Caroline Nichols was one of the first successful professional woman conductors in the United States, leading Boston’s Fadette Ladies Orchestra in more than 6,000 performances. She was a dynamic and personable figure, encouraging and training scores of women to become musicians and to seek financial independence. Nichols was born in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1864. Encouraged by her father, she studied violin from an early age. She was a talented musician and continued her violin studies with Julius Eichberg and Leopold Lichtenberg, important musicians in Boston at that time. She also studied music theory and orchestration. Nichols became a professional violinist and was a founding member of the Marion Osgood Ladies Orchestra. Four years later, in 1888, with five other women musicians, she founded the Fadette Ladies Orchestra, which became known as the Fadettes. The orchestra grew to 20 members, playing social functions in the Boston area. Although starting with the group as the concertmaster, by 1890 Nichol’s had become the orchestra’s conductor. The group gained in popularity and from 1897 to 1902 they performed in almost every city east of the Mississippi River and in Canada. As unusual as an all-women orchestra was at the time, more unusual was that the business side of the Fadettes, which was also entirely run by women. The group began playing in popular Boston theaters and at events such as the Pittsburgh Annual Exposition on the same bill as John Philip Sousa’s band. Vaudeville was extraordinarily popular at the time and eventually the Fadettes signed a vaudeville touring deal. Eventually, the group would have forty members when playing on the east coast near their Boston base and 22 members when travelling the vaudeville circuit. Vaudeville provided one of the only venues for women-only orchestras to play. Many acts of this kind were hired more for novelty’s sake than for their musicianship, but a contemporaneous critic referred to the Fadettes as the only women’s orchestra at the time “large enough to handle the serious works of the great composers and [with] the ability to do so, too.” Nichols took the music aspect of the Fadettes seriously. In a 1908 San Francisco Call interview she says “What makes me boil to the roots of my hair, though, is to read that we play like girls. We do not. We play like musicians! Is there anything surprising about that? It would be strange if it were otherwise; but the lofty superiority of the men—critics, sometimes they call themselves—who dismiss us with the patronizing assurance that we play well for sweet young things—that is what I can’t endure.” Nichols tried to intersperse the popular music that vaudeville performances demanded with pieces by Beethoven and Wagner, always balancing showmanship and musicianship. She led the Fadettes for more than 30 years. It was a remarkably successful career for a woman conductor in any age, much less the earliest years of the 20th century. Caroline Nichols was a true pioneer for women seeking a professional career in music and a wonderful spokesperson for women making their own way in the world; read what she has to say in her own words in the article “There is No Sex in Music” in the San Francisco Call from 1908, which can be accessed here: ttps://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC19080621&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

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