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Female Spectacle

The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism
  • Susan A. Glenn
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2000
View more publications by Harvard University Press

About this book

When Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term “feminism” had yet to enter our national vocabulary. But over the next half-century, a rising generation of actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Glenn reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women.

Reviews

All the world may be a stage, but Susan Glenn brilliantly shows us how the stage can shape the world, in this case the modern world of the New Woman from the 1880s through the 1920s. What female performers did on stage and in their professional careers changed forever what all women did off of it.
-- Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

Female Spectacle is a delightful book that vividly portrays the place of women in the popular theater of the early twentieth century. Engrossing and brilliantly insightful, it will surely be hailed as one of the finest studies of American popular culture to appear in the last decade.
-- John Kasson, author of Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century

Female Spectacle is a richly detailed, lively and original treatment of a fascinating subject. Beautifully researched and persuasively argued, it is also fun to read.
-- Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University

Female Spectacle is a major contribution to the limited literature of women and the American stage. Susan Glenn has offered important insights into the place of feminism in twentieth-century American theater.
-- Brooks McNamara, New York University

Female Spectacle excavates a long-forgotten world and recreates it for us as the glittering, charming, funny theater it was for Americans a century ago. Susan Glenn's insights into the importance of the first female star system for the making of modern American womanhood are enthralling. A book full of surprises, wonders, and show-stopping insights.
-- Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

Glenn prods readers into thinking about women's demands for roles in public life...As with the best history, Glenn's research sheds light on both past events and present dilemmas. Her argument and research thus provide an important historical context for the recent flood of memoirs about feminist activism in the 1960s-1990s.
-- L.D. Brush Choice


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 1, 2009
eBook ISBN:
9780674037663
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
336
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