Art & Creativity Quote by Dorothy Fields

Fields is doing something sly here: she refuses the lazy alibi that men are simply better, then immediately points to the one corner of her industry where male dominance is still treated as “natural.” That pivot matters. By conceding women’s obvious presence across the arts, she blocks the patronizing rebuttal - “maybe women just aren’t interested” - and forces the real question: why is songwriting, specifically, kept so lopsided?

The subtext is less about inspiration than infrastructure. Painting and fiction can be solitary; songwriting, especially in Fields’s Tin Pan Alley and Broadway world, was a jobs ecosystem run on access, apprenticeship, publishing relationships, late-night rooms, and informal networks where credibility was granted socially before it was granted artistically. Fields is naming a gate without calling it a gate, a tactician’s move in an era when blunt accusations could cost you work.

There’s also an implicit distinction between “performing” and “authoring.” Women could be welcomed as voices, muses, stars, even as lyrical “subjects,” while authorship - ownership of the melody, the royalties, the canon - remained a more protected kind of power. Fields, a successful lyricist herself, isn’t pleading for recognition; she’s diagnosing a pattern from inside the machine. The line lands because it’s calm, almost conversational, yet it destabilizes the industry’s favorite myth: that the byline imbalance reflects talent rather than permission.