Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790–1850

The annals of American theatre history have often overlooked, diminished, and dismissed the invaluable contributions of actresses, both stock and star, English and American, to the emergence of a burgeoning American theatre culture in the early years of the nineteenth century. In her book Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790–1850, Sara E. Lampert successfully rights these wrongs of a patriarchy-infused, gender-biased historical record. Through a thorough and expansive investigation of primary source material, Lampert focuses her study on the determined career aspirations of white actresses and their often career-complicating personal lives. More specifically, Lampert focuses her study upon a small retinue of “starring women,” women who achieved star status and attendant riches and celebrity. However, as Lampert consistently demonstrates, despite these factors, her starring women only achieved some measure of control over the path of their careers, as society’s patriarchal norms granted much power to the men of their professional and personal lives.Lampert’s collection of starring women offers the reader a complex and informative window into the gendered theatre culture of the time. Some of these women were born into the profession due to mothers and fathers already in the business. Others, in the latter decades of Lampert’s study, entered the acting profession solely on their own volition. Some of these women began their careers working for stock companies before breaking into the ranks of stardom. And others tried their professional hands at playwriting and theatre management. Whatever their unique paths constituted, they all experienced interference and pressure from patriarchal men who sought to control them for their own professional or personal gain. Such men included fathers, husbands, theatre managers, starring actors, agents, theatre critics, and newspaper reporters. Furthermore, Lampert’s study demonstrates that over time her starring women increasingly found themselves compelled to negotiate their private and public selves within a larger societal framework ruled by a middle-class identity increasingly invested in the ideals of genteel white femininity and Christian reform culture. As Lampert compellingly demonstrates, a failure to negotiate these societally determined parameters not only affected career success but also their very livelihoods.Lampert orients her study within a broader discussion of an emerging American theatre scene initially located in the northeastern cities of New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. As her study notes, theatre culture would over time expand to Richmond, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans to the south and St. Louis and San Francisco to the west. However, the majority of her study focuses on the northeast and St. Louis. She casts theatre as an unstable business, one that sought change solely to reap rewards at the box office, one which hired whomever the public would pay to see, one which, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, viewed England as a recruiting ground for its rosters of talent. Furthermore, Lampert presents a portrait of a theatre industry grappling with its sense of cultural identity, complicated and enabled by the rise of literary and theatrical critics and an emerging press economy, two factions presuming to shape American identity and cultural norms on the backs of the theatre industry. In the early chapters of her book, starring women arrive from England to play for American audiences. But by the latter chapters of Starring Women, the transatlantic cultural traffic flow begins to reverse course, as successful, starring American-born women travel to England’s stages to seek further fortune and renown. The story of American theatre during the time frame of Lampert’s study is indeed a story of cultural emergence as American character and American ideals slowly begin to take shape in the American dramas written and performed by American talent.Beyond these broad historical strokes, Lampert’s important contribution to the historical record is primarily found in her meticulous, close readings of her chosen women’s lives. Using a vast array of primary sources such as letters, diaries, court records, newspapers, journals, playscripts, handbills, reviews, and other periodicals and public records, Lampert weaves together truly compelling accounts of her starring women’s lives. Throughout her book Lampert is careful to record and analyze the women’s public and professional lives revealed in these sources first and foremost, only delving into their personal lives as it pertains to the courses their careers followed. Consistently, from chapter to chapter, Lampert pursues her thesis that the “respectability politics” (18) overwhelmingly and inevitably impacted not only the courses that her women’s careers would follow but also the way that they have been so far remembered in the historical record. One example of this involves the story of American-born Josephine Clifton, who spent much of her career trying to overcome early career associations with an infamous womanizer, Thomas Hamblin, manager of the Bowery Theatre. Further complicating her early public persona was her mother’s associations with the sex trade. Taking her career into her own hands, Clifton traveled to England to seek professional approval from English audiences so as to be able to return to America and negotiate a new identity. After her successful return, she sought new dramas that suited her talents. She achieved much success only to have her career brought low again by yet another scandal not of her making but which included her in its cast of characters. Her story involves many impressive episodes that reveal an ambitious, talented, savvy professional who, like the other starring women of Lampert’s study, was forever at risk of forces beyond her control, forces that insisted on reading her through the lens of a moralizing press and public, and through the roles she performed on stage.Lampert is quick to note the efforts by critics of the time and in the several decades following to consistently frame their valuation of her starring women’s stories based on their “narrow gendered tastes” (39). In her concluding chapters, she also notes that her later starring women drew increasingly large female audiences, further complicating how starring women negotiated the borders of society’s “respectability politics” (18). Lampert’s study is well researched, clearly and concisely argued, offering a valuable contribution to the study of antebellum American theatre and the emergence of American cultural identity. Its only weakness is an assumption that the reader is fully aware of the course of American history. References to President Jackson and “new nationalism” (94), for example, could have been more fully explained and the study never acknowledges that America was a slave-owning nation, an oversight in a study that leans heavily on a discussion of genteel white womanhood.