"WOMEN IN MUSIC: The emotional force in women is usually stronger, and always more delicate than in men. Their constitutions are like those fine violins which vibrate to the lightest touch. Women are the great listeners, not only to eloquence, but also to music. The wind has swept many an Aeolian lyre, but never such a sensitive harp as a woman's soul. In listening to music, her face is often lighted up with tenderness, with mirth, or with the simple expansiveness of intense pleasure. Her attitude changes unconsciously with the truest, because of the most natural, dramatic feeling. At times she is shaken and melts into tears, as drops of rain fall off. The woman's temperament is naturally artistic, not in a creative, but in a receptive sense. A woman seldom writes good music, never great music; and strange to say, many of the best singers have been incapable of giving even a good musical reading to the songs in which they have been most famous...it has often been remarked that they have more perception than thought, more passion than judgement, more generosity than justice, and more religious sentiment than moral taste."

Source: The Reverend H.R. Haweis, MA, Music and Morals, Philadelphia, Theodore Presser Co., 1889

Note: This entire book is intended to represent the refined gentleman's view of morality of all the world's music just before the turn of the (19th to 20th) Century.