Sara E. Lampert. Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater 1790–1850.

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, female actors played not only starring roles on the American stage but also were central figures in the transformation of the theater and of American culture. These starring women found themselves at the center of debates over class relations and gender roles and expectations. Indeed, as Sara Lampert persuasively argues in this well-researched work, women performers were active agents of change inside and outside the theater and have long deserved more attention from theater and women’s historians. Male actors and managers and the Astor Place Riot have received most of the attention. Lampert’s focus opens up this dramatic world and reveals so much more about the gender dynamics of the theater business and American society in general in the mid-nineteenth century. These actresses and dancers helped transform the American theater from a male-dominated, often rowdy space where all classes mingled into a genteel, feminized amusement of the middle class. And, more significantly, by being the highest paid and the most-visible women workers of the time, they helped define, even as they challenged, the gendered parameters of female celebrities. Always conscious of their need to remain appealing to respectable audiences, starring women walked a delicate line between transgressing and reaffirming middle-class notions of womanhood—notions that these women aided in solidifying over the nineteenth century.