Female Spectacle

Reviews / Votes

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 <I>Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century</I> 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 <I>American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century</I> 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 *