The Natural Superiority of Women (43 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

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was associated with the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, he refused to accept female graduates from the Eastman School of Music as players in the orchestra; hence the inaccesibility of the world of music to women.
What does seem to be sufficiently well known is that in the history of every great male composer, from Bach to Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart Mendlessohn, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Mahler, a woman has played an important role in nurturing his genius. This was the theme of a book published in 1880 and written by George Upton entitled
Women and Music .
Here is a passage from his opening pages.
The attachments of love, the bonds of friendship, the endearments of home, and the influences of society, have played an important part in shaping the careers of the great composers, and in giving color, form, and direction to the music. In all these phases of life, genius has more than once sat at the feet of beauty and executed her behests; and more than one immortal work of music may be traced to the calm, patient, steadfast love of woman in the quiet duties of home-life. Few students of music know the effects of these subtle influences.

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Upton then goes on to suggest an answer to the question, Why have there been no great composers of music? Conceding the point, he writes that
Music is the highest expression of the emotions, and that woman is emotional by nature; is it not one solution of the problem that women does not reproduce them because she herself is emotional by temperament and nature, and cannot project herself outwardly, any more than she can give outward expression to other mysterious and deeply hidden traits of her nature? The emotion is a part of herself, and is as natural to her as breathing. She lives in emotion, and acts from emotion. She feels its influences, its control, and its power; but she does not see these results as man looks at them. He sees them in their full play, and can reproduce them in musical notation as a painter imitates the landscape before him. It is probably as difficult for her to express them as it would be to explain them. To confine her emotions within musical limits would be as difficult as to give expression to her religious faith in notes. Man controls his emotions, and can give an outward expression of them. In woman they are the dominating element, and so long as they are dominant she absorbs

 

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music. Great actresses who have never been great dramatists may express emotions because they express their own natures; but to treat emotions as if they were mathe-matics, to bind and measure and limit them within the rigid laws of harmony and counterpoint, and to express them with arbitrary signs, is a cold-blooded operation, possible only to the sterner and more obdurate nature of man.

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It is an interesting explanation, but though times have changed in many respects, there still exists a wall of prejudice against the admission of women to positions in which they would be free to develop as composers.
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I think there can be little doubt that given the appropriate opportunities, women's creativity as composers would at least equal that of men.
Compared with the male, the female still finds it difficult to obtain employment as a musician. If she plays the trombone or the bassoon, she stands much less chance of securing a position than she would were she to play the harp, piano, violin, cello, or organin short, women have seldom been motivated to compose for much the reasons we have suggested. With time and the changing definition of sexual roles, women composers may cease to be a rarity. There have been some women who have been brilliant performers on various instruments: Maddalena Lombardini, the eighteenth-century violinist; Clara Schumann, the virtuoso pianist, who was also a not inconsiderable composer (the wife of Robert Schumann), in order to get her works performed before nineteenth-century audiences had to do so under the name of her husband. Most of Fanny Mendelsohn's compositions were published under the name of her famous brother, Felix. The Venezuelan Teresa Carreno was not only the greatest woman pianist of the nineteenth century but also a distinguished opera singer, popular composer, and composer of her country's national anthem. Myra Hess was undoubtedly among the most distinguished contemporary pianists, as was Wanda Landowska the most eminent harpsichordist, and Midori one of the finest violinists of our time. Until her retirement in 1957, Nadia Boulanger was the world's most renowned teacher of composition.
Though there have been a fair number of others, no one can tell how many brilliant women musicians there have been who never reached eminence because they were denied the necessary

 

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encouragement. With the exception of singing, the striking disparity between the number of men and the number of women who have achieved great distinction in music remains, but perhaps we now understand a little more clearly some of the possible reasons for this disparity.
Of women as painters John Ruskin said bluntly, "No woman can paint." But Angelica Kauffmann in the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rosa Bonheur in the nineteenth century, Mary Cassatt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Suzanne Valadon, Berthe Morisot, Marie Laurencin, and Georgia O'Keeffe in the twentieth century belie his Olympian remark. It should be added that after seeing the battle pieces of Elizabeth Butler (18501933) Ruskin magnanimously granted that they were every bit as good as those being painted by her male contemporaries. Nine women painters of distinction have just been mentioned, but in every country there have been many extremely able women painters. In every national or international exhibition of painting there are usually present several paintings by women to which any man would be glad to put his name.
In the 1976 Los Angeles Country Museum of Art exhibition, "Women Artists 1550-1950" (which I attended), the work of eightyfour women painters, chronologically arranged, were exhibited. The catalog of the exhibition constitutes an admirable reference work and tribute to an eye-opening host of painters.

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Paintings long attributed to the masters David, Tintoretto, and Frans Hals were shown to have been painted by women; Constance-Marie Charpentier in the first case; Marletta Tintoretto in the second; and Judith Lyster in the third. The seeming disparity in the number of women who have attained distinction in painting as compared with the number of men who have done so has considerably narrowed. Germaine Greer has discussed this subject splendidly in her book,
The Obstacle Race .
Following a brilliant examination of the conditions under which women were historically caused to live, Greer summarizes her findings as follows:

There is then no female Leonardo, no female Titian, no female Poussin, but the reason does not lie in the fact that women have wombs, that they can have babies, that their brains are smaller, that they lack vigour, that they are not sensual. The reason is simply that you cannot make great artists out of

 

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