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, theater directors were distinctly less important than the divas and handsome matinee idols who preened to spark the interest of “matinee girls.” And as lionized actresses outnumbered their male counterparts and often visibly doubled in the brass by taking their shows on the road, the stage offered a singular arena for exhibiting a woman’s ability to openly compete and best a man.43
The mounting centrality of women as consumers and producers of American popular culture continued to create variations in the melodramatic aesthetic that subsequently shaped the development of motion pictures during the 1910s. Variously labeled immoral, problem, and of the emotional hydraulic school, female characters frequently drove the action of these plays, many of which were written, adapted, or commissioned by women.44 Displaying innovations in stock characters and plot devices, these plays often featured active, independent heroines in stories in which chance and responsibility factored into judgments about women’s character.45 As the publicity about Cushman’s private life prefigured, threats to a loved one often justified the exercise of these protagonists’ wills. A heroine, not a hero, executed the first hair’s-breadth rescue of a victim strapped to railroad tracks. As she batters through a train station door with an axe, her helpless beloved shouts “Courage!” and “That’s a true woman!”46
Other players in so-called immoral melodramas tackled the sexual double standard that judged chastity as central to a woman’s worth and meaningless to a man’s.47 This was the subject of La dame aux camellias (1852), an adaptation of the popular novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. After its 1854 American debut, Camille; or, The Fate of a Coquette, as it was often called, became not just one of the two most popular plays performed in the United States but also the signature part of the late nineteenth century’s greatest international star, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.48 Repeated revivals never wanted for an audience, since, following Bernhardt’s example, every great actress demanded to assail Camille’s lead, Marguerite, the courtesan whose self-sacrifice for her lover demonstrated that even a “fallen woman” could be more than she appeared. After seeing Bernhardt in the role, the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse called the older star’s performance “an emancipation.” As Duse recalled, “She played, she triumphed, she took possession of us all, she went away . . . and for a long time the atmosphere she brought with her remained in the old theater. A woman had achieved all that!”49 Like Cushman, Bernhardt displayed qualities associated with both sexes. But in contrast to the Anglo-American context, in Bernhardt’s day the French accepted, indeed expected, overt displays of actresses’ sexuality, including motherhood without marriage.50 Yet even the more tepid version of Camille performed in the Anglophone world prompted alarm among early critics who called it a “deification of prostitution.”51 Indeed, the play’s popularity with women audiences and actresses spawned a host of imitators exploring the erring woman’s relationship to society.52 The trend prompted escalating concern over how the “morbid fictions” of a “herd” of female playwrights threatened to force Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens to the margins of the American theater.53 Such views indicated why Camille sounded an early note in the swelling cacophony over how women’s entrance into masculine preserves threatened to disrupt the nation’s fragile cultural standards and social stability.
Indeed, by 1900 many cultural custodians linked the nation’s advanced state of democratization and industrialization to its production of an emancipated type of modern woman whose influence had debased American culture. Considered a “quintessentially American” type, the modern woman was one of the first national exports that presaged the reversal in the direction of cultural influence across the Atlantic that Hollywood later intensified.54 Hugo Munsterberg was one of many leading public intellectuals who predicted that cultural deterioration would follow women having come to “dominate the entire life of America,” in the words of his German compatriot Albert Einstein. A specialist in visual perception who taught at Harvard from 1892 until his death in 1916, Munsterberg developed a keen interest in film late in life, creating one of the first theories of film spectatorship.55 In his guise as a successful popular writer, Munsterberg set about explaining how his foreign perspective offered particular insight into American culture, in writing that often displayed “the strikingly misogynist” tone that characterized much of this commentary. According to Munsterberg, American women’s influence spun “a web of triviality and misconception over the whole culture.”56 In 1901 Munsterberg worried that the theater’s female audience had placed it under the control of patrons who could not “discriminate between the superficial and the profound.” “The whole situation militates against the home and the masculine control of high culture,” he lamented, warning, “if the whole national civilization should receive the feminine stamp, it would become powerless and without decisive influence on the world’s progress.” Munsterberg’s estimates were supported by a 1910 survey of theatrical producers and critics that claimed women composed between two-thirds and three-quarters of the audience for performances even at night.57 The next year Clayton Hamilton, a drama critic at Columbia University, summed up the results of this reality: “Every student of the contemporary theater knows that the destiny of our drama has lain for a long time in the hands of women. Shakespeare wrote for an
