In 1988, the University of Minnesota Press published an English translation of philosopher Catherine Clément's 1979 L’opéra, ou, la défaite des femmes (Opera, or the Undoing of Women). In this tract that is now famous among feminist music scholars, Clément argued that in opera after opera, women were the inevitable victims. Likening women in opera to jewels, she explained that “the role of jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing.” Musicologist Joseph Kerman sought to clarify Clément's perspective in 2006. He argued that when Clément wrote of “opera,” she was referring not to “the genre [of] opera over its entire history” but to “the repertory of the Paris Opéra when she grew up in and around the 1950s.” He pointed out that this was the same repertory—which included such staples as Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, Carmen, Tosca, Salome—that many Americans understood as “opera” during Rudolf Bing's tenure as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company (Met) from 1950 to 1972. Kerman ultimately admitted that Clément's perspective had a ring of truth to it, concluding that it was impossible to deny “that our basic, traditional operatic repertory drips with female blood.”

Kerman's assessment notwithstanding, many opera scholars continue to dismiss Clément. Yet in the 1950s, at the very moment that Clément was beginning to see a pattern of gendered violence, ostensibly at the Paris Opéra, opera in the US was conforming to a similar pattern. In fact, composers and librettists in the US were influenced by many of the same operas that eventually inspired Clément's blistering critique. As they absorbed the European opera canon through the live performances and weekly radio broadcasts of the Met, they created new operas. Aaron Copland and Erik Johns wrote The Tender Land (1954, rev. 1955); Carlisle Floyd wrote Susannah (1955); Douglas Moore and John Latouche wrote The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956); and Jack Beeson, Kenward Elmslie, and Richard Plant wrote Lizzie Borden (1965). In all four of these operas, women appeared, yet again, as the genre's inevitable victims. Remarkably, the singers who embodied these American victims did not always accept their victimhood. Sometimes they resisted, rewriting the roles they had been assigned through their performances. Sometimes they used their lived experience to invest in their roles a certain kind of authenticity.