Sigma Alpha Iota

Spring 2019 8 PAN PIPES WOMEN COMPOSERS As part of higher education in music, students across the country are required to attend a certain number of concerts or recitals per semester, to encourage exposure to a variety of musical styles other than what is comfortable for most. Concert programs across the country, however, tend to exclude half of the human population, opting instead to focus on the works included in the western musical canon — a canon that is overwhelmingly white, European, and male. Why are women composers underrepresented in the western musical world? Why are they — as an op-ed from an online, UK-based newspaper states — seen as inferior to their male counterparts? ese questions are answered most succinctly through a socio- political lens. Before the industrial revolution in the 1760s, the US functioned as an agrarian society, meaning both humanity and the economy relied on the upkeep of land and crops. e two sexes played an equal role in the quest for the survival of humanity. ese roles were assigned out of necessity: the men worked the farm to feed the family, and the women bore children and raised the family. On one hand, this could be seen as an imbalance of power between the sexes, but with the high infant mortality rate, women bore the burden of making sure humanity lived to see another day by bearing children. ey were obviously successful in playing this role for generations since we now have an overpopulation problem in many countries, including our own. With Reconstruction in the 1870s, along with urbanization and the advent of modern medicine around the turn of the century, the infant mortality rate dropped significantly. Women were no longer needing to be baby factories in order for humanity to survive; the gender role they had been serving for centuries was becoming less and less necessary. Nevertheless, the fairy-tale narrative women were told for generations persisted. Betty Friedan in her masterwork, e Feminine Mystique, defines this narrative as a fulfillment fallacy, stating "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women aer 1949 — the housewife-mother." Betty Friedan almost single-handedly began the second wave of feminism in the early 1960s with this publication. She details interviews of her classmates from Smith College on the tenth anniversary of their graduation, and defines their feeling as this "problem that has no name," saying they were unhappy despite living in material comfort and married with children. While feminism has had four waves with their own ways of protesting the traditional patriarchy, the second wave is the most related to the answer we are searching for. Because of the widespread unhappiness Friedan found in her research and the effect of those who related to this unhappiness, more career opportunities e Annual James J. Whalen Academic Symposium at Ithaca College provides a forum for students, faculty, and the community to discuss cutting edge research topics and to examine the connection between research and education. e Symposium includes poster, presentation and creative (visual, media and performing arts) sessions by students from all academic disciplines. e following is an edited version of the Music Area award-winning presentation given by Brittany Giles (Lansing/East Lansing Alumnae) on April 12, 2018. The feminine Mystique Living Composers of Modern American Music

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