Chapter 2, ‘Women in Composition during the Cold War in Music’, focuses on women active in the West, where, for all the apparent government liberalism, in musical terms, composers had to face what could often, at the time, seem like the monolithic regime of total serialism, as advocated by Pierre Boulez and his circle. Through a range of case studies, including Grace Williams, ElizabethMaconchy (whose pre-war careers are both also discussed in Chapter 1), Elisabeth Lutyens, Thea Musgrave, Betsy Jolas, Louise Talma, Julia Perry, and Miriam Gideon, Rhiannon Mathias deftly considers the compositional strategies which women developed to respond to this musical environment.