The Art of the New Woman: The Arts as Professionalism and Mobilization in Twentieth-Century Memphis

Abstract

Women in early twentieth-century Memphis stood on precarious ground, forging new paths with social reform efforts and progressivist ideals while prudently abiding antiquated notions of southern womanhood institutionalized in southern society long before the Civil War. Rich, white women of Memphis closely interacted with this convergence of traditionalism and liberalism in their club activity and social reform efforts, which began as early as the 1890s when the Nineteenth Century Club and the Beethoven Club were founded and elements of New Womanhood began to disseminate from northeastern, metropolitan areas into southern urban centers. An investigation of women’s social reform and political mobilization thus requires not only an understanding of the precedents set by New Womanhood and traditional southern womanhood, but a careful analysis of intersections of progressivism and southern convention that recurred in elite Memphis women’s daily routines and social activity. Women’s communal and individual music making in Memphis provides the most compelling example of subtle and socially-conscious twentieth-century southern feminine liberalism. Individual efforts by Memphis composer Julia Raine, Beethoven Club founder Martha Trudeau, and influential club women like Fannie Trezevant to instill a love of classical music into the larger Memphis community and to use music making to cultivate for themselves a position of political, professional, and even social autonomy in a highly stratified Memphis illuminate how music was a popular past-time, a common field for women with professional ambitions, a common language among the powerful white women in Memphis, and a vehicle for women’s critiques of southern patriarchal culture.