In Sherrie Tucker’s book, Swing Shift, on gender and jazz, conveys the struggle of all successful women throughout time. In Jazz, the “all-girl bands will resound with historic dissonance”, but, in fact, women in jazz bands did exist, but the fact that they were good was much contested (Tucker 2). All-girl bands were left out of almost all of Swing Era History. Much of jazz and swing history was written primarily about white males, not accurately reflecting the cultural origin of the music (3). When historians tried to “make-up” for the lack of diversity in Swing Era history they wrote about African American swing musicians, leaving out both white and black women in swing (3). They were looked as “housewives” just passing time until the war was over and the men came back to practice “good” swing music (3). Playing an instrument was seen as a “masculine” hobby, not gender-neutral in the slightest (6). This way of thinking has been prevalent for millennia, being women shouldn’t be a reason that a person is not a good at an art, whether it be jazz or any other kind. Tucker’s analysis of women in swing bands covers not just the music industry, but the struggles of all successful women from the dawn of time.
Not just women in jazz were discriminated against and accomplishments diminished because of their gender, the “Matilda Effect” is a term to describe the denying of work done by female scientists and dubbed false (J. Lee). Today, only 30% of all researchers around the world and only 25% of scholar award winners, are female (“Women in Science”). No matter how accurate the work may be, male scientists wouldn’t even glance at it based on the gender of
the researcher, a woman. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a prominent physicist, discovered pulsars, but the credit for the discovery ended up going to her superiors (J. Lee). Even if a woman did the majority of the work on a scientific discovery, then man associated with it would still get the credit. Esther Lederburg and her husband Joshua discovered Lambda bacteriophage, yet only Joshua and his colleagues were awarded a Nobel prize (J. Lee). Even her husband claimed, “She had to gift just to be appointed as a research associate professor (J. Lee).” A woman whose work went towards antibiotic resistance, couldn’t get an appropriate job from her accomplishments. This parallels closely to the claims made by Tucker that even though there were many talented women jazz players, their accomplishments and talent were never publicized or rewarded.
Women in literature also have contributed to the ideas of gender discrimination. To tackle this problem, Victorian authors such as Mary Braddon and Rhoda Broughton created satiric novels to convey their distaste of the treatment of women in society (E. Lee). Many women created these types of novels to make their story of struggle be heard among the masses. Works such as those of Sarah Grand were seen to be as too conceited on female values and displayed too much of the feminine struggle (E. Lee). Just like with women in jazz there was the opinion that the women agenda be kept up with, that they wanted people to know that women played certain pieces (Tucker 3). This is quite similar to some of the new rise of feminist writers in the 1980’s which started to focus on what it was to be female (Moi 260). Many writers, though, contested this statement, one, Nathalie Sarruate stated, “When I write, I am neither man nor
women, nor dog nor cat, I am not me, I am no longer anything.” Women began to wish to be critiqued on their work and not based on their gender (260). These writes in the mid-1900’s wanted to be compared to all writers. not just to other females, or men (261). It shouldn’t matter what gender wrote the piece, but what the piece portrayed and the artistic integrity of the work. This mirrors the opinion of women that Tucker interviewed that stated that they didn’t want to be judged on their music based on the fact that they were women (Tucker 26).
Sherrie Tucker became the voice of the women of jazz, women who most people didn’t know existed resulting from the bias of white, male historians. The struggles that Tucker portrays in her Swing Shift are the struggles that any successful women have had to face. Their accomplishments were covered up by those of men, and their names never are written into history. One day, we won’t have to search for history made by women, we won’t have to make arguments on how their work has impacted us, and their names will be written right alongside those of men