Historiograpical editing of female achievement

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www.theguardian.com/education/2015/aug/18/female-composers-a-level-music-syllabus-petition

A girl is petitioning Edexcel for including only male composers in the GCSE music exam - 63 composers, no women.

It occurs to me that when women have made historical achievements, overcoming the barriers that were in place in their own time, they are then edited out as future generations wipe the slate clean of female achievement.

If there is any hope of women attaining equality then this needs to addressed. It would be nice to get to a point where historical female achievement was just as acknowledged as male achievement but I think this does need to be done in schools. If future generations have an historical perspective where women, despite barriers, could be seen artistically as equal to men we would be a step farther in gaining intellectual equality.

Any thoughts?

I think there are a set of sedimented, middle class ideas about 'genius' that tend to gender it as male. Combined with a cultural prohibition on appearing on a public stage from about the mid C18 to mid C20, it means there are a lot of areas where women haven't been able to achieve, or have been ignored if they have in spite of all the barriers. I suspect that there is a combination of genius + publicity in the musical world that has excluded women more profoundly than, say, the novel - which was (for a long time) seen as more detailed, real, domestic and private in nature.

Good on this student for starting the campaign - what a great idea!

(I hate all that aesthetic stuff about "the great novel", "the great painting" - which leads to a Harold Bloom-style male canon. Ugh, ugh, ugh. It's not only suspicious in gender terms but politically too. All these male arbiters of taste. Ewwww)

From asking around, it's not just historical female composers the a level syllabus ignores, but also modern day ones, not just of classical music either.

Norah Jones gets a mention which is great, but seems to be the only woman writing popular music according to the exam boards.....

So it's an ongoing issue - that contemporary women are getting written out for exam boards and syllabuses (in music here but I remember the vast amount of lit I did also being mostly male). I feel that education has a great part to play in the normalising of womens' place in the world. If our children are taught in such a way that we have equality of standing, they will also expect it in their day to day lives.

Agreed.

So, why isn't this happening?

I get the whole male patriarchy thing but regardless education should lead the way, not lag. How can we hope to enlighten our children when we give them such a backward looking education.

History is incredibly important imo, we need to stop editing it and let it properly inform the future. It's like Christianity editing out all the bits that were problematic for their world view.

I'm actually a bit shocked about this. From a purely academic point of view, and leaving aside the obvious detrimental effect the editing out of female composers from history will have on girls and young women today, this is unforgiveable. You're going to teach medieval music without even mentioning Hildegard von Bingen? Or early twentieth century music without Nadja Boulanger? These were not marginal figures someone just "forgot" about, they were incredibly prominent key figures in the development of the classical canon. That's like teaching the classical period and editing out Haydn!

And I agree with shovetheholly about the classical canon. The intellectual dishonesty of teaching a cultural tradition that went to great pains to exclude all but a small segment of the population and then turn around and celebrate that small segment as "geniuses" is not something you want to perpetuate.

Where were the female Mozart and Bach? They were at home, singing to their children. Or they hummed a tune over the textile machinery.

Come to think of it, maybe the working-class male Beethoven was whistling as he shovelled coal. We're just never going to know those people or whatever they could have accomplished.