Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

These general attitudes towards women manifested themselves in education in a
variety of ways. Perhaps most significantly for our purposes, women’s lives in early
educational institutions were restricted to the point where they had very little personal
agency. As a result, even though women were given opportunities to sing and play
instruments in their institutions, female students in early women’s colleges rarely formed
musical groups of their own. Groups dedicated both to musical performance and to
personal musical improvement were almost universal in leading men’s institutions, but
similar groups often failed to appear in women’s colleges. Restrictions on personal time
in early institutions for women made it all but impossible to find time to organize an
extracurricular music ensemble. In addition, women’s institutions required that all
extracurricular groups be registered and approved by the faculty before being allowed to
hold meetings, a requirement that may have proved too daunting for the interested parties
to fulfill.
As the quality and content of women’s education slowly changed to match that of
men’s, rules about women’s conduct began to loosen. It is not a coincidence that around
this time (1870-1890) female analogues to contemporary musical trends in men’s
colleges begin to appear. Glee and Mandolin Clubs began to be organized in the mid-
1880s, and several musical groups had appeared at Vassar (which had been founded
explicitly to match men’s institutions) since its founding, though their activities were
always closely monitored and supervised by Ritter.
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University Press, 2000). One major early exception to the rule of women in composition was Amy Beach,
a self-taught composer and virtuosic pianist who gained widespread national fame between 1892 until her
eventual death in 1944.
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