Book Review

Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Instrumentalists and Conductors. By Beth Abelson Macleod. Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland and Company, 2001. ISBN 0-7864-0904-5 (pbk.). 215 pp.

At the center of Beth Abelson Macleod's Women Performing Music are three chapters, one each devoted to the lives of Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Ethel Leginska, and Antonia Brico. Each woman was approximately a generation apart, thus, serving Macleod as an example of the effects of gender on the progress these women were making from 1884 when Bloomfield-Zeisler presented her first American piano recital to a Chicago audience to 1989 when Brico died in Denver. The points that both connect as well as separate these three women are detailed. None of these women was born in America, but there is no doubt that they were American.