None of this means that the Bank of England deliberately set out to exclude women. It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically widespread practice of attributing women’s work to men made it much harder for a woman to fulfil the Bank’s requirements. The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.
The case of the Bank’s subjective selection criteria also shows how male default can be both a cause and a consequence of the gender data gap. By neglecting to account for the historical gender data gap, the Bank’s selection procedure for historical figures was designed around the kind of success typically achieved by men; even a requirement as seemingly benign as that the figure not be controversial, well, as the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously put it, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’. The result was that the Bank not only failed to correct for the historical gender data gap: it perpetuated it.
Such subjective designations of worth masquerading as objectivity crop up all over the place. In 2015 a British A level student called Jesse McCabe noticed that of the sixty-three set works included in her music syllabus, not a single one was by a woman. When she wrote to her exam board, Edexcel, they defended the syllabus. ‘Given that female composers were not prominent in the western classical tradition (or others for that matter),’ they wrote, ‘there would be very few female composers that could be included.’ The phrasing here is important. Edexcel doesn’t mean that there simply aren’t any female composers – after all, the International Encyclopaedia of Women Composers alone has more than 6,000 entries. What they are talking about here is ‘the canon’, that is, the body of works generally agreed to have been the most influential in shaping western culture.
Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society. Women have been locked out of the canon wholesale because what success looked like in composing has historically been almost impossible for women to achieve. For most of history, if women were allowed to compose at all, it was for a private audience and domestic setting. Large orchestral works, so crucial for the development of a composer’s reputation, were usually off limits, considered ‘improper’.77 Music was an ‘ornament’ for women, not a career.78 Even by the twentieth century, Elizabeth Maconchy (who was the first woman ever to chair the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain), was being curtailed in her ambitions by publishers such as Leslie Boosey, who ‘couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman’.
Even if the ‘little songs’ women were allowed to write were enough to earn you a place in the canon, women simply didn’t have the resources or position to ensure their legacy. In her book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, Anna Brer compares the prolific seventeenth-century composer Barbara Strozzi (who ‘had more music in print in her lifetime than any other composer of the era’) to one of her male contemporaries, Francesco Cavalli. As head of music at St Mark’s in Venice (a position not open to women at the time), Cavalli had the money and the stature to ensure all his works, including the many he did not publish in his lifetime, were kept in a library. He could pay for an archivist to look after them, and he could, and did, pay for the Masses he composed to be sung on the anniversary of his death. In the face of such inequality of resources, Strozzi never stood a chance of being remembered on an equal footing. And to continue to insist on the primacy of a canon that excludes women like her is to perpetuate the male-biased injustices of the past.
As well as going some way to explaining their exclusion from cultural history, the exclusion of women from positions of power is often given as an excuse for why, when we teach them about the past, we teach children almost exclusively about the lives of men. In 2013, a battle raged in Britain over what we mean by ‘history’. On one side was the then British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, brandishing his proposed new ‘back to basics’ national history curriculum.79 An army of twenty-first-century Gradgrinds, he and his supporters insisted that children needed ‘facts’.80 They needed a ‘foundation of knowledge’.
This ‘foundation of knowledge’, the ‘basic’ blocks of ‘facts’ which every child should know, was notable, amongst other gaps, for its almost wholesale absence of women. No women appeared in Key Stage 2 (ages seven to eleven) at all, other than two Tudor queens. Key Stage 3 (ages eleven to fourteen) included only five women, four of whom (Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, George Eliot and Annie Besant) were lumped together under ‘The Changing Role of Women’ – rather implying, not without reason, that the rest of the curriculum was about men.
In 2009, prominent British historian David Starkey criticised female historians for, in his opinion, focusing too much on Henry VIII’s wives rather than the king himself who, he railed, should be ‘centre stage’.81 Dismissing the ‘soap opera’ of his personal life as secondary to the formal political consequences of his rule, such as the Reformation, Starkey insisted that ‘[i]f you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify’.
Starkey’s position rests on the assumption that what
