Actresses as Working Women

Name: Actresses as Working Women
Brand: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Price: 254.75 AUD
Availability: BackOrder

Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture

By: Tracy C. Davis

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Hardcover | 27 June 1991 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
228 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 13.8 x 1.27

Hardcover

RRP $294.00

$254.75

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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.

Industry Reviews

"the wealth of previously unknown and scattered factual information makes the book very useful to readers interested in theatre history, the construction of gender, and nineteenth-century culture."-"Victorian Review "This important study, grounded in Marxist and feminist theory and the New History' methodology of Lawrence Stone, discounts many of the findings of the only other recent books on the subject . . . for being too narrowly limited to successful West End performers and casually assembled data. Davis (Harvard) includes suburban and provincial theater and music hall performers, and explodes many a myth about actresses with substantial evidence ranging from census reports to court records . . . . Crucial reading for the serious theater historian, this book will also interest those concerned more generally with feminist and Victoriam subjects.--"Choice."

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