Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men(8)
Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society. Women have been locked out of the canon wholesale because what success looked like in composing has historically been almost impossible for women to achieve. For most of history, if women were allowed to compose at all, it was for a private audience and domestic setting. Large orchestral works, so crucial for the development of a composer’s reputation, were usually off limits, considered ‘improper’.77 Music was an ‘ornament’ for women, not a career.78 Even by the twentieth century, Elizabeth Maconchy (who was the first woman ever to chair the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain), was being curtailed in her ambitions by publishers such as Leslie Boosey, who ‘couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman’.
Even if the ‘little songs’ women were allowed to write were enough to earn you a place in the canon, women simply didn’t have the resources or position to ensure their legacy. In her book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, Anna Brer compares the prolific seventeenth-century composer Barbara Strozzi (who ‘had more music in print in her lifetime than any other composer of the era’) to one of her male contemporaries, Francesco Cavalli. As head of music at St Mark’s in Venice (a position not open to women at the time), Cavalli had the money and the stature to ensure all his works, including the many he did not publish in his lifetime, were kept in a library. He could pay for an archivist to look after them, and he could, and did, pay for the Masses he composed to be sung on the anniversary of his death. In the face of such inequality of resources, Strozzi never stood a chance of being remembered on an equal footing. And to continue to insist on the primacy of a canon that excludes women like her is to perpetuate the male-biased injustices of the past.
As well as going some way to explaining their exclusion from cultural history, the exclusion of women from positions of power is often given as an excuse for why, when we teach them about the past, we teach children almost exclusively about the lives of men. In 2013, a battle raged in Britain over what we mean by ‘history’. On one side was the then British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, brandishing his proposed new ‘back to basics’ national history curriculum.79 An army of twenty-first-century Gradgrinds, he and his supporters insisted that children needed ‘facts’.80 They needed a ‘foundation of knowledge’.
This ‘foundation of knowledge’, the ‘basic’ blocks of ‘facts’ which every child should know, was notable, amongst other gaps, for its almost wholesale absence of women. No women appeared in Key Stage 2 (ages seven to eleven) at all, other than two Tudor queens. Key Stage 3 (ages eleven to fourteen) included only five women, four of whom (Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, George Eliot and Annie Besant) were lumped together under ‘The Changing Role of Women’ – rather implying, not without reason, that the rest of the curriculum was about men.
In 2009, prominent British historian David Starkey criticised female historians for, in his opinion, focusing too much on Henry VIII’s wives rather than the king himself who, he railed, should be ‘centre stage’.81 Dismissing the ‘soap opera’ of his personal life as secondary to the formal political consequences of his rule, such as the Reformation, Starkey insisted that ‘[i]f you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify’.
Starkey’s position rests on the assumption that what takes place in the private realm is unimportant. But is that a fact? The private life of Agnes Huntingdon (born after 1320) is revealed through snippets in public documents from the court cases concerning her two marriages.82 We discover that she was a victim of domestic abuse, and that her first marriage was disputed because her family disapproved of her choice. On the evening of 25 July 1345 she ran away from her second husband after he attacked her; later that night he turned up at her brother’s house with a knife. Is the abuse (and lack of freedom of choice) of a fourteenth-century woman private irrelevancies, or part of the history of female subjugation?
The arbitrary division of the world into ‘private’ and ‘public’ is in any case arguably a false distinction. Invariably both bleed into each other. When I spoke to Katherine Edwards, a history teacher who was heavily involved in the fight against Gove’s reforms, she pointed to recent research on women’s role in the American Civil War. Far from being an irrelevance, ‘women and their conception of their own role completely undermined the whole Confederate war effort’.
Elite women, brought up to believe absolutely in the myth of their own helplessness, simply could not get over their understanding of work as intrinsically unfeminine. Unable to bring themselves to take up the jobs vacated by enlisted men, they wrote to their husbands begging them to desert, to come home and protect them. Poorer women proved a headache in a more proactive way, as they organised resistance to Confederate policies, ‘because they were starving basically, and they needed to feed their families’. Excluding women from an analysis of the outcome of the American Civil War not only constitutes a gender data gap, but also a data gap in the understanding of the construction of the United States itself. That seems like a ‘fact’ worth knowing.
The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account for half of humanity – not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about ourselves. It has fuelled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact.