a problem. Unconscious patriarchal complacency is bad enough.