Book Review

Wearing the Breeches focuses on American actresses who performed male roles in masculine attire on the nineteenth-century stage. As Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix points out, the cultural construction of women as generally passive, sentimental, and pure encouraged playwrights and audiences to believe that women could "naturally" play melodramatic boys, spunky young men, and even dashing equestrians. Dozens of actresses performed such roles from 1800 to the late 1860s, when wearing the breeches abruptly shifted from a legitimate mode of performance to a type of working-class burlesque. While Mullenix has uncovered much new information, she squeezes the evidence to support a dubious thesis and pursues contradictory modes of historical explanation.

1

Despite much evidence to the contrary, Mullenix argues that cross-dressed women on the stage threatened patriarchal privilege. Certainly some male critics patronized and criticized breeches-wearing actresses, but there is little evidence to suggest that they did so out of fear. Further, Mullenix uses the critical discourse surrounding breeches performers to conclude that few spectators sexually objectified these actresses (at least until the 1860s), even though she acknowledges that the male gaze was a primary reason for the invention of breeches roles in the 1670s. True, nineteenth-century critics rarely hinted at sexual allure in their reviews; it would have been bad journalistic manners for them to do so.

. . .