‘I don’t like this term Woman Composer’, Maconchy wrote in 1975. She was hardly alone in expressing frustration about her gender being foregrounded. It was a recurring refrain among Maconchy’s contemporaries and their predecessors. Despite the efforts of women like Ethel Smyth and Rebecca Clarke, there was a remarkable continuity in the kinds of gender prejudice experienced by women composers in Britain throughout the twentieth century, and the conceptual frameworks that were used to understand their music. Stereotypes about ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ music proved difficult to change, as did deeply entrenched ideas about the limits of women’s compositional capacities. The careers of Maconchy’s British predecessors help to contextualise both her reception in the British press, and her own conception of what significance her gender had for her composing. This chapter discusses Smyth and Clarke, but also intersects with Maude Valérie White and Poldowski (the pseudonym of Régine Wieniawski),