Sophie Lewis Drinker

Sophie Lewis Drinker, née Hutchinson, was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, on 24 August 1888, and died in Chestnut Hill, in the same state, on 6 September 1967. She is remembered as one of the first researchers to tackle systematically the role of women in music, a field that had until then received little scholarly attention.

Her interest in music, which in her youth was rather incidental, grew strong after she met Henry S. Drinker, a Philadelphia lawyer and a devoted amateur musician and musicologist. They married in 1911 and built a household that became known across the country for its domestic musical life. In 1928 the couple launched what the family called the "Accademia dei dilettanti di musica", a tradition of singing gatherings that lasted some thirty years. Friends and acquaintances attended, sometimes more than a hundred people at once, to perform Bach cantatas and other choral repertoire.

It was precisely this choral practice, together with her experience in the women's choir Montgomery Singers, that awoke her interest in the history of women musicians. With no formal academic training, she spent some twenty years documenting a comprehensive history of women's relationship with music. The result was Music and Women, published in New York in 1948, which for about three decades was the only attempt to address that history as a whole. For this work, Smith College awarded her an honorary doctorate in music in 1949.

She also wrote other books, such as Brahms and his Women's Choruses (1952), and numerous magazine articles on choral singing, family musical life and Saint Cecilia as patron saint of music. She also left unpublished memoirs, dating from around 1965. Her research papers are held in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and at the University of Pennsylvania, while the rest of her personal archive is in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College.

Her legacy rests above all on Music and Women, a pioneering work that opened a field of study that would over the years become established within musicology.