Female Spectacle – The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism - Hardcover

Glenn, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674003330 ISBN 13: 9780674003330

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

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 centre 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 theatre to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women. Ironically, theatre 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-advertising to Emma Goldman's political theatrics, from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn shows how and why theatre mattered to women and argues for its pivotal role in the emergence of modern feminism.

About this title

Review

Informative and funny... conveys well how early female stars [...] articulated a number of themes that later became central to feminism... -- The Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 September 2001

About the Author

Susan A. Glenn is Professor of History at the University of Washington, and author of Daughters of the Shtetl, which won the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674003330
• ISBN 13: 9780674003330
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 306