Women and Music

Another twentieth-century phenomenon that has inspired better focus and greater interest lately is music outside the Euro-American tradition.

On the other end of the chronology adopted here, modern women's expanding roles in music are revolutionizing views of women in music.

The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the driving force behind the emergence of a wide range of studies and theories focusing on the lives, positions, and contributions of women in society through the ages. As in other fields, scholars in music began to show an interest in the work of the half of the world's population that had been ignored in earlier studies of music history and development. Women's studies came to the fore even more slowly in music than in many other fields, however, perhaps because musicology was (and to some extent still is) dominated by men schooled in traditional methodologies