Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (review)

In Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, historian Susan A. Glenn makes a substantial contribution to the feminist project of making women's theatrical and social performances visible by charting the emergence of women as theatrical and political performers into the spotlight of late-19th-and early-20th-century American popular culture. Starting with Sarah Bernhardt and her own family's (half-joking) proscriptions against making a spectacle of herself, Glenn argues that there "was a dynamic tension between women's desire (on as well as off the stage) to use theatrical spectacle as a vehicle for achieving greater voice in culture and politics, and theater's countervailing urge to turn female spectacle into a symbolic expression of male mastery" (3). Glenn spends the first two-thirds of Female Spectacle exploring the ways in which women's performances on the popular stage—in vaudeville, the music hall, and burlesque—may have influenced and framed women's performances on the political stage. Her final chapter presents the appearance of the chorus girl on Broadway stages and focuses on the geometric rigors of Busby Berkeley's spectacular dance productions as a masculinist reaction against this liberationist backdrop. The feminist movement in culture, Glenn argues, followed the rise of women as producers of their own theatrical spectacles. Ironically, she concludes, it was also on the theatrical stage, in the revues and musicals of the 1920s, that the women's movement was repressed by men as they re-presented women's bodies as commodities for mass consumption.

In the early chapters, Glenn concentrates on the ways female performers negotiated theatricality and femininity, especially in light of the development of mass culture. For Glenn, Bernhardt's tours of the United States offered "a compelling example of how a female rebel might successfully invent (and play a starring role in) a new public drama of personal freedom" (39). Her second chapter—titled "Mirth and Girth: The Politics of Comedy"—discusses the ambivalence of women's comedic performance, looking at the ways in which funny women like Marie Dressler created their humor by performing simultaneously within and against prevailing standards of beauty and female decorum. Here Glenn also explores female minstrelsy as a performance of "racial excess" (54) equivalent to the performances of physical excess by the "fat" (and "ugly") ladies of the comic stage, pointing the way to a subject worth exploring in greater depth.

As a bridge to her discussion of the spectacles produced by women in the political arena, Glenn takes a brief, largely theoretical, look at "The Imitation Craze" (74), the trends toward female mimicry, blackface minstrelsy, gender impersonation, and ethnic caricature, as well as imitation of specific individuals in vaudeville from 1890 to the end of the 1920s. To demonstrate a facility for imitation on the stage, Glenn asserts, implied for women performers and their audiences the potential to (re)create oneself according to new models in life. For Glenn the ways in which American women took part in the Salome craze—"Salomania"—displayed the contradictory impulses of playful and parodical self-expression, in the form of minstrelsy and sexual parody, then as transgressive critiques of social norms.

Women took to the political platform and the street with the same tendency toward self-dramatization and theatrical acuity. In Glenn's view, Emma Goldman orchestrated her political performances in theatrical terms similar to those of women on the vaudeville circuit; the spectacle of female activism was understood from the framework of the display of female transgression. Similarly, suffragette rallies were conspicuously constructed as theatrical events, "an aesthetic as much as political act" (146) in which women balanced their desire for empowerment within their demonstration of discipline, affirming that they could be simultaneously "courageous and visually attractive" (146). In Glenn's words: "The purpose of the suffrage parades was to transform the perceived threat of women's political power into a visual spectacle of moral heroism...