Maasai women sing at ceremonies men are not allowed to attend. Their songs accompany beadwork, childbirth, and marriage negotiations. The melodies are distinct from the men's warrior chants, higher-pitched, more rhythmically complex. These songs were rarely recorded because outsiders weren't present to hear them, and when ethnomusicologists arrived, they mostly focused on the men. Maasai women's music is a parallel tradition that ran alongside the more public male ceremonies, essential to Maasai life but invisible to the archive.