This thesis explores how contemporary Appalachian women’s gendered experiences influence their choices of ballad repertoire. This inquiry is pursued through a feminist analysis of interviews with six women ballad singers from Madison County, North Carolina. In evaluating the women’s choices of ballads and their commentary on the songs, this thesis draws upon narratological theories as well as concepts from Appalachian traditional music studies. This study finds that women’s repertoire preferences reveal contemporary female concerns for physical safety and political agency. The singers also extract hidden transcripts from ballad texts and use ballads to educate audiences about women’s historic oppression. However, some singers find other factors, such as a song’s tune, or its significance as a part of regional heritage, to be more significant than the narrative content of the songs. This work affirms the contemporary influences of gendered concerns in ballad singing communities.

In the early days of the twentieth century when vaudeville was the most popular theatrical entertainment in America, there were a number of female singers who became its star performers. In the process of conducting preliminary research for a dissertation topic on female singers of this era, it quickly became evident that while much has been written about opera singers of that era, only limited material was available on female vaudeville singers. Furthermore, the small amount of information which was available was so randomly scattered among various sources that it was difficult to perceive a composite picture of these performers.The purpose of this investigation into the musical styles and repertoire of three great female singer-comediennes of early vaudeville--Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker--is to determine what the reasons were for their tremendous popularity. Because vaudeville was the prime source of entertainment before the days of mass media, the American public was quick to make stars of many of its performers. This study seeks to ascertain what it was about thesewomen's particular musical styles, repertoire and personalities which made them so interesting and caused the public to make them vaudeville stars. Though there are certainly other female singers of this period which are also of interest:, these three were chosen because they were unique.This study is presented as a series of articles with separate chapters devoted to Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker as individuals. These chapters include biographical material, especially from books about vaudeville performers, and also explore critical reviews and other reports on their work from such sources as "Variety," "Theatre Magazine," and various newspaper accounts. Analysis of these sources on each individual within the chapters is included as well. The final chapter contains a summary of the research and a discussion of what conclusions were reached about the musical styles and repertoire of Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker as a result of this investigation.In addition to discovering the reasons for these performers' popularity and appeal, it is hoped that a viable by-product of this research has been to arouse renewed public interest in these three fascinating ladies of early vaudeville.

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

For most of the twentieth century, opera singers were not beholden to the ideal physical standard of women dictated by popular culture, but rather focused on serving the music and perfecting their artistry. Unprecedented sociocultural changes throughout the twentieth century exposed the shifting ideals of each generation and how they were promoted through mass media and advertising. This thesis surveys the time period of the 1890s to the present day for the purpose of analyzing cultural trends, philosophies and technologies that shaped the century. Societal pressure to make the body a project and the focus of one's own intense attention now reflects back onto the opera stage where audience members expect to see what society has dictated to be an acceptable female form. Artistic and stage directors are influenced by society's decree that only thin is beautiful, imbedding into the mindset of the art form notions that now affect how female professional opera singers are depicted and even employed.