In the 1970s, Alison Knowles collaborated with the important experimental composer and self-identified lesbian Pauline Oliveros on the feminist Postcard Theatre. In the examples here, the most famous composers of Western concert music—all male—are boldly dismissed as lowly, laboring women (“a two-penny harlot,” “a Black Irish washerwoman,” “a mother,” “dishpan hands”). Photographs of Pauline Oliveros as a swaggering girl with a dagger and Knowles as a surly baby, as well as of Knowles’s young daughters absorbed in their own playing, ironically assert the existence (past and future) of women composers despite systemic gender discrimination.
© Alison Knowles.
