[excerpted from from dissertation, The Girls in the Band: Women's Persectives on Gender Stereotyping in the Music Classroom (2004)]

Women’s ban from the music halls is directly linked to their ban from the church in the Middle Ages. Sophie Drinker notes that, in ancient civilizations (and in some existing non-Western societies today), women played lead roles in the religious and spiritual lives of their communities. Women were prophets, priestesses, and matrons of their religions, and they were also often largely responsible for the music that accompanied ceremonies. Most music in ancient societies seems to have been created for utilitarian purposes, either work- or spirit-related; to this extent, women were prominent in the creation and retention of their communities’ music. They held important roles as respected healers and guardians for their cultures (Drinker 1995).

The Middle Ages in Western history saw, among other dramatic life changes, a change in the concept of spirituality and community participation in religion. No longer did religious rites and knowledge belong to everyone in the group; it was now the property of the Church, ruled by an elite literate class composed almost entirely of men. Women soon found that their religious duties had disappeared, and with it went the privileges they had once enjoyed as creators and keepers of cultural knowledge. Nuns were sidelined in convents outside the mainstream of the church. Men, conversely, made the majority of the decisions and controlled the majority of the written materials for this new Church, because they controlled the host and the mass. This new dynamic between the sexes would have profoundly disastrous consequences for women, not the least of which was women’s continuing exclusion from the world of music, which was still very much in the service of religion (Pendle 2001) . . .

After making inroads with the major orchestras, however, women did not wish to relinquish their new positions in the musical community. Slowly, they once again made their ways back into the ensembles, this time in the company of men and in the face of the usual protest. Women players were hired with more frequency in the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not obtain permanent contracted positions until some time later: Boston hired its first full-time woman player in 1945, New York in 1966. The Pittsburgh Symphony hired their first woman in 1964, and San Francisco finally hired their freelance tympanist, Elayne Jones, for full-time work in 1972. In 1947 only 8 percent of the players with major American symphony orchestras were women; by 1964 that figure increased to 18 percent. In the 1974–75 season, 24.9 percent of the full-time players in the nation’s thirty-one major symphonies were women, and by 1983 the figure was 27.8 percent. Gains women made in the orchestral world in terms of numbers seem to have reached a plateau by the late 1980s; in 1989, 30.8 percent of full-time players were women. The figures for the 1990s are barely any higher than this; in 1994 women represented 37.9 percent of the population of the nation’s 44 largest orchestras, and in 1998, 34.7 percent (Pendle 2001).

These recent numbers are unimpressive, and there are still underlying gender issues at play in the orchestral world. While Elayne Jones was finally hired by San Francisco in 1972, she was denied tenure two years later. After initially filing a lawsuit with the organization, she agreed to drop it in exchange for another audition before the players’ committee. She lost that audition and was downgraded to part-time status with the San Francisco Opera (Pendle 2001).

Even today, the participation of women in America’s orchestras is in inverse proportion to their budgets: the larger the budget, the fewer women hired. Among the best-endowed orchestras (Boston, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia), only 19.4 percent of the players were women in 1988. In the same year, in regional and smaller metropolitan symphonies with budgets between $1 million and $3.6 million, 47.1 percent were women (Pendle 2001).