This interdisciplinary thesis examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in latter eighteenth-century Britain for instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control. The opening chapter defines and historicizes the term "social harmony," by discussing neoclassical views of musical affect as productive of beneficial social behaviours and gender definition. By delineating canonical aesthetic theorists' influence upon women writers and musicians and assessing music's place in women's moral education, this chapter complicates the idea of separate public and private spheres of cultural achievement and introduces expanded views of women's agency as composers and performers. Next, the thesis appraises women's engagement with charity, musically enacted, through formal musical and textual analysis of hymns, songs, and benefit performances and publications. It marks the productive intersection of patronage and charity for women, who could articulate divergent responses to such idealized or stereotyped objects of pity as prostitutes and madwomen and benefit materially from so doing. The third chapter considers women composers and writers' employment of imitative and associative aesthetic practices in nature's musical representation, including neoclassical and realist pastorals, the picturesque, and the sublime. It traces development of a hybrid aesthetic of natural representation that enables performative and compositional separation of femininity from nature in forms including the novel, song, and pastoral drama. The final chapter identifies contemporary anxieties concerning the depiction of political, moral and gender-role stability within an increasingly international musical discourse. It analyzes women's musical conceptions of cultural difference and national identity in ballad operas and pastiches in light of these conflicts. By crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order-or by re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony-women composers, lyricists and performers contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The purpose of this study is to determine the perception of women revealed in the writing of Philo of Alexandria. Although Richard Baer approached the subject in Philo's Use of the Categories Male and Female, no comprehensive examination has been made of the role Philo accorded women. I set Philo's writing on the subject of women within the context of two intellectual traditions, the Jewish and the Greek, in order to determine whether he accepts, rejects or alters inherited attitudes. I study it also in the context of the multifarious ways Philo uses "male" and "female" to express comparisons. There emerges a coherent pattern, which indicates that Philo's statements about women are not isolated from his overall understanding of the meaning of "female." After establishing these two larger contexts, I narrow the scope of the study, by demonstrating that Philo's perception of women cannot be determined from his statements about "man." I do this by studying the context in which he uses both Greek terms translated by the English term "man," anthropos and aner, as well as looking into the use of the two terms in the Septuagint and in some earlier Greek writing. In the body of the work I study Philo's material on Biblical women and contemporary women, subdividing the first group according to Philo's terms, "women" and "virgins." The conclusion of the work is that Philo intensifies the subordination of women which he draws from both traditions. He views woman as a danger to man unless she is under his strict control. Since his first concern is the survival of the community through the religious strength of its men, he believes that woman ought to play an auxiliary role, and to be prevented from any behaviour which would deter men from their religious quest. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)