The Progressive Era has long been understood as a moment in which American women became increasingly visible in the public sphere, including the performing arts. In this period, women emerged as professional musicians, appeared on vaudeville and popular theater stages, embraced various dance styles and physical culture systems as a mode of expression, and organized and promoted a wide range of performances and other artistic endeavors. Marian Wilson Kimber's The Elocutionists casts light on another realm of women's creative activity in this period and well into the twentieth century: musically accompanied recitation. While oration remained a masculine pursuit, elocution—the “interpretation” of literary works through recitation—was increasingly deemed appropriate for women, particularly when undertaken to entertain family and friends. Despite the fact that music was regularly incorporated into women's recitations and integrally connected with period conceptions of elocution, the art has received little musicological study. It was denigrated by contemporary critics...
Review: The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, by Marian Wilson Kimber
MARY SIMONSON is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Women's Studies at Colgate University. Her scholarship explores performance across media in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has been published in edited volumes and journals including this Journal and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her book Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment, 1907–1917 was published by Oxford University Press in 2013; her current book project examines music and voice in American silent film presentation in the 1920s.
Mary Simonson; Review: The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, by Marian Wilson Kimber. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2019; 72 (1): 251–255. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.1.251
Download citation file: