Breaking every prescription of ideal femininity, American actresses
of the mid-nineteenth century appeared in public alongside
men, financially supported nuclear and extended families,
challenged domestic common law, and traveled the globe in the
transnational theater market. While these women expanded
professional, artistic, and geographic frontiers, they expanded
domestic frontiers as well: publicly, actresses used the
traditional rhetoric of domesticity to mask their very
nontraditional personal lives, instigating historically significant
domestic innovations to circumvent the gender constraints of the
mid-nineteenth century, reinventing themselves and their families
in the process. Nan Mullenneaux focuses on the personal and
professional lives of more than sixty women who, despite their
diverse backgrounds, each made complex conscious and unconscious
compromises to create profit and power. Mullenneaux identifies
patterns of macro and micro negotiation and reinvention and maps
them onto the waves of legal, economic, and social change to
identify broader historical links that complicate notions of the
influence of gendered power and the definition of feminism; the
role of the body/embodiment in race, class, and gender issues; the
relevance of family history to the achievements of influential
Americans; and national versus inter- and transnational cultural
trends. While Staging Family expands our understanding of how
nineteenth-century actresses both negotiated power and then hid
that power, it also informs contemporary questions of how women
juggle professional and personal responsibilities—achieving success
in spite of gender constraints and societal expectations.