ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two women, Brigida Banti and Gertrud Schmeling Mara, each of whom shaped English taste by engaging in a foreign musical idiom, though their performative personae occasionally bruised English sensibilities. It considers how popular song defines Britishness, and marks the challenges that an increasingly international aggregate musical style and the association of the foreign with effeminacy poses to musical definitions of nation. The chapter addresses the nexus of gender and national identity in the stereotype of the British heroine. It appraises some responses by women composers and writers to militarism, to see how they elaborate, resist or reproduce woman's role within social harmony, and to determine, how "by patriot's art, the people are cajoled". Before analyzing women's employment of these and other strategies, the chapter examines Britons' anxieties concerning foreign music and musicians' influence upon ideal femininity, masculinity, and social harmony.
