Performing Women, Public Womanhood, and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century Cultural Marketplace.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that between the 1790s and 1870s female performers and their publics transformed the relationship between the commercial stage, constructions of gender, and women’s relationship with public life. The advent of new forms of performance, celebrity, and entrepreneurship by women like actress Fanny Kemble, dramatic reader Anna Mowatt, African-American concert singer Elizabeth Greenfield, and manager Elizabeth Bowers expanded forms of public womanhood while drawing in middle-class female audiences. This popularization of new forms of female performance and types of celebrity played out within an intensifying contest over the ownership and class structure of theater in which the status both of female performers and female consumers became increasingly central. I address these issues in a number of ways, examining women’s shifting roles as contested symbols of respectability, agents of reform, marginalized but ever-present consumers, and finally, as celebrities whose performances both onstage and off mobilized the fantasies and desires of female spectators.

This project looks across different genres of stage entertainment, considering dramatic theater, concert music, ballet, and dramatic reading. All of these genres of entertainment raised similar questions about women’s intellectual capacity and moral and cultural role, the relationships between performance of femininity and female interiority, and the meanings of new forms of female embodiment and physicality. Women’s stage labor also provides a unique perspective on gender, work, and the family economy in this period of market revolution.