Star actresses and dancers were among the most publicly visible, celebrated, and often polarizing female public figures in the early United States. This book examines the careers and celebrity of the women and girls from Europe and America whose fame drove the growth and transformation of theater between 1790 and 1850 from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Appalachian West. Starring women introduced new repertoire—melodramas, breeches roles, dance pantomime and ballet—that catalyzed debates about social ownership of American culture, regional and national identity, and women’s place in public life. This book transforms existing understandings of early U.S. theater and culture by examining a broad cohort of understudied figures and argues that women stars were vital to the development of transatlantic and U.S. entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Most significantly, starring women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of changing nineteenth-century gender roles. As this book demonstrates, even while they achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and prominence through the “starring system,” the patriarchal family structures that governed women’s lives and careers conditioned their participation in the industry. The celebrity culture that expanded from the 1820s demanded that starring women conform to new standards of sentimental domestic femininity, even as the structural realities of their lives defied such standards. Starring women were exceptional figures who mapped the margins of a narrowing white middle-class domestic ideal.
