Description
The book "Actresses as Working Women" explores the social identity of actresses in Victorian England. It discusses how performers, despite coming from different class backgrounds, had a unique level of social mobility. However, female performers faced different living and working conditions compared to their male counterparts, leading to the use of the term "actress" to distinguish them. The book draws on various disciplines and primary evidence to investigate the separate and marginalized status of actresses, which resulted in economic insecurity. The book also discusses how actresses struggled to reconcile their sexuality and the demands of their physically demanding and itinerant occupation, while also facing constant public scrutiny and assumptions about their morality. The performance conventions of the time, influenced by popular pornographic images, further reinforced the stigma surrounding actresses. This book is one of the first feminist studies to delve into the history of theatre in the 19th century, providing a fresh perspective and extensive evidence on the topic.
In Victorian society--rigidly stratified by both income and occupation--performers were drawn from various class backgrounds and enjoyed a unique degree of social mobility. Nevertheless, the living and working conditions of female performers were distinctly different from their male counterparts: fully justifying in social, economic, and gender terms the semantic distinction "actress."
Actresses as Working Women utilizes the methodologies of a number of disciplines--labor history, historical demography, sociology, performance analysis, and literary theory--and a vast amount of primary evidence to investigate actresses' separate and equivocal status. Their segregation and marginalization guaranteed economic insecurity. Their attempts to reconcile sexuality and the female life cycle to a physically demanding, itinerant occupation while under constant public scutiny led to assumptions about their morality that were difficult to overcome. Performance conventions--in both theatre and music hall traditions--that reflected popular pornographic images reinforced this stigma, which was documented in contemporaneous erotic literature and the male-controlled culture of vice that permeated theatrical neighborhoods.
One of the first in-depth feminist studies of the history of theatre,
Actresses as Working Women brings a fresh perspective and voluminous evidence to bear on the study of nineteenth-century theatre.
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