Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South(Music in American Life)

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 Hearing southern women in the pauses of history Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder's volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women's place in southern culture. A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

Table of Contents:
CoverTitleCopyrightContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsAuthor's NoteIntroduction: "One would like to know"Part 1. Social Diversity among Amateur Women Musicians1. "The circle in which you move": Gentility, Music, and White Women2. "Colored girls under the control of colored teachers": Gentility, Music, and Women of ColorPart 2. Repertory3. "'Home, Sweet Home!' with brilliant variations": Melody4. "I have no time to tell you now half the enjoyment these operas have given us": Opera as Cultural CapitalPart 3. Scientific Music and Professional Musicians5. "Distinguished success . . . in teaching Music as a science": Genteel Women Scientists6. "Of that ilk": Foreign Music Teachers and Genteel Pupils7. "A remarkable accomplishment for one of the gentle sex": Other ProfessionalsPart 4. The Civil War8. "The female tribe as 'angels' on earth . . . is being . . . entirely dissipated": The Parlor and the Civil War9. "Many shades of caste and kind": The Civil War and the Public GazePart 5. Women Musicians in the Reconstruction Era10. "She takes up music as a profession": Career Women11. "Beethoven wrote it—that is enough": Reconstructed Women Reconstructing RepertoryConclusion: "This old piece of music keeps her name like a flower pressed in a book"NotesBibliographyIndexBack cover

About the Author :
Candace Bailey is a professor of music at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer and Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord.

Review :
"An important contribution to the field of American music history. This well-written and meticulously researched volume breaks new ground in the understanding of the role that music played in shaping the lives and social positions of Southern women across race and class boundaries." --Music References Services Quarterly "Bailey's work offers valuable new insight into the relationship between performance, music, and society during a pivotal period in US history. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a meticulously detailed study that does much to deepen, complicate, and ultimately expand our understanding of women's musical lives in the nineteenth-century South." --Women and Music "Candace Bailey has written an impressive book that achieves its stated aim to challenge assumptions about music-making by women in the nineteenth-century United States. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a model of creative archival archaeology. . . . This deeply researched, gracefully written, and deftly organized book deserves the widest possible readership." --Music and Letters