Starring Women

Reading many histories of the American theater in the early to mid-nineteenth century, one might be forgiven for thinking that the early American stage was dominated by male actors, especially Edwin Forrest. While Forrest and some of his contemporaries, such as Junius Brutus Booth and his son, Edwin Booth, were powerful forces, they were equally matched by their female counterparts. Indeed, in the second third of the nineteenth century, as Sara A. Lampert ably shows, the most prominent female actors often outmatched their male peers in fame, reputation, and—most importantly—income. Starring Women takes a deeply researched look at the lives and careers of the major actresses of the first half of the nineteenth century, most forgotten, even by theater historians. By excavating them for contemporary readers, Lampert shows how these women carved out careers in the context of an emerging and eventually dominant ideology of Christian domesticity. Lampert's main argument is that these female stars never actively subverted domesticity, nor did they fully conform to its precepts, even as they may have embodied it onstage

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