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About this book
When the French actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term "feminism" had not yet entered our national vocabulary. But over the course of the next half-century, a rising generation of daring actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Exploring and exploiting modern fantasies and fears about female roles and gender identity, these performers eschewed theatrical convention and traditional notions of womanly modesty. They created powerful images of themselves as ambitious, independent, and sexually expressive "New Women."
Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women. Ironically, theater also provided an arena in which producers and audiences projected the uncertainties and hostilities that accompanied changing gender relations. From Bernhardt's modern methods of self-promotion to Emma Goldman's political theatrics, from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn shows us how and why theater mattered to women and argues for its pivotal role in the emergence of modern feminism.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. The Bernhardt Effect: Self-Advertising and the Age of Spectacle
- Chapter 2. Mirth and Girth: The Politics of Comedy
- Chapter 3. The Strong Personality: Female Mimics and the Play of the Self
- Chapter 4. The Americanization of Salome: Sexuality, Race, and the Careers of the Vulgar Princess
- Chapter 5. “The Eyes of the Enemy”: Female Activism and the Paradox of Theater
- Chapter 6. “Nationally Advertised Legs”: How Broadway Invented “The Girls”
- Chapter 7. “Like All the Rest of Womankind Only More So”: The Chorus Girl Problem and American Culture
- Conclusion: The Legacy of Female Spectacle
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index