| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix. Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage. New York: St. Martin's. 2000. Pp. viii, 373. $45.00.

This book, well-researched and densely argued, looks at the rise and fall of female transvestism on the nineteenth-century American stage. Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix establishes a framework of gender-based critical approaches to prove that cross-dressing actresses threatened to usurp traditional male roles and upset Victorian notions of "True Womanhood." She mines a wealth of primary newspaper sources and treats her subjects with empathy and respect. The book tells us what the actresses were doing, why Mullenix thinks they were doing it, and how theater critics responded. 1

The book's critical apparatus, sometimes confusing in its loose terminology, does not overwhelm the captivating stories of the actresses themselves. A reader may be skeptical of using modern critical theory to tell historical individuals what they meant by what they said, but Mullenix generally lets the actresses' lives and art, and the critical responses to them, speak for themselves. She describes, at length, the fascinating careers of Clara Fisher, Adah Isaacs Menken, Charlotte Cushman, and several others. . . .

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