Just a few weeks ago, Germany’s VAN magazine published an interview with the composer Olga Neuwirth. In it she describes her early career in the 1980s and ’90s — a ‘lone’ female voice in the ‘wilderness’ of classical music. So far, so sadly, so frustratingly predictable. But then she turns to the current situation and things become rather more startling. ‘I think it has become nastier,’ she says:
A more ‘elegant’ chauvinism prevails… When a woman calls attention to injustices today her objections are often dismissed as hysteria… She is kicked out and declared an adversary without further explanation or discussion.
We’re used to the idea that — in the arts at least — the feminist fight is all but over. Women take their place alongside men as authors, artists, choreographers and filmmakers, and it seems out of step with this shiny new equality to suggest that all might not be quite so entirely right on.
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