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The origin of this article was a talk I was invited to give in Toronto at the conference Musical Intersections 2000, a millennial joint meeting of fourteen societies devoted to the scholarly study of music. Writing on behalf of five societies' Committees on the Status of Women, Judy Tsou proposed to me the daunting task of somehow surveying the music scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality that had been produced in the twentieth century. Intrigued and terrified in equal measure by the challenge, I accepted. Despite my fears I welcomed the opportunity to think about a subject I did not know well -- the history of this scholarship, as both a form of feminist activism and a form of musical behavior in the range of activities Christopher Small has dubbed "musicking."(1) Knowing that I could not write a credible historical narrative in the few weeks available to me (nor even in a few months), I wrote instead a rather loose, informal text. I share revised fragments of that text here, as if they were fragments of a research prospectus on the subject as I would approach it -- given who I am, a musician, music historian, and feminist who was been professionally (and politically) aware, on and off, for the last thirty years of the twentieth century.
Memory
History is not the same as memory. According to the Italian historian Anna Rossi-Doria, "memory" is an interrogation of the past that seeks "to fill the abyss between past and present...to remember what happened so as not to lose it."(2) By contrast, "history" as she defines it is a "search for a time separate from the subject...an effort to codify the separation from past and present." Women's historians often blur the distinction between them, Rossi-Doria argues, because "memory" is so consonant with the traditionally feminine work of sustaining social relationships; thus, the implicit objectivity of "history" often feels wrong to women writers. The urge to write "memory" rather than "history" is especially strong among feminists, she adds, because writing "memory" is intentionally political. "Memory" tries "not to lose" the ancestors, veterans, comrades in struggle, so as to "not to lose" the struggle itself; the writer of "memory," like her readers, uses "memory" as a ground for her...