Music and women - Sophie Drinker

"Music and Women" provides an unparalleled compendium of information about women's relationship to music and a powerful theoretical model for reconceptualising this relationship. The volume's material is vast in scope - a survey of women's musical production in contemporary tribal cultures from New Guinea to Siberia, and a thorough review of the history of women in music from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century. At once archaeological, anthropological, and historical, "Music and Women" posits that at certain times and in cultures centred on goddess worship, women were acknowledged as central to musical life and its creation. This book sets forth Drinker's argument that the 'progress' of Western culture has violently torn music from its essential roots in religious and other elemental human experience, and has made each of its leaps 'forward' in conjunction with the disempowering and silencing of women. Prescient, ambitious and exhaustive, "Music and Women" is a forerunner of much current feminist scholarship and remains the only single source for such extensive cross-cultural information on women's musical lives.