From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880-1927 (review)

{ 148 } BOOK REV IEwS sized the extent to which other, previously marginalized ethnic minorities had achieved some measure of acceptance. Here Ragussis argues that the theatrical repertoire functions as a means of “extending and entering that debate” over ethnic belonging (197). Yet the Victorian era also brought the impulse to historicize some of these ethnic types, so once again they occupied a curiously dual role as living characters in British drama and fiction as well as relics of a bygone era. Ragussis acknowledges several points meriting further study at the end of his work—including the ways in which the figure of the perpetually wandering Jew was recast as a dominant “agent and master . . . of theatrical illusion” by the end of the nineteenth-century (210). Fortunately, his study has laid a strong and imaginative foundation for this continued work. —HEATHER S. NATHANS University of Maryland-College Park Sadly, Dr. Michael Ragussis died of cancer on August 26, 2010. Dr. Ragussis was a professor at georgetown University for thirty-five years. He was the author of four major books and numerous articles and reviews, as well as the recipient of several significant grants and fellowships, including ones from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. \ From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880–1927. By Pamela Cobrin. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009. 243 pp. $52.50 hardcover. In From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880–1927, Pamela Cobrin examines the developing role of women in the theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By placing the rise of women in theatre within the historical sphere of firstwave feminism, she uses performance as a gauge for the rise, fall, and contradiction of women’s fortunes as they broke free of Victorian models of women in society and embraced their evolving role as a political force. Cobrin deftly blends the theatrical with the historical using case studies of five vastly different performance venues to track the development of women in politics and society as they became an increasingly public presence outside the home and outside the prescribed definition of femininity. After introducing the reader to the historical and feminist background of the period, she devotes a chapter to each case study: suffragist parades; Mary Shaw’s Gamut Club; the Provincetown { 149 } BOOK REV IEwS Playhouse; the Neighborhood Playhouse; and the commercial theatre of Lillian Trimble Bradley, Rachel Crothers, Edith Ellis, and Minnie Maddern Fiske. As a theatre historian, Cobrin hopes to illuminate the“collision of aesthetics , performance practice, and politics” (14) at the turn of the twentieth century . Although she hints at the then-burgeoning theories of gender identity, her discussion is primarily based in performance theory and historical analysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first chapter, which examines the inherent theatricality of the suffragist parade. Parades were very popular for celebrating holidays and other events, but they seldom featured women and were rarely planned by women. Perhaps as striking as the suffrage parade itself was the fact that the entire event was planned, choreographed, costumed, and performed by women; and they showed remarkable savvy in knowing what the people wanted to see. The women in the parade were generally attractive, and the costumes and other visuals created an atmosphere of street theatre in which the language of the suffrage movement was displayed as theatrically as possible . The spectacular parades, which occurred between 1910 and 1915, provided entertainment and education for both the women involved and the spectators watching the event. The second and third chapters focus on theatre organizations that specifically used their resources to promote activism and address political issues facing women. Chapter 2 introduces Mary Shaw’s Gamut Club, whose members were encouraged to write and perform plays that were then presented in a home-like community where women could meet and discuss pertinent issues. Chapter 3 presents the Provincetown Playhouse as a “home for wayward radical women” (93). The commune-like atmosphere was appealing to activist theatre women like Susan Glaspell,Neith Boyce,Mary Caroline Davies...