Women's Musical Club Cultures

The Musicians Club of Women (MCW) is one of the oldest musical clubs in the United States, formed in Chicago in 1875 as the Amateur Musical Club. From its beginnings as a women's social group for music-making, the Club hosted musical gatherings and raised money for charities and philanthropic causes. It afforded its members opportunities to perform for other members, to expand their social and musical networks, and to hear high-caliber classical concerts in a sociable setting. The musical women of MCW were both professional and amateur: some led distinguished careers in music and others worked to enrich the culture of music-making and music appreciation in Chicago. As the Club grew, it programmed works and performances by noteworthy composers and performers from Chicago and beyond, with a particular focus on women composers and contemporary American works. In the second half of the twentieth century, a series of generous bequests from the estates of former members furnished ample scholarship opportunities for young women musicians and vocalists and informed the modern mission of the Club. The history of MCW charts the intersection of music-making, education, women's rights, and philanthropy in Chicago, illuminating the social connections and career paths afforded to women through their membership with MCW.
Drawing from the new collection of MCW archives housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, this paper will highlight the Club's varying social and professional purposes and how they informed the Club's concert programming and community service outreach. My archival research will be supplemented by a historical monograph written by MCW member Ruth Klauber Friedman to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Club in 1975, as well as a series of interviews I will conduct with current long-time members. Club leadership has continually negotiated the needs of members, honed their mission as a non-profit organization, and promoted young women musicians and philanthropic organizations around Chicago. In supporting women's causes and facilitating women's representation in musical professions, the Musicians Club of Women has sustained a long legacy of women advancing women as musical performers, composers, conductors, teachers, and scholars.

During World War II, American media created and fueled stereotypes that portrayed the typical teenage female Frank Sinatra fan as hysterical, immature, distracted, and obsessed. What contemporaneous critics and current scholars have generally not acknowledged, however, was how Sinatra fandom provided American teenage girls with a multitude of benefits and tools to help navigate their stressful and often confusing wartime lives. In Sinatra fan clubs specifically, these benefits included having a safe space to discuss ideas surrounding music, politics, and civil rights with people of the same ages and interests, opportunities for career preparation, a way to express their creativity and explore their sexuality, and a chance to interact with an international fan community in the midst of worldwide conflict. Driving this examination are Sinatra fan club newsletters and correspondences authored by these teenage girls from the archives of the Hoboken Historical Museum, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, and the Margaret Herrick Library. These printed materials demonstrate a notable level of professionalism and creativity, marking these girls not as mindless cultural consumers, but engaged cultural producers.
In dialogue with the work of scholars in fan, gender, and popular music studies, this study will demonstrate how consulting texts produced by teenage girls as opposed to primarily professional criticism leads to insight into how the creative objects produced by this fan community served them as war-era Americans. These texts reveal a form of music criticism that addresses popular music not so much as a cultural product that reflects larger society, but as a highly personal tool for understanding and encouraging intimate desires for both individuals and peer groups of teenage girls. Furthermore, these artifacts shed new light on the war-era persona of Frank Sinatra, who was heavily criticized by much of adult society during the years of World War II, by revealing how teenage fans responded to specific aspects of his voice, performance style, appearance, and social beliefs.

Though largely overlooked by musicologists, the Pacific Northwest region of the United States has been long-identified by scholars as a historically progressive place for women. Washington State, for example, allowed women to vote as early as 1883 and officially granted women's suffrage in 1910, a full decade before the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. In 1926, with the election of civic activist and women's club member Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle also became the first major U.S. city to have a woman mayor. Musicologists have also recently highlighted the Pacific Northwest region as a place that allowed women more freedom to pursue musical roles such as conductor, professional musician, composer, and impresario, roles that would have been less available to them elsewhere in the United States in the early twentieth century. Yet, while correctly categorizing the region's climate as progressive for musical women, most current scholarship does not address some crucial debates that occurred in Seattle over women's roles in the public and private spheres during this time. As a result, some of the multifaceted ways that women used music and music clubwork to participate in these debates have been overlooked. This paper illuminates these debates by examining the Ladies' Musical Club of Seattle's (LMC) complex role as a prominent all-volunteer, all-women music club, and by exploring how issues of gender, class, and ethics were navigated by, and through the work of, these musical clubwomen. 
Utilizing the LMC's extensive archival holdings, and expanding on existing research on Seattle women and music by myself, Elizabeth Knighton, and Maurine Weiner Greenwald, I focus on two key issues that emerged as contentious in Seattle: women's suffrage, and women's right to earn a wage. These two topics were especially pronounced around World War I, when issues arose as men returned from war to find that many women had taken jobs in their absence. Ultimately, this paper shows how musical clubwomen's engagement with these issues, both explicitly and tacitly, helped shape the progressive musical landscape for women in Seattle.