In recent years, the “female pioneers” of electronic music have coalesced into a tightly defined canon including Maryanne Amacher, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel, and only a few others. They have become known for an iconoclastic presence in the male-dominated field of the time, yet their own writing and interviews reveal significant differences in the ways these artists thought about gender and sound. My research will take a closer look at each of these artist’s distinctive feminist aesthetics, asking how their explicit statements about gender can help us interpret their works in sound, if at all. This research will inform the notion of identity-based canonization more generally, particularly at a time when American identity politics are under attack.