Bowery B'hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences

Abstract

IN THE I 820S, THEATER WAS A MALE CLUB. MEN OF ALL CLASSES regularly attended their favorite theaters with their friends. Occasionally, they would bring their wives, daughters, or sweethearts. The men were boisterous and demanding; they drank, smoked, and met prostitutes. By the 1 890s, however, women were the primary theatergoers at what had become the middleand upper-class legitimate theater; men attended, but seldom without female companions. The men sat quietly in darkened theaters and did not interfere with the plays' progress. Earlier studies have documented the behavior of these audiences, particularly of the rowdy audiences.3 But the process of transformation from rowdy to tame and the gendered nature of this process remain unexplored. In the nineteenth century, re-gendering of theater was in the forefront of fundamental cultural shifts, including the increasing importance of bourgeois respectability among the rising middle and upper classes of urban industrial capitalism, the growth of a culture of consumption and the attendant reorganization of the public sphere around the female shopper, and changes in the definitions of middle-class femininity. The changes in theater reveal the link between the two cultural formations,