Committee on the Status of Women: sessions at AMS meetings

2005: Gender Issues in Graduate Pedagogy: Seminar Culture and Mentoring

About 80 people attended the Committee on the Status of Women’s open session in Washington on “Gender Issues in Graduate Pedagogy: Seminar Culture and Mentoring." The panel had four speakers: Professors Mitchell Morris (UCLA), Judith Peraino (Cornell University), and Richard Will (University of VA), and PhD candidate Gordon Haramaki (UCLA). Heather Hadlock (Stanford University) moderated the discussion. The speakers shared experiences of teaching/being graduate students, and reflected on the ways that gender and other kinds of difference, most notably race, ethnicity, regional background, and sexual identity, can influence the dynamics within a seminar AND an individual participant’s sense of access to “discursive authority.” Each panelist spoke for 5-6 minutes. We then broke out into five discussion groups of 12-15 people, each informally led/supported by a member of the CSW.  (Dorothea, James, Nina, Honey, Sindhu, Richard)
Mitchell Morris talked about the under-examined role of politeness in seminar culture and pedagogical interactions, and specifically the influence of regional and cultural manners. He described any new grad student as a cultural anthropologist. The seminar teacher is “traffic cop” managing students’ access to airtime. He argued against the idea of socializing all teachers and students into a uniform style of interaction, and instead compared seminars to intellectual ecosystems: a department needs diversity of seminar cultures and pedagogical styles.

Gordon Haramaki reflected on how gender, ethnicity, and family status (marriage/parenthood) all shape a student’s expectations of and comfort in a seminar environment.  He pointed out that every student comes with a slightly (or greatly) different socialization toward authority and deference. He also noticed the gendered family roles that govern much thinking about pedagogy: teachers as father/mother/aunt/sibling; students as son/daughter.
Judith Peraino spoke about the graduate seminar as a space in which students struggle with language – the shock of discovering the inadequacies and biases of the languages they have received, and the work of inventing new language to ask and express what they want to say. She saw this as an essential difference among kinds of seminar cultures (e.g., officially “feminist” vs “traditional”), in that some seminars foreground that problem of language. This can also produce tensions within a seminar, between students of different intellectual/theoretical orientations.

Richard Will described the experience of teaching a proseminar with only female students; depth of engagement with material (especially feminist theory) – wondering what “clicked” to created this energy and how to repeat with larger/mixed class.

Heather Hadlock reflected on the frustration of a feminist teacher in a post-feminist world: students’ perception that the playing field is now level; that gender is passé, no longer a useful category for analysis; that the terms of feminist critique are themselves limiting, requiring us to keep investing in old stereotypes of domineering men/compliant women. (Sindhu Revuluri  articulated this point in an email prior to the meeting). Gordon’s response that he doesn’t see gender as passe, but rather gender is the “hook” that pulls out a tangle of other threads (ethnicity, race, class, etc) and causes the fabric of apparent sameness to unravel.

After the panelists spoke, we broke out into 8 small groups for informal discussion.

When groups reported back at the end of the session, we were surprised at the diversity of concerns discussed. These included the waning of some stereotypical sexist/misogynist/homophobic classroom behaviors and the persistence of others; family issues (especially anxiety about bias against married grad students and against young scholars with children); the difficulty of analyzing pedagogical dynamics in terms of identity, given how complex our notions of “identity” have become.
The final phase of the session centered on the concept of “discursive authority”: what constitutes it; how individual scholars acquire it; how diversity within the field challenges and broadens the range of possible authoritative discourses.

2004: Gender Issues in Scholarly Publishing

About 60 people attended the CSW Open Meeting in Seattle, which featured a panel discussion on “Gender Issues in Scholarly Publishing,” with special focus on feminist, queer, and gender scholarship. Panelists Suzanne Cusick (ed., Women and Music), Daniel Melamed (ed., Journal of Musicology), Judy McCulloh (Music Editor, U of Illinois Press), and Gayle Sherwood Magee (former Music Editor, Indiana U Press) discussed the roles and priorities of general and specialist journals; creating, proposing and marketing edited volumes; the peer-review process; and the larger network of feminist/gender scholarship,  publishing and undergraduate curricula.

2003: Obstacles to Gender Parity in Musicology

The Committee on the Status of Women sponsored an open session in Houston titled "Obstacles to Gender Parity in Musicology," featuring a panel of four speakers: Professors Walter Frisch (Columbia University), Susan McClary (University of California, Los Angeles), Honey Meconi (Rice University), and Jessie Ann Owens (Brandeis University). The speakers provided a variety of anecdotal and statistical information concerning barriers to career advancement in musicology that are particular to women. Each panelist presented brief remarks, after which a lively discussion among the panelists and individuals in the audience ensued, moderated by Professor Deanna Bush of the University of North Texas.

Speaking first Susan McClary offered anecdotal comments based on her experience at the University of California at Los Angeles. She began by noting that in the mid 1990s, her department had fewer senior women faculty members than they had had in the 1960s. She attributed this in part to what she sees as a current perception, even among junior women musicologists, that only women get jobs nowadays, a perception that leads to resentment of women and may inhibit their promotion to senior status. She also cited a discussion in her graduate seminar, in which her students acknowledged that they likely would have been less sympathetic towards a book on women musicians of the seventeenth century by a male author, had that book been written by a woman. The students, she related, would have considered the topic “special pleading” had it come from a woman. This, McClary pointed out, is a basic attitude that must change before women’s work can be evaluated on an even par with men’s. Finally, she pointed out that the attrition rate of female faculty is much higher due to women’s tendency to place family concerns over career goals and to be intimidated out of expressing their professional needs.

Walter Frisch spoke next and provided statistics based on a Columbia University Provost’s report, “Where are the Leaks in the Pipeline for Women?” Most telling was the fact that in the Humanities program at Columbia, 60% of all students (Graduate and undergraduate) are women, whereas women make up only 17% of tenured faculty. Furthermore, this study found that the higher the academic rank, the lower the number of women who were represented. Part of the problem, according to the study, is that the overall number of faculty positions in the Humanities is shrinking. Thus, fewer faculty members are being hired, making it more difficult to correct a gender imbalance, especially at senior faculty levels. A suggested solution is to hire more women at the tenure rank.

Honey Meconi began her talk by rebutting the notion that current professional women should sacrifice their personal lives so that later generations can enjoy career parity with men. Citing the example of Cristle Collins and Robert Judd (though aware of the pitfalls of focusing on exceptional cases), Meconi argued that women in musicology today should expect to have a personal life and be able to advance in their career. One source of strength in her own career has been the wealth of role models in the form of senior women colleagues. Meconi suggested greater efforts in mentoring and networking among women to help encourage female junior faculty members can pursue career goals with confidence.

Jessie Ann Owens, reflecting on her years as a Dean, reiterated how difficult it is to conduct a search that will necessarily lead to the hiring of a woman. Although she was able to make three “target of opportunity” hires as Dean, she pointed out that the forces leading to diminished numbers of senior women are subtle and pervasive and extend beyond academia. She enumerated several key factors in this regard. First, she cited general socialization factors; women are generally taught to be less adamant in expressing their needs and to be more apologetic and self-doubting about those needs. Owens also brought up the issue of reproductive realities and suggested that the six-year tenure model may not be feasible for women. Finally, she evoked the “old-boy network,” which, she maintained, is alive and thriving. To address this phenomenon, she has formed a “Gang of Five” with other senior women musicologists in the Boston area who meet regularly to discuss the issues facing women in our field. This informal group, she hoped, might serve as a model for the sort of networking mentioned by some of the other panelists.

2002: Making Connections with Women Studies Department

Judy Tsou, Chair

• “Are We There? Women's Studies in a Professional Music Program.” Claudia Macdonald (Oberlin College)
  MacDonald described her own decision to integrate her work on women into general music courses. Macdonald emphasized two other themes: "presence," the need to raise awareness of the role of women in music history, and "interaction," the difficulty of realizing the interdisciplinary possibilities of such a topic.
   
• “Being Inclusive: Teaching About Music and Gender.” Jane Bernstein (Tufts University).
  Bernstein discussed the forthcoming book she has edited, Women’s Voices and Music. Placing this book in a historical context, she noted an increasing focus on performance and performance theory. Bernstein asserted that musical literacy is entirely irrelevant to her book, making it useful for both music majors and women’s studies majors alike.
   
• “Of Feminist Waves and Music.” Marcia Citron (Rice University)
  Citron reflected on recent developments in feminism and feminist theory and described a new or “third wave” of feminist thinking, which emphasizes display of beauty and sexuality and in general is direct and unapologetic about sexual issues. She further described the third wave as a reaction to the predominantly white, heterosexual, and middle-class makeup of both earlier and separate forms of feminism.

2001: Open Meeting on Life Issues

• Cristle Collins Judd and Bob Judd: How does a couple successfully negotiate this double career path?
  For this presentation, Cristle and Bob decided to emphasize a decision they made at the beginning of their marriage not to be a commuting couple. They have stuck to it, and it has worked out for them. Bob noted that this probably is not the right decision for everyone. Commuting can work for some, but would be too stressful for them.
   
• Kelley Harness: Sexual Orientation and the Job Search
  Kelley stated that there are issues about which one needs to decide before appling for a job, including how “out” one want to be, or whether to be “out” at all. Another issue is that concerning the dynamics of a spousal / partner hire, which gay musicologists may have trouble broaching.
   
• Marion Guck and Joe Dubiel: Couples Who Commute Between Tenure Track Jobs
  Marion and Joe had two separate, successful careers before they began their relationship. Now they have both arrived in tenured positions 600 miles apart, and they both have to still see the these positions as “provisional,” even though it gets harder to change as time goes by. Issues raised included coordinating sabbaticals, whether or not to make lateral or downward professional moves for the sake of proximity, travel options, and maintaining separate households in two cities.

2000: Toronto Joint Session

The Committee on the Status of Women organized and presented an unofficial joint session with six other societies (SMT, SEM, SAM, CMS, MLA, and IAWM) during the Toronto conference. The well-attended session began with a panel entitled "A Look Back at the 20th Century: Gender and Identities" with two speakers. Suzanne Cusick (University of Virginia) and Su Zheng (Wesleyan University) gave talks on "Gendered Musicology and the Short Century," and "Identities, Roles, and the Status of Women Music Professionals in the Twentieth Century" respectively. Suzanne Cusick offered some intriguing thoughts on gender and musicology in the "short" twentieth century (1914-1989), beginning with the birth of the Musical Quarterly, and ending with the watershed Baltimore conference (1988). Su Zheng said that within the discipline of music, there is always a danger of letting ethnomusicology take the role of the feminized other. Ethnomusicology can challenge and broaden western feminism with a cross-cultural perspective.

The second half of the session was a panel discussion by the representatives of the seven societies' committees regarding their missions and histories. College Music Society's committee co-chairs, Judy Coe and Calvert Johnson, reported that their committee has existed since 1982 and has undertaken advocacy projects for women. Sally Reid of the International Alliance for Women in Music described how three different societies (eventually merging to become IAWM) were founded with the aim of getting women represented in the larger associations, projects, and journals. Neither IAWM nor the Music Library association was invited to this conference. MLA President Paula Matthews noted that the Women in Music Roundtable started with a session on scholarship of women musicians in 1985, and has compiled a published bibliography on the subject. Liane Curtis, chair of the Gender Interest Group of the Society for American Music, reported that their society in general has been supportive of gender scholarship. Zoe Sherinian of the Society for Ethnomusicology said their committee, though only established in 1996, has had special sessions on mentoring, pedagogy, and epistemologies. Elizabeth Sayrs described how the Society for Music Theory's committee came into being in 1986 as an ad hoc committee for establishing guidelines on nonsexist language. Now it is a standing committee with a website that includes an archive of syllabi for courses on women and music. Finally, Claire Fontijn-Harris gave a short history of the CSW, which was founded in 1975. She brought up the important news that the history of the AMS is being compiled, but as yet this committee has not been included.

The session ended with a reception graciously hosted by the University of Illinois Press.