ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that women's autonomous pleasure in music can be seen as a site of potential resistance to the kind of social and moral discipline that some writers on female education hoped music would afford women. It explores the rhetoric of discipline and practice in eighteenth-century theories of female education and accounts of actual music-making. The chapter moves from prescriptive examples of conduct literature to consider forms of literature that more clandestinely attempt to influence women's behavior using musical means, and considers the restrictions imposed upon, and the pleasures enjoyed by, musical women. Music is an art that disposes itself over time, and an art in which one must invest significant time in order to acquire even moderate skills. The chapter offers the term "conduct dramas" to distinguish these works from both the larger category of closet drama, and from other forms of conduct literature.
