Women’s agency and competing listening technologies in the early twentieth century

Abstract

This paper examines women’s role in shaping domestic listening during the first third of the twentieth century, when player pianos, reproducing pianos, phonographs, and gramophones competed in the home. Advertising and illustrated press reveal how these devices were associated with class, taste, modernity, and different modes of musical engagement. By comparing active control, mediated performance, and delegated listening, the study argues that women’s technological choices and domestic practices were central to musical agency and to the social meanings of emerging sound technologies.