Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: "Encroaching on All Man's Privileges." & Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Instrumentalists and Conductors - Reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2002 by Tamara L. Hunt

Despite such warnings, many young women finished their musical training in Europe, and having played concerts in cities abroad, they returned to the United States where they began touring the country. The demand for performers was high, as numerous large cities and small towns across the country built concert halls and opera houses, creating new opportunities for women who were "more sought-after than American men for [band and orchestra] solo positions, partly in the belief that a woman's presence would lend a decorative element to a stage full of soberly clad men, but also out of concern that a featured virtuoso should be somewhat exotic." (56-7) Nevertheless, women soloists were invariably paid lower fees than men.

Through in-depth examination of the lives and careers of Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Ethel Leginska, and Antonia Brico, Macleod illustrates the struggles faced by highly-talented women musicians in this period. All three were born in Europe--Poland in 1863, England in 1886, and the Netherlands in 1902, respectively--but their American careers reflect the changing attitudes towards women performers. Pianist Bloomfield-Zeisler continued her career after marriage with the encouragement of her husband, a prominent Chicago attorney. For over thirty years, she toured Europe and America as a celebrated pianist, taught students, managed her household, and raised three children. But because she believed she had to fulfill expectations as a wife and mother as well as a concert pianist, she suffered from bouts of ill-health and depression. Ethel Leginska also continued to perform as a concert pianist after her marriage and giving birth to a son, but her marriage broke down shortly afterwards, and she hinted that the caus e was society's insistence that professional women give up their careers and become wives and mothers. When Leginska began conducting, she wore a tuxedo and kept her back to the audience in an effort to de-emphasize her gender and focus the audience's attention on the performance, but in light of her personal life, critics saw her instead as the personification of feminism and the "new woman." Leginska was instrumental in the establishment of the Boston Women's Symphony and Women's Symphony of Chicago in the late 1920s, but was unable to obtain a permanent position as conductor of a major orchestra. By the l930s, when "society was far more judgmental about the idea of broader public roles for women than it had been in the 1910s and l920s," (120) Leginska found fewer opportunities as a conductor or performer even though American symphony orchestras were proliferating. Thus, for the last thirty years of her life, she turned to teaching, and her death in 1970 went virtually unnoticed.

Antonia Brico was just coming to maturity in the l920s, and unlike Bloomfield-Zeisler and Leginska, she focused on conducting, becoming the first American to graduate from the Master School of Conducting at the Berlin Academy of Music. Returning to the United States in the early l930s, she conducted a variety of concerts, many of them aimed at a wider popular audience. Perhaps because of the increased scrutiny of women musicians by critics in the 1930s, Brico always denied that she was a feminist. Yet during the Depression, she formed a women's orchestra to provide employment and training for other female musicians and to provide low-cost entertainment to the public. Yet like Leginska, Brico was unable to obtain a permanent appointment at any major symphony orchestra, and was repeatedly passed over by the Denver Symphony orchestra. She too turned to teaching to support herself and had faded into relative obscurity when one of her former pupils, folksinger Judy Collins, produced a Oscar-nominated documentary f ilm about her entitled Antonia: Portrait of the Woman (1974), which led to a brief revival of interest in Brico's career.