ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Daniels’s life,” concerns the composer’s formative years in light of changing gender roles for American women. Drawing on autobiographical sources and documented events in Mabel Daniels’s young adult life, this chapter introduces the factors that predisposed Daniels for her success as a composer. Boston played a part in supporting suffrage, symbolic for greater freedom for women to enter higher education and the professions, and in making way for the performance of women’s large-scale compositions. Daniels’s middle-class status, her family’s involvement in music, and her father’s patronage of cultural organizations were also key to her success. While Radcliffe College was an important site for Daniels’s identity formation, Munich’s Royal Conservatory and the MacDowell Colony offered her opportunities for further professional advancement. Daniels’s father, male mentors associated with institutions in Boston and Munich, and fellow residents of the MacDowell Colony, particularly the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, encouraged Daniels’s aspirations to compose.
