Musical Daughters of Eli: Women Pioneers at Yale

Class photograph and musicologist

Portrait File

Photograph of the Class of 1911
Yale School of Music

Although they were barred from admission to Yale College in the early 20th century, women were already a major fraction of the students enrolled at the School of Music, which offered undergraduate as well as graduate degrees in that era. Luella Totten and Helen Eugenia Hagan, whose compositions are displayed elsewhere in this exhibit, were among the women who earned the Bachelor of Music Degree, and a number of other women studied at the School of Music but did not receive a degree.
This photograph of the Class of 1911 attests to the presence of women. The five men seated in the middle row were faculty, so the students shown here comprise seven women and seven men. On the back of the photo is a note that supplies the names of all of the faculty, six of the male students, and only three of the female students. (The person who supplied the note indicated uncertainty about the name of one of the women.)
Back row (left to right): Allen Tanner, Josephine Brewster, unidentified, unidentified, Amalia V. von Woedtke, unidentified, Harry Ranks, unidentified, Walter Allen.
Middle row: unidentified, Prof. David Stanley Smith, Prof. Harry B. Jepson, Prof. Horatio Parker (Dean of the School of Music), Prof. Isidor Troostwyk, Prof. William Haesche, Clara Holman??
Front row: Louis de Vito, Louis Lupo, Joseph de Vito.

Gilmore Music Library

Nan Cooke Carpenter
Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1958)

Music education at Yale is multifaceted. In addition to training students in musical performance and composition, the university also offers the Ph.D. degree in music history and theory. Since 1958, the Ph.D. programs have been housed in the Department of Music, while performance and composition remain the responsibility of the School of Music. The first women to receive the Ph.D. were Nan Cooke Carpenter and Catharine Keyes Miller, both in 1948. Miller wrote a dissertation about a 15th-century English choirbook, while Carpenter produced a study of music in the Medieval and Renaissance universities. Ten years later, Carpenter published a book (seen here) based on her dissertation. She taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, and the University of Georgia.
The first woman on the faculty of the Department of Music was Janet Knapp in 1958–1963. (She received the Ph.D. from Yale in 1961.) In the ensuing decades, several other women taught in the Department of Music, but none of them had senior faculty status until Ellen Rosand was appointed in 1992. Rosand was soon followed by Margot Fassler, who headed the Institute of Sacred Music, and held a joint appointment in the Department of Music.