Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South

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Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Candace Bailey

University of Illinois Press, 2021

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-252-04375-8

Paper: 978-0-252-08574-1

eISBN: 978-0-252-04854-8 (OA)

eISBN: 978-0-252-05265-1 (standard)

About the Book

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

About the Author

Candace Bailey is a professor of music at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer and Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord.

Reviews

"An important contribution to the field of American music history. This well-written and meticulously researched volume breaks new ground in the understanding of the role that music played in shaping the lives and social positions of Southern women across race and class boundaries." --Music References Services Quarterly

"Bailey's work offers valuable new insight into the relationship between performance, music, and society during a pivotal period in US history. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a meticulously detailed study that does much to deepen, complicate, and ultimately expand our understanding of women's musical lives in the nineteenth-century South." --Women and Music

"Candace Bailey has written an impressive book that achieves its stated aim to challenge assumptions about music-making by women in the nineteenth-century United States. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a model of creative archival archaeology. . . . This deeply researched, gracefully written, and deftly organized book deserves the widest possible readership." --Music and Letters