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How Far Have We Really Come?

An Investigation into the Feminist Influence of Ethel Smyth

Mara Stoll
Music History
Term Paper
11-24-19
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It’s the early years of the 20th century, and you are standing in a crowded street. Why is it so

crowded, you might ask? There is a suffrage protest happening right around you! Tensions are

starting to rise, and violence is waiting just under the surface. Oh, no, here come the police!

Time for you to get out of there. As you push your way through the crowd, a song starts to swell

around you.

“Shout, shout, up with your song!

Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking;

March, march, swing you along,

Wide blows our banner, and hope is waking.

Song with its story, dreams with their glory

Lo! they call, and glad is their word!

Loud and louder it swells,

Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord!”

These are the words to “The March for the Women” by Ethel Smyth. This work, among others,

was instrumental to the success of the British women’s suffrage movement. It brought the

movement into people’s homes and the performance venues of high society. Not only did it help

women gain suffrage, but Smyth’s work helped female composers gain respect and recognition

previously denied them by the music community.

Dame Ethel Smyth was a fascinating woman. She was fourth of eight children, born in

1858 in Sidcup England. Her family was relatively unremarkable, some of her relatives had

successful military careers, but Ethel wanted a career in music. Despite her parents’ objections,

she was determined and began private study with Alexander Ewing who introduced her to the

likes of Wagner and Berlioz. In order to advance her studies, she went on to attend the Leipzig
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Conservatory. This lasted barely a year, as Smyth felt she wasn’t being challenged enough as a

woman, and she left to study privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. She managed to brush

toes with quite a few successful composers during this time such as Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Clara

Schumann and Brahms.

As we have already seen, Ethel Smyth was never going to be one to just let other

composers, especially men, get all the success and recognition. She never did anything halfway,

whatever she did, she made sure she did it well.

Her greatest achievement was to compose six operas when only a handful of women had

composed even one before her; moreover, Smyth's operas were published, performed,

and revived from Leipzig … to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. … She

published nine books of evocative memoir, incomparable portraiture, and critical

commentary. She made innumerable broadcast … She found the time to play hard, and to

win, a medley of competitive sports: hunting, cricket, tennis, golf, mountaineering,

bicycling. (Wood 1986, 126)

Ethel Smyth was a Renaissance woman like almost none before her. Not only did she compose

and write and all of these things, she got recognized for it. She was knighted in her lifetime! For

women, before they even had the right to vote, this was a marvelous achievement and made her

someone the suffragettes definitely wanted on their side. During her tenure as a suffragette, she

composed several works that had strong feminist messages and several pieces that were

composed exclusively for women to perform. The principle of these pieces is “The March of the

Women” composed in 1911. Other works include: “Hey Nonny No, Songs of Sunrise; in

chamber music: finale of the String Quartet in E Minor; Three Songs, for solo female voice; and

in 1913-14, the opera The Boatswain's Mate and its instrumental overture” (Wood 1995, 616).
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Surprisingly, given what we know about her nature, Smyth wasn’t always so keen on the

suffrage movement. She felt like it was something she should stay out of. “At first she confessed

to an "indifference tinged with distaste, and, Heaven forgive me, ridicule ... As a composer, I

wanted to keep out of it. It seemed to me incompatible with artistic creation"’ (Wood 1983, 129).

Smyth didn’t feel that the movement was a serious movement. She didn’t think from what she

had seen that they were militant enough to be effective or worth bothering with. However, after

hearing Pankhurst, a prominent suffrage leader, speak she was hooked immediately. (This might

have been influenced by the massive crush she had on her.) In a letter to Pankhurst, Smyth

wrote:

"no one can be a more profoundly convinced Suffragist than I. I have always felt

enormous admiration for the militants--absolutely approved of their policy and seen in it

(as must, I think anyone who has read history) a supreme guarantee that the question is a

real one, not a fad of visionaries but a practical need voicing itself in many ways, among

others in this way." (Wood 1995, 613)

Smyth was so enthralled by this movement that she put her entire career on hold for two years in

order to be a part of this event. The interesting this is though, this is when she created some of

her most influential work. Her suffrage march helped spark the suffragette spirit in the hearts of

women across the British Isles.

“The March for the Women” was first introduced in January of 1911 and from that day forth

became the anthem of the movement. It was sung everywhere and gave hope to suffragettes no

matter the situation. “In Holloway prison, …cheered and exercised inmates and greeted their

release. …replenished hunger strikers, …[and] helped raise the Union fund. In city and
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countryside, …[the March] restored the health and spirits of militants awaiting certain rearrest”

(Wood 1995 618). There is a legendary story of Smyth during her two-month stay in prison,

conducting the March for the inmates in the yard below through the bars of her window with her

toothbrush. This song inspired and energized people. It was so important in fact, that Pankhurst

presented her with a ceremonial baton at a meeting of the WSPU.

Beyond her work for suffrage, Ethel Smyth was an advocate for women in the arts. She

was constantly treated unfairly because of her gender and therefore would get review after

review criticizing her not for the quality of her music but the fact that it was written by a woman.

“While the Leipzig critic had said that her violin sonata lacked "feminine charm," George

Bernard Shaw, then music critic of the Star, dismissed the Serenade for its "daintiness"-a

supposedly desirable feminine trait” (Gates 1997, 65). No matter what she did, there was an issue

with her being a woman. Even though “The March for the Women” was wildly popular with the

everyday individual, it never received the critical acclaim and acceptance that it deserved given

the caliber of the composition. This didn’t stop her. She continued composing and creating

impressive works. Despite professional criticism, her pieces were decently popular, and she

gained respect from other popular composers of the time.

It is impossible to know for absolute certainty if the same outcomes would have occurred

without Ethel Smyth. Impacts like this are hard to quantitatively measure. However, the acclaim

she gained both in the suffrage area and in music, not to mention her success as an author, point

to recognition of a significant impact she made in the representation of women. She was a

pioneer for women in music as well as other disciplines and showed others with similar

aspirations that they didn’t have to be silenced if they didn’t let themselves be. Smyth was in jail
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for two months and they still couldn’t stop her from joining her suffrage sisters in song.

Ironically, she has been vastly under researched and underrecognized for the work she did

despite there being extensive documentation of her life due to her memoirs. Even though Ethel

Smyth has been largely forgotten in the arch of music history, her biggest legacy is the

recognition that female composers receive today. Without her perseverance and refusal to be

silenced, female composers would be not judged on their music instead of their womanhood.

There is still a long way to go in the realm of recognition for composers in minorities, but Ethel

Smyth’s work, especially “The March for the Women”, helped pave the way for the women that

came after her. It is imperative that progress is continued to be made in this area and a good

place to start would be giving Ethel Smyth the recognition she deserves for her role in music

history and the women’s rights movement.

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References

Gates, Eugene. (1997) "Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don't: Sexual Aesthetics and the
Music of Dame Ethel Smyth." Journal of Aesthetic Education 31, no. 1: 63-71.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3333472.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_expensive%2Fco
ntrol&refreqid=search%3Ae3c6af94ac8a5b0c42823065c552d1b7

Laurie McManus. (2014) "Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception: The
Case of Louise Otto." 19th-Century Music37, no. 3: 161-87.
https://doi.org10.1525/ncm.2014.37.3.161.

Solie, Ruth A. 1993. Musicology and Difference : Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship.
Edited by Laura Tunbridge and Carolyn Abbate. London: University of California Press

Wood, Elizabeth. (1995) "Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women's Suffrage." The Musical
Quarterly 79, no. 4: 606-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/742378.

Wood, Elizabeth. (1983) "Women, Music, and Ethel Smyth: A Pathway in the Politics of
Music." The Massachusetts Review 24, no. 1: 125-39.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089403.
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