Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870.

Between 1790 and 1870 American theater evolved from an irregular operation into a dynamic, profitable, and influential enterprise. In the first half of this period, argues Faye Dudden in her elegant blend of biography, analysis, and narrative, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses & Audiences 1790-1870, female actors, managers, playwrights, and audience members achieved a measure of prominence and authority. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, such advances had been rescinded by the combined effects of commercialism, traditional restraints on women's behavior, and a cultural "turn to the visual." Ultimately, argues Dudden, the nineteenth-century American theater was a failed opportunity for women.

At the close of the eighteenth century, American theater was largely a male-dominated institution. Because the theatrical world was haphazardly organized, however, opportunities existed for intelligent and enterprising women to enter it and through it to gain financial independence and access to public expression. Dudden suggests that despite longstanding prohibitions against the appearance of women in "public" venues, the way in which theatrical performance was then understood allowed them access. In large part, performance was believed to be an aural rather than a visual art, and closely related to elocution, an artform that was intrinsically neither male nor female. Thus, when a woman appeared on stage, such as the actress and playwright Susanna Rowson, the quality of her voice and her delivery became the focus of attention, and not her physical presence. Still, before the 1830s the American theater did not attract many "respectable" women. The fact that those who did attend performances or attempted to find work on the stage had to rub shoulders with the theater's other "women" - the prostitutes who inhabited the "third tier" of many urban playhouses - was a particularly strong disincentive.

Fanny Kemble's rise to fame in the 1830s changed all this, and further expanded the possibilities for women in the antebellum theater. An immensely talented actress, Kemble parlayed her stage presence, her literary skills, and her impressive family connections into widespread acclaim, enabling her to earn large fees and maintain (and even enhance) her reputation. Although Kemble's success was an anomaly, it inspired a number of women to consider the theater as a viable vocation, and even served as an early example of what a woman with talent and ambition could do in the world.

Of Fanny Kemble's successors, the radical potential of theater for women was most fully realized in the experiences of Charlotte Cushman, called by many the greatest American actress of the nineteenth century. Cushman elevated the position of the actress to unprecedented heights, and popularized powerful female roles that challenged the received wisdom about female character and identity. Interestingly, Cushman realized her greatest success with a portrayal of a man, Romeo, an achievement that only begins to suggest the transformative power the theater had to offer talented women.

The emergence of female celebrities as role models was paralleled by significant changes in the organization of the theatrical business, however; developments that led to a negative outcome for women. In the same decade as Kemble's rise to fame, Bowery Theater manager Thomas Hamblin introduced a new type of play, the spectacular melodrama, which featured visual rather than the aural effects traditionally emphasized on the stage. Just as Kemble's celebrity attracted women to the theater, Hamblin's spectaculars - which examined male sexual villainy and economic domination of women - were designed to appeal to an audience with a large female component. However, Hamblin's efforts to enlarge the audience was achieved through the circumvention of the popular celebrity system that was then emerging. He knew that even though audiences would choose theaters featuring favorite performers, celebrities' fees reduced a manager's profits. Hamblin chose instead to invest in sets and costumes, and hire unknown actors. Thus, even as the example of Kemble offered a vision of the actress as independent and self-supporting, the new economics of the theater, pioneered by Hamblin and quickly adopted by managers and producers throughout the profession, meant that the majority of theatrical women were severely restricted in what they could earn.

No sooner were women welcomed into the audience than they began to be excluded, however. The mixed theater-going audience that Dudden describes as emerging in the urban centers in the 1830s began to fragment in the 1840s, as managers and producers injected class considerations into theatrical performances. Immigration and enlarging city populations made it possible for impresarios to target different potential audiences along race, class, and gender lines. The Bowery Theater, for example, replaced plays designed to appeal to a mixed audience with works aimed directly at working-class men. In the proliferation of new themes and subject matter, however, women were left out. New theaters for middle-class audiences continued to draw both men and women, but no distinct "women's" theater emerged, Dudden argues, because of traditional restraints on women's access to financial resources.

Ironically, it was the innovation of a woman - the famed manager Laura Keene - that ended the positive potential of the theater of earlier decades. In the 1850s and 1860s, Keene experienced a degree of success in presenting melodramatic plays for a mixed middle-class audience. Finding she was losing her male audience to "model artist" shows and "concert saloons" - establishments that featured scantily clad women for the viewing pleasure of men - Keene began to produce "spectacle" plays that combined material suitable for a mixed audience with a plentiful supply of women's legs. Keene ultimately failed to reconcile the two trends, but her spectacles were carried on by male producers and managers in the form of "leg shows." By the time feminist critiques of the leg shows emerged in the 1860s, the theater that had valued an actress's talent over her physical appearance, and had offered remunerative employment for women, was gone. A profession that had once supported talented actresses like Kemble and Cushman had been reduced to a meager livelihood that afforded most women few opportunities other than roles as low-paying visual props.

Ultimately, Dudden argues, the transformation of the American theater from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1870s was a lost opportunity for women. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the theater presented an unrivalled chance for women to improve their status within the larger social, cultural, and political life of America. By the last third of the century this opening had been irrevocably closed. In large part this lost opportunity came about because of the traditional forces that held women back - lack of financial resources, lack of personal freedom - but it finally rested on a subtle, but significant transformation in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Americans, the "turn to the visual." Ultimately, it was the aggressive hawking of women's bodies as a visual commodities - when women became objects rather than actors upon the stage - that sabotaged their ability to effect change.

Ed Hatton Temple University