Candace Bailey's new monograph, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth Century South, is a generous addition to the literature on U.S. women's musical lives. This study seeks to correct present-day perceptions of nineteenth-century U.S. women's music making, what Bailey calls, “generic white middle-class women who performed simple music in their parlors” (2). Unbinding Gentility problematizes these assumptions by highlighting differences between practices based on race, class, and region, and examines women's music making on a more granular level. It builds on Ruth Solie's examination of Victorian parlor music practice and is a peer to recent studies of women's amateur and professional musicking, like Marian Wilson Kimber's 2017 The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, which explored a performance practice unique to women during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and Bailey's own 2010 study, Music and The Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer, which introduced readers to women composers during the Civil War.Footnote ¹ Unbinding Gentility draws on histories of the South and copious archival research to introduce readers to many new women musicians—Black and white, professional and amateur—whose many “microhistories” demonstrate the rich complexity of women's music making in the nineteenth-century U.S. South.

Although Bailey consults newspapers, diaries, and secondary sources to contextualize her subjects, the book's main primary sources are binder's volumes—collections of loose sheet music bound together in single volumes, which were most popular from 1830 to 1880 and intended for home use. Binder's volumes abound in the archived materials of women from elite and elite-aspiring households. At once highly variable personal collections shaped by the needs and interests of their owners, binder's volumes also played a key role in a musical practice largely intended to demonstrate the gentility of women in a certain class and societal position. From these sources, Bailey demonstrates how musical performance differed based on each woman's region, wealth, and local music industry and thereby gains glimpses into their interior worlds. For example, the author notes that women and girls from wealthy families were more likely to own more challenging arrangements of opera arias, which indicated their family's ability to hire more highly regarded, often European, music teachers and to devote more time to music practice. The sheet music in binder's volumes was passed down through generations and traded among friends, as indicated by publication dates and the names written on them. Personal notes scribbled onto sheet music further provided insight into these women's inner thoughts; in one poignant instance, Bailey argues that Sarah Ponleva “Eva” Berrien Eve, a planter's daughter living near Augusta, Georgia, expressed her desire for the “exotic” by writing her own name next to an image of a Spanish dancer on her 1858 copy of “La Naranjera” (65).

Like much archived material ephemera, binder's volumes are limited in terms of what they can teach, mainly revealing information about elite or upwardly mobile whites. Chapter 2, the book's sole chapter dedicated fully to Black women's music making, demonstrates this limitation (although subjects from this chapter appear throughout the book). This chapter also makes clear that gentility alone is an insufficient lens for understanding Black women's performance of parlor music. Still, it is impressive, as the author weaves “microhistories” into a compelling narrative about Black women teaching, learning, and performing written music in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Charleston before the Civil War. In the chapter's conclusion, Bailey reiterates the need for more information and poses pointed questions to drive future research. Scholars of Black women's music making will no doubt find much to work with here, and it would be fascinating to see the insights that emerge from contextualizing this information within the larger history of Black women's music making in the nineteenth-century United States.

Because the book's primary aim is to introduce new content to the field, Bailey must devote considerable space to introducing readers to her subjects and explaining the contents of the binders in depth. At the same time, she chronicles change over time and explores a fairly wide geographical scope. The close attention to detail and wide topical leaps made within each chapter result in a book that is not particularly well suited for cover-to-cover reading. Perceptive scholar that she is, though, Bailey anticipated this issue and structured the book accordingly. The book is divided into five topically arranged parts, each containing multiple chapters that are themselves broken up into distinct, well-titled sections focusing on a new person, region, genre, or profession. Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2) explores the uses of binder's volumes by white and Black women and the varied ways in which they demonstrated gentility through learning and performing written music. Part 2 (Chapters 3 and 4) dives deeper into the content of the binder's volumes themselves, covering the wide range of music contained within them, and the popularity and peculiarities of their operatic repertoire. Part 3 (Chapters 5–7) explores the different professional music options available to women and includes a discussion of divisions between what was considered “scientific music” versus music viewed merely as an accomplishment. Parts 4 and 5 (Chapters 8–11) cover the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, considering the changes (and lack thereof) to women's music making during the war as well as the opportunities available to Southern women after a drastic upheaval to the elite, white Southern way of life. Like the binder's volumes themselves, this study binds many scattered bits of information into a compelling whole. Organized into sections, the book invites readers to use it much like Bailey's subjects might have used their binder's volumes: Readers might pick a subject from the index, focus on a single section, or grab several chapter parts that best fit their needs at that moment, and dig deeply into the details.

Overall, Unbinding Gentility provides a great deal of detailed insight on women's music making that will be useful to scholars for a while to come. Some sections of the book lend themselves well to graduate or advanced undergraduate seminars. In particular, the first section—about white and Black women's use of binder's volumes and notated music—is a neat illustration of the opportunities and limitations of archival research, and the poignant questions and leads for future research Bailey provides at the end of Chapter 2 are helpful for those pursuing research in that area. Chapter 8, on the parlor tradition during the Civil War, is also especially apt for the classroom: Bailey's observation that the attempts to preserve the parlor tradition amidst the turbulence of wartime “symbolize an active preservation of antebellum cultural ideals even as the war undid the familiar hierarchies that gentility reflected” might inspire discussions about what ideals are preserved or challenged by musical or performative responses to present-day crises of racial capitalism, climate change, and pandemic (142). Scholars of U.S. women's history, women and music, amateur musicianship, nineteenth-century musicking, the sheet music industry, Civil War history and culture, and Southern studies (to name a few) will find much new information and inspiration in Unbinding Gentility.