ent women helped shape wider social and cultural developments because they exercised a degree of freedom that was rarely available to women in public, according to Glenn. By the 1890s you had the first of the star system. The player became more important than the play, she says. Celebrities had to develop strong personalities to remain in the spotlight. Theater and newspapers had a symbiotic relationship. They encouraged women to have individual personas to attract attention. To grab attention, women had to be outrageous - a spectacle - because it paid off. This was the P.T. Barnum syndrome of promotion. Only one figure challenges Bernhardt for the spotlight in Glenns book, and its a composite fashioned from hundreds, if not thousands, of young women - the Broadway chorus girl. Glenn calls the chorus girl a generic emblem of the new woman. The chorus girl made a spectacle of herself both on and off the stage. While performing, she was a visual spectacle as part of a line of precision dancers that was stage-managed by men in a very controlled way, according to Glenn. Off stage, she had a mind of her own and made a spectacle of her independence. The chorus girl was widely pictured to be an urban adventurer who was young, attractive and dangerous. She was depicted in a very pervasive stereotype as a gold-digger, and the term dangerous chorus girl was a way of talking about a younger generation of urban women who would stand up to men. Historians in general have ignored the theater as a place where new ideas were generated, says Glenn. I hope this book permits people to see it as a place that helped move the world into the 20th century. And, she writes, Theater licensed women to say not only look at me because I am bizarre, funny, critical, graceful, melodic, or beautiful, but listen to me because I have something to say about what it means to be a woman. Shotgun Productions, founded in 1989, is a theatrical production company dedicated to ...
