![]() | Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Actresses Subjects: Actresses -- United States -- Biography; Actresses -- United States -- Conduct of life; Actresses -- Family relationships -- United States; Theater -- United States -- History -- 19th century; 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 is a lecturer in international writing in Duke University's Thompson Writing Program and Duke Kunshan University. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)