Taylor and Francis Davis, T: Actresses as Working Women

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.