ABSTRACT
The use of gender as an analytic category has been a recent development in the study of traditional and classical European music. Gender is a socially constructed category, derived predominantly from one's biological sex, and continuously negotiated within a given cultural template or framework. Scholarship on gender and music in Europe can be divided into some distinct, yet overlapping categories, showing a variety of disciplinary approaches. Men and women commonly worked the fields, tended livestock, and prepared small gardens for family use, but women alone were responsible for rearing children, doing many domestic chores, healing the sick, and often preparing bodies for burial. Women were also responsible, especially before modern times, for assisting in childbirth and healing, and many became adept shamans and ritual-healing specialists, especially in Northern Europe, Russia, Finland, and Iceland. Newer forms, however, such as popular, jazz, and national music, are breaking down these gender barriers, for women and men, as late-twentieth-century Europe underwent rapid change.
