
Jumping Through Hoops
Performing Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Circus
Betsy Golden Kellem(Author)
Feminist Press at The City University of New York
Published on 24. July 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-55861-344-7 (ISBN)
Description
"Jumping Through Hoops reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as The Queen of Beauty; Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; and Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public at a time when "respectable" women were mostly confined to their homes. Betsy Golden Kellem explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy "mud shows" to a major international business, these circus women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top"--
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 148 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
428 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-55861-344-7 (9781558613447)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
06/2025
The Feminist Press at CUNY
€20.49
Available for download
Person
Betsy Golden Kellem is a scholar of the unusual. Her writing on circus and entertainment history has appeared in venues including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Public Domain Review, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, and Slate. A board member of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, Betsy is an Emmy winner for her Showman’s Shorts video series on P. T. Barnum. She is a columnist for JSTOR Daily and regularly teaches and speaks for academia and industry. If you ask nicely, she will juggle knives for you. She lives in North Haven, Connecticut.