Go West, Young Women! - Hilary Hallett

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of public authority.24 A phrase that emerged from the contemporary all-male minstrel shows aimed at working-class men, “doubling in the brass” signaled the expectation that all members of a stock company perform roles that crossed conventional gender boundaries, including playing both sexes on-stage and performing tasks typically reserved for the opposite sex off of it. The practice helped to explain why the most successful thespians often excelled at more than just acting. But Cushman’s timing was unlucky. The Walnut Street Theatre was opened in the midst of a serious economic downturn, and financial problems forced her to resign in 1846. That same year, after performing alongside the great English tragedian William Macready, the twenty-eight-year-old Cushman set sail for London, touting the older actor’s advice (probably invented) that only in England would her “talents be appreciated for their true value.”25 The decision displayed Cushman’s belief in the still broadly shared assumption that the English possessed superior aesthetic sensibilities and powers.

      Cushman triumphed in her first London season, performing opposite her great American rival, Edwin Forrest, whose fame she eclipsed after midcentury. Like Forrest, Cushman played the same kind of roles, time and again, with a physical power and expressive emotionality that British critics considered characteristically American. But unlike Forrest, her theatrical type celebrated her ability to act like figures she was not and never could be: a powerful queen, whether Scottish, English, or gypsy, and Shakespeare’s most romantic male lead, Romeo, in the “breeches roles” that helped so much to earn her fame. The parts Cushman played to audiences’ greatest delight reveled in her manifestation of public virtues that confounded traditional femininity. “Her true forte is the character of a woman whose softer traits of womanhood are wanting . . . roused by passion or incited by some earnest and long cherished determination the woman, for the time being, assumes all the power and energy of manhood,” declared a review of Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering.26 Guy Mannering featured her most famous role, next to her power-drunk Lady Macbeth: Meg Merriles, a gypsy queen who saves the hero and whom Cushman played as frightful-looking old crone, to Queen Victoria’s dismay. Credited with bringing breeches parts into vogue in America, her success as Romeo emphasized the role that acting a “manly” man played in her success.27 The tall, powerfully built, husky-voiced actress accentuated Romeo’s aggressive charms, depicting him as “a militant gallant, a pugnacious lover, who might resort to force should Juliet refuse to marry him.”28

      FIGURE 2. Charlotte and Susan Cushman in Romeo and Juliet, mid–nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

      Cushman’s roles also demonstrated how melodrama’s splintering licensed women’s access, as both performers and fans, to its democratizing, individualistic excesses. “Her style was strong, definite bold and free: for that reason observers described it as ‘melodramatic,’ ” recalled a theater historian in the Saturday Evening Post decades after her death. “She neither employed nor made pretense of employing, the soft allurements of her sex. She was incarnate power: she dominated by intrinsic authority.”29 Contemporaries marveled at the passion with which she fought duels and made love to other women on stage, notably with her sister Susan, who often starred opposite her as Juliet.30 In the end, theatrical lore stressed that her renown emerged from her exhibition of manly heroism. “When a fellow in the audience interrupted the performance” of Romeo and Juliet one night, “Miss Cushman in hose and doublet strode to the footlights and declared: ‘Someone must put this person out or I shall be obliged to do it myself’ ”; thereafter “all honors that a player might win were hers.”31

      Still, Cushman’s publicity also ensured that audiences understood how her private virtues justified her breaching feminine decorum. As with most early attempts to justify women’s display of privileges and opportunities reserved for men, the protection of loved ones initially posed the best defense. Much as with Pickford a half-century later, stories about Cushman’s personal life emphasized her role as family provider, explaining her Puritan pedigree, the collapse of her father’s business, her turn to the stage to support her family. Ever her own best publicist, Cushman initiated this presentation in a lightly fictionalized story she sent to Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1836, just weeks after landing her first real job on stage. Entitled “Excerpts from My Journal: The Actress,” the story prodded readers to recognize that acting offered many worthy women their best financial alternative when forced to fend for themselves. Cushman also publicized her tender feminine side by making much ado of a decision to forgo marriage after the end of a “tragic love-affair” with a never identified “young gentleman of a Presbyterian family.” Warned by his family of the “looseness of the lives of actresses,” the gentleman reportedly broke their engagement after finding her “being entertained by some of her theatrical friends and mates at a rather lively supper party.”32 Thereafter she reportedly devoted herself to “work, work, work! study, study, study!” her family, and philanthropy.33

      In this way, Cushman prefigured the path later taken by the first generation of highly educated, middle-class New Women. After 1900, such women’s success in the public sphere challenged assumptions about the female sex’s intellectual and physical incapacities while accepting that such pursuits often required forgoing marriage and traditional domesticity.34 Like many of the New Women to follow her, Cushman instead cultivated a circle of women for domestic partnership and intimacy. Indeed, one biographer speculates that her preference for intimate relationships with women made it easier for her to present an image of ladylike decorum in her private life by removing the threat of sexual scandals with men.35

      Cushman’s bright particular star thus sent multiple, seemingly contradictory impressions about the model of individual achievement she offered to her increasingly female fans. Some critics marveled at how the “manly”-appearing Cushman managed to perform love scenes “of so erotic a character that no man would have dared indulge in them.” Yet “the most respectable female audiences” watched actresses in breeches roles fight duels and make love to other women “with much apparent satisfaction.”36 Indeed, female patrons made Cushman into a self-made woman of unrivaled wealth and public stature. “I feel much better about womankind,” confided playwright Julia Ward Howe after Cushman’s conquest of New York in 1857.37 In 1874 an “unmarried lady” sent Cushman a letter shortly before her death that conveyed the meager opportunities for self-support, let alone self-definition, available to women of any class. The lady was “proud to direct other ladies who were struggling for their bread, to take example from your noble career, and work out for themselves an independent and individual life.” She added: “As a working woman I am under obligation to you for the footprints you leave on the sands of time.”38

      Although poor health finally forced Cushman to retire in 1874, women’s importance as theatrical stars and patrons only increased apace with the industrial engine that sped the growth of commercial entertainment after the Civil War. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of shows touring the country jumped from fifty to more than five hundred. By 1900 the number of popular-priced theater seats in cities like Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, and New York outdistanced population growth by four to one.39 Women’s prospects for employment in the melodramas performed in many of the new, inexpensive (at ten or fifteen cents), family-friendly segments of the theater business like vaudeville soared along with the proliferation of play houses and touring companies that aimed to attract lower-middle-class workers of both sexes. After employing almost entirely men in 1800, performing became one of the largest professions for women a century later.40 Many more women worked in nursing and teaching, but both occupations demanded an education, forbade marriage, and paid barely subsistence wages.41 The stage offered the best chance for both self-support and social mobility for women with the fewest resources—women who otherwise would likely have worked from sunup to sundown in filthy factories, stood six and half days at a department store counter selling products they could not afford, or served at the beck and call of a mistress nearly every hour of each day.42 Only as performers and writers did women earn the same, or greater, wages as men for equal work. In the celebrity culture that blossomed around the stage,

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