Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, And American Theater, 1790-1850 by Sara E. Lampert (review)

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• Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, And American Theater, 1790-1850 by Sara E. Lampert
• J. K. Curry

STARRING WOMEN: CELEBRITY, PATRIARCHY, AND AMERICAN THEATER, 1790-1850. By Sara E. Lampert. Women, Gender and Sexuality in American History Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020; pp. 276.

The development of the star system and expansion of theatrical markets in the early nineteenth-century United States provided a new economic opportunity for a number of performers drawn from the London stage and elsewhere in Europe. Demand for itinerant stars grew to the point that homegrown talent also found an opening. In Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790-1850, Sara E. Lampert focuses her attention on the women who booked starring engagements in this period. Like their male counterparts, women were drawn to itinerant starring in pursuit of potential rewards, including high income, enhanced reputations, and greater control of their repertoire. However, women faced significant challenges to succeeding in this arena.

Beyond considering the difficulties starring women faced in negotiating contracts with male managers or maintaining the approval of male critics, Lampert argues the experiences of starring women illuminate the patriarchal organization of the US in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The circumstances of individual female performers varied, but their careers were impacted by issues unlikely to affect male stars, including the hardship of traveling as an unmarried woman or expectations that a father or husband would control business arrangements. Further, Lampert explores the ways starring women navigated an emerging celebrity culture and participated in the creation of a new middle-class and female theatre audience. Both as stars and audience members, women's activities were informed by the respectability politics of the day, with starring women helping make contested theatre spaces more hospitable to a certain class of white female spectator. At the same time, starring women, especially during the 1820s and '30s, embodied the contradictions of being women with high visibility careers while serving as champions of an ideal of domestic femininity. Female celebrities attempted to maintain a suitable public image within narrow bounds of respectability, with serious risk of suffering career damage from malicious gossip or exposure of their private lives.

Starring Women's organization is thematic and roughly chronological. Chapter 1, "Between Stock and Star: Theater and Touring in the United States, 1790-1830," considers the career strategies of several women, including Anne Brunton Merry, Agnes Holman, Lydia Kelly, Clara Fisher, and Mary Ann Duff, [End Page 584] who attempted starring engagements during the years when this professional opportunity was just opening up. These actresses faced various challenges such as disapproval from critics when choosing to perform roles in genres outside of the "legitimate" drama, including, in Kelly's case, breeches roles in melodramatic spectacles. Women's opportunities to enjoy career independence through itinerant starring could also be constrained by family obligations and social expectations that business matters would be handled by men, as detailed in chapter 2, "(Dis) Obedient Daughters and Devoted Wives: The Family Politics of Stock and Star." The implications for starring as a daughter or single, married, or widowed adult are examined via the experiences of Mary Rock, Ellen Johnson Hilson, Frances Denny Drake, and Elizabeth Blanchard Hamblin, along with Fisher and Holman.

An extended examination of the adulation and subsequent vilification of a single touring star is the subject of chapter 3, "The Promise and Limits of Female Stage Celebrity: Fanny Kemble in America, 1832-1835." The appearance on US stages of members of the leading London theatre family was a source of great excitement when Fanny Kemble first arrived in New York with her father Charles. Lampert notes that "during a period of fierce contestation over the terms of women's engagement with public life" (84), Kemble had the potential to appeal to genteel white women and elevate the stage through both her artistry and personal character. However, the publication of Kemble's journal, with leaked pages first appearing in print in January 1835, led to a swift backlash against the writer due to both the perceived Trollopesque critique of her US hosts and the revelation of private thoughts at odds with a carefully cultivated public persona as starring...