Music and Women, the story of women in their relation to music by Sophie Drinker, is a chronicle of women’s traditions modeled on the waxing, full, and waning movements of the moon-mother-musician-Goddess and her dancing attendants …
… women belonged to important religious institutions and sang their hymns and danced their dances…Their ecstasy was a ritual performed in imitation of immemorial tradition and for the same immemorial reason – to become one with the rhythm of life.
– Sophie Drinker
This book came recommended to me by one of the women I ‘met’ online at the symposium on Marija Gimbutas hosted by the Association of the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM). That symposium was grand, stimulating and inspiring in its discussions on the publications and research of Marija Gimbutas as well as wonderful in the opportunity to meet so many like-minded women, many of whom have dedicated their life‘s work and research furthering the work and research of Gimbutas and her declaration of egalitarian, matrilineal, goddess-worshiping cultures dating to ‘Old Europe’ going as far back as approximately 7,000 BC. Please see RESOURCES for Marija Gimbutas’ books among recommended reading list!
Ruth Barrett, one of the women I met at the symposium, subsequently attended my systrum presentation and suggested I might find Drinker‘s book of interest. I managed to acquire a used copy and it’s kind of funny because the previous owner was quite heavy-handed with a yellow highlighter pen!
Sophie Drinker (1888 -1965), an amateur musician, self-educated Philadelphian wife and mother, “a well-bred lady of leisure and privilege”, wrote this “progressive, activist work and scholarship“ following 20 years of research. The book © 1948 publ. 1995, The Feminist Press, was published when Drinker was 60 years old.
Sophie is considered a founder of women’s musicological and gender studies, which she spent a great deal of her life researching and writing about. The Drinker family was well known for their invitation-only singing parties, and in 1930, Sophie joined the ‘‘Montgomery Singers.”
Musicologist Elizabeth Wood writes in the preface: Sophie Drinker was an amateur musician, self-educated Philadelphian wife and mother, “a well-bred lady of leisure and privilege” who wrote this “progressive, activist work and scholarship“. Wood goes on to say “Drinker conjured a narrative of the female story modeled on the waxing, full, and waning movements of the moon-mother-musician-Goddess and her dancing attendants…
She invokes the daughters of the moon to remind women everywhere of our “deep reservoirs of imaginative power” and to….
experience the joys of music making through the sounds of gong, rattle, drum and the rhythms and melodies of ethnic and folk dances and songs.
