1. “Women to Enter Producing Field: Theatre Institute Announce Revue in Autumn—Plans Its Own Theatre,” New York Times, 18 June 1926. My use of “girl” in this essay reflects 1920s common parlance referring to inexperienced, usually unmarried and childless young women in their teens to early twenties, who were considered socially and emotionally immature. “Women” tended to be distinguished from “girls” implicitly by motherhood, marriage, age, and/or professional status. The institute uncritically accepted and perpetuated these distinctions, particularly with regard to professional theatrical experience and age.

2. The lists of members vary in different articles. The following women were listed as charter members in “A Woman's Theater,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 20 June 1926: Blanche Alter, Cecil Arden, Mary Boland, Mildred Brown Brennan, Louise Closser Hale, Ann Harding, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, C[h]rystal Herne, Tessa Kosta, May Leslie, Carrie Lowe, Mary Pickford, Beatrice Weller, and Carrol Weller. A notice in a feminist journal lists twenty theatre women involved in the project, including Arthur, Julia, Castle, Irene, Crothers, Rachel, Janis, Elsie, and Shaw, Mary: “For Women in Theatre,” Equal Rights 14.37 (1927): 290Google Scholar.

3. “Women to Enter Producing Field.”

4. “The Theater,” Detroit Free Press, 22 June 1926.

5. Chaudhuri, Nupur, Katz, Sherry J., and Perry, Mary Elizabeth, “Introduction” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, ed. Chaudhuri, , Katz, , and Perry, (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2010), xiii–xxiv, at xxiGoogle Scholar. The authors are referring to Chaudhuri's research methodology; see her chapter in the same volume, “Finding an Archive in Krishnobhabini Das's Englande Bangamohila,” 135–55.

6. Cobrin, Pamela, From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880–1927 (Newark: University of Delaware Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 2009), 158Google Scholar.

7. Barrett-Fox, Jason, “Rhetorics of Indirection, Indiscretion, Insurrection: The ‘Feminine Style’ of Anita Loos, 1912–1925,” JAC 32.1–2 (2012): 221–49, at 222Google Scholar.

8. Carolyn Lowrey, “Mabel Rowland—Maker of Men and Women,” New York Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 1916, in “Rowland: Mabel,” scrapbooks, Robinson Locke Collection, NAFR+, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereinafter RLC).

9. Ibid.

10. While I have not identified the first documented case of being stricken by the stage, the OED entry for “stage-smitten” dates it to Aphra Behn's 1682 play The City-Heiress. In this comedy, it refers to young men's habit of falling in love with actresses. The OED cross-references the term with “stage-struck,” which is defined as “smitten with love for the stage or drama or with the desire to become an actor.” Oxford English Dictionary, 3d ed., s.vv. “stage-smitten” and “stage-struck.”

11. On the matinee girl see the chapter “The Octopus and the Matinee Girl” in Schweitzer, Marlis, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 12–50Google Scholar. On the screen-struck girl see Anselmo-Sequeira, Diana, “Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan,” Cinema Journal 55.1 (Fall 2015): 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. See Alexander, Ruth M., The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

13. Lunbeck, Elizabeth, “‘A New Generation of Women’: Progressive Psychiatrists and the Hypersexual Female,” Feminist Studies 13.3 (1987): 513–43, at 514CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

14. Lunbeck, 515.

15. Schlossman, Steven and Wallach, Stephanie, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,” Harvard Educational Review 48.1 (1978): 65–94, at 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Falconer, Mrs. Martha P., “Causes of Delinquency among Girls,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 36.1 (1910): 77–9, at 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Anselmo-Sequeira, 10.

18. An 1890 seven-volume slang dictionary, with a subtitle boasting three centuries of “heterodox speech,” defines “stage-fever” as “A craze for the boards: hence stage-struck”; in its three examples—dated ca. 1710, 1821, and 1851–61—men suffer the condition. “Stage-Fever,” in Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary Historical and Comparative of the Heterodox Speech of All Classes of Society for More Than Three Hundred Years, with Synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc., comp. and ed. Farmer, John S. and Henley, W. E., 7 vols. (London: Thos. Coulter & Sons / Harrison & Sons [et al.], 1890–1904)Google Scholar, 6 (1903): 342.

19. See, for example, “A Stage-Struck Beauty Cured,” New York Times, 7 May 1884; “Stage Struck in Peril: Police Are Investigating Theatrical Agencies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 January 1905; “Masked Men Gag and Rob Woman,” Boston Globe, 10 March 1925. The article, “For Stage-Struck Girls,” makes direct reference to “the unfortunate Louise Lawson,” whose 1924 murder, along with that of actress Dot King in 1923, were known as the butterfly murders; Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press, both 16 January 1927.

20. Fannie Hurst, “Stage-Struck!” Washington Post, 26 October 1924.

21. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 8.

22. Bingham, Anne T., “Determinants of Sex Delinquency in Adolescent Girls Based on Intensive Studies of 500 Cases,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 13.4 (1923): 494–586, at 542 (italics mine)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. “Runaway Girl Explained: Migratory Instinct and the Social Factors that Stimulate It, as Seen by Travelers’ Aid Society's Secretary,” New York Times, 17 May 1925.

24. Healy, William, Individual Delinquent: A Text-Book of Diagnosis and Prognosis for All Concerned in Understanding Offenders (Boston: Little, Brown, 1915), 764–5 (§356)Google Scholar.

25. “New York Is Mecca of Runaway Girls: One-third of 3,000 Aided by Service League Came Here to Seek Stage Careers,” New York Times, 12 April 1925.

26. Bolton, Gavin, “A History of Drama Education: A Search for Substance,” in International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, ed. Bresler, Liora (New York: Springer, 2007), 45–61, at 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Kozelka, Paul, “Dramatics in the High Schools, 1900–1925,” in History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Wallace, Karl R. (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1954), 595–616, at 599–600Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 597.

29. Paul Anderson, “Straight Talk to Stage-Struck Girls,” Woman Worker, 17 November 1909, 465.

30. Kathy L. Peiss, “American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture,” Journal for MultiMedia History 1.1 (Fall 1998), www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/peiss-text.html#top, accessed 28 July 2018.

31. Glenn, Susan A., Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 166Google Scholar.

32. Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway, 101. See also Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar.

33. Here, the author is specifically referring to movie magazines. However, these profiles were also a staple of women's and theatre magazines. Sternheimer, Karen, Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 37Google Scholar.

34. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 6.

35. “Curb on the Stage-Struck,” New York Times, 8 February 1912.

36. Quoted in Anselmo-Sequeira, 11. Given the persistence of coverage of stagestruck girls well into the 1920s, I disagree with Anselmo-Sequeira's assertion that “by 1913, the figure of the stage-struck girl disappeared from the once-incessant crackle of newspaper gossip” (11).

37. “New York Is Mecca of Runaway Girls.”

38. See chapter “Times Square (after 1900),” in Henderson's, Mary C. The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, NJ: J. T. White, 1973), 177–99, at 188Google Scholar.

39. Hischak, Thomas S., “American Musical Theatre, 1870–1945,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Drama, ed. Richards, Jeffrey H. and Nathans, Heather S., Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, § “Broadway Roars in the Twenties,” doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731497.013.010. Margaret Knapp, “Introductory Essay” to Part II, “Entertainment and Commerce,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. Taylor, William R. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 120–32, at 128Google Scholar.

40. Hoerle, Helen Christine and Saltzberg, Florence B., The Girl and the Job (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 200–1; 145Google Scholar.

41. For a history of women's theatre clubs and working women's clubs see Cobrin, Pamela, “Mary Shaw's Gamut Club: An Experiment in American Women's Activism,” in From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880–1927 (Newark: University of Delaware Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 2009), 62–92Google Scholar. See also Tina Louise Margolis, “A History of Theatrical Social Clubs in New York City,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1990.

42. Patterson, Ada, “Actresses’ Clubs in America,” Theatre 20 (1914): 182–4, 187, at 184Google Scholar.

43. “Exchange to Aid Actresses,” Billboard 34.7 (18 February 1922), 20Google Scholar.

44. Margolis, 222–54. In addition to the Professional Women's League's extensive fund-raising and support for actresses, it was known for its all-female drag productions, staged as private entertainments and public benefits for the club. On these all-female productions see Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz, “A Doublet and Hose in My Disposition: Sexology and the Cross-Dressed Theatrics of the Professional Women's League,” Theatre History Studies 15 (1995): 105–22Google Scholar.

45. Cobrin, 75.

46. Ibid., 91; Margolis, 361.

47. “Women Stage Stars to Build a Theater,” Detroit News, 24 June 1926; “Woman's Theater Formed,” Billboard 38.26 (26 June 1926), 7Google Scholar.

48. There are numerous histories of this economic and cultural sea change in the theatre industry. Two histories that draw specific attention to the impact on female theatre professionals include Auster, Albert, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in American Theatre 1890–1920 (New York: Praeger, 1984)Google Scholar, and McArthur, Benjamin, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

49. Lowrey.

50. Blanchard, Fred C., “Professional Theatre Schools in the Early Twentieth Century,” in History of Speech Education in America, ed. Wallace, Karl R. (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1954), 617–40, at 618Google Scholar.

51. Lowrey.

52. Mayer, David, “The Actress as Photographic Icon: From Early Photography to Early Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Gale, Maggie B. and Stokes, John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74–94, at 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Kelcey Allen, “Amusements,” Women's Wear, 15 November 1923; Antel, Dorothea, “Reflections of Dorothea,” Billboard 35.46 (17 November 1923)Google Scholar.

54. Schweitzer, Marlis, “Singing Her Own Song: Writing the Female Press Agent Back into History,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20.2 (2008): 87–106, at 89Google Scholar.

55. Chansky, Dorothy, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 4Google Scholar. Rowland did perform with the Greenwich Village Players, a Little Theatre with Broadway ambitions. She played in A Fantastic Fricassee, one of two productions that was part of the theatre owner's publicized “[p]lans to restore to the Greenwich Village Theatre the type of entertainment with which the playhouse was originally identified”; “Village Theatre's Revues,” New York Times, 26 August 1922. Jeanette MacDonald, who Rowland would claim as a protégée of the institute, was also in the production. When Rowland and the rest of the company arrived at Sing Sing prison for an invited performance, the warden informed them that he had received protests from a number of welfare organizations regarding scantily clad dancers performing for male inmates. The warden asked them cut these numbers, so the company refused to perform. Rowland told the reporter, “A feature of the show is a ballet of classic dancers who, it is true, wear very few clothes, but it was the first time that we have been called ‘vulgar,’ and the show has been running for eleven weeks”; “Greenwich Players Banned at Sing Sing,” New York Times, 20 November 1922. Rowland's defense mischaracterizes reviews of the revue. Numerous critics mentioned the show's salaciousness (and amateurishness) in their overall negative reviews, such as “Marta Nova …wore a costume more brazenly naked than anything I have seen.” This same reviewer called out Rowland's monologues: “She ruins her chance at getting a hearing before larger audiences by a stupid suggestiveness which taints all of her stuff”; in Patterson James, “Marguerite Abbott Barker Offers ‘A Fantastic Fricassee’ in Sixteen Courses,” Billboard, 11 November 1922.

56. “The Theater,” Detroit Free Press, 22 June 1926.

57. “A Woman's Theater.”

58. Chansky, 14–15.

59. “Women to Enter Producing Field”; compare the advertisement for Mabel Rowland Publicity in New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 February 1919.

60. “Broadway's Loss,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 17 April 1931.

61. Front-page advertisement for Chamberlain Brown in Variety, 11 February 1916.

62. “Woman's Theater to Continue Service to Stage Aspirants,” Billboard, 10 July 1926.

63. “Woman's Theater to Assist in Promoting Woman's Work,” Billboard, 29 October 1927.

64. “Woman's Theatre Benefit,” New York Times, 1 November 1926.

65. Society section, Evening Star (Washington, DC), 13 March 1928.

66. “Soiree Artistique,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 17 March 1929.

67. “Feminism and Altruism in Theater—Woman's Institute to Erect Theater Soon to Be Run Entirely by Women,” New York Sun, 1 November 1926.

68. M. C. D. “Drama: Women and the American Theatre,” The Nation 106 (1 June 1918): 665Google Scholar.

69. The label “New Woman” arose in the late nineteenth century and denoted a break with Victorian ideals of “true womanhood” that valued women's passivity, purity, morality, and domesticity under patriarchal control. New Women sought greater social and civic equality. They expressed their desires and shifted cultural gender norms in overtly political realms as well as seemingly apolitical social ways, ranging from seeking higher education to public athleticism, to dispensing with corsets for practical clothing, to smoking, to employment outside of domesticity, to suffrage activism.

70. Cobrin, 62–92 (“Mary Shaw's Gamut Club”).

71. This is a summary of Rosalind Rosenberg's and Nancy F. Cott's definitions, in Honey, Maureen, “Gotham's Daughters: Feminism in the 1920s,” American Studies 31.1 (1990): 25–40, at 29Google Scholar.

72. Treman, Irene Castle, “I Bobbed My Hair and Then—,” Ladies’ Home Journal 38.10 (October 1921): 124Google Scholar.

73. “Gave Fine Performances,” Toledo Journal, 13 March 1910, “Rowland: Mabel” clippings file, RLC.

74. “Feminism and Altruism in Theater.”

75. Lowrey. Rowland offered this anecdote when asked her position on suffrage. Rowland replied that women were not ready for the vote, but “they control votes without casting them.” Here, Rowland is positioning herself against the “aggressive side” of the National Woman's Party's militant tactics in a manner palatable to mainstream audiences.

76. Marion Clyde McCarroll, “Woman's Theatre Seeks to Enlist Interest of New Members Outside the Profession,” New York Evening Post, 6 September 1928.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. For in-depth discussions of this debate, the gendering of comedy, and the gender politics surrounding funny women in early twentieth-century theatre and film see Glenn's chapter “Mirth and Girth: The Politics of Comedy” in Female Spectacle, 40–73, and Wagner, Kathleen Anderson, “‘Have Women a Sense of Humor?’: Comedy and Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century Film,” Velvet Light Trap 68 (2011): 35–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. Rowland quoted in McCarroll.

81. “Actresses Take Hand in Clean Theater Move,” Hartford Courant, 27 July 1926.

82. See the discussion above in note 55.

83. “Ziegfeld Fights Nudity on Stage,” New York Times, 26 June 1926.

84. Ibid.

85. Hester, Heather, “Making Entertainment American: Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.,” in “Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The German-American Experience since 1700,” ed. Berghoff, Hartmut and Spiekermann, Uwe, German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement 12 (2016): 241–62, at 257Google Scholar. Ziegfeld did not keep this promise for long, nor does he appear sincere in his intentions, which Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh and Katherine Jones document with a 1928 Follies program featuring nude photos of girls and their examination of the Follies sexual exploitation of underage teenagers in “What Price Glory?: The Sexual Economy of Ziegfeld's Follies,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 24.1 (2012): 31–58Google Scholar.

86. Notice in “Notes,” Variety 11.3 (5 September 1908): 10Google Scholar. In an article titled, “The Servant Question on the Stage,” the author, F. E. R., describes the slavey type in order to praise Israel Zangwill's play Merely Mary Ann for the unconventional dignity it grants the character: “the sloven, vulgar creature one is prone to associate with that title, or the brazen, hard faced, slangy individual one most frequently finds in such a position”; Good Housekeeping 38.3 (1904): 330Google Scholar. Similarly, in a thoroughgoing description of servants on the melodramatic stage, of the slavey, Preston Gibson writes: “The slavey has bright red hair, which is short and which she wears in a pigtail which sticks straight out from the back of her head. Here face is sharp and peaked and dirty, and she is dressed in a torn old blue colored waist and a short skirt which is up on one side and down on the other. You can instantly tell her because she comes in with a shoe over one hand and a blacking brush in the other”; in “The Humor of Melodrama,” Washington Post, 2 August 1908: SM6.

87. Glenn, 209.

88. Barrett-Fox, 236.

89. McCarroll.

90. See notes 1, 2, 47.

91. See, e.g., “For Stage-Struck Girls,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press, both 16 January 1927.

92. Mabel Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,” Woman's Journal (September 1928): 14–16, at 15.

93. “For Stage-Struck Girls.”

94. Ibid.

95. Hazel Canning, “Protects the Stage-Struck Girls,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 January 1927; “For Stage-Struck Girls.”

96. Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,” 15.

97. “For Stage-Struck Girls.” Rowland's critique of the exploitation of women echoes actress Mary Shaw's lengthy cataloging of the predatory acts of financial and sexual exploitation that plagued actresses on tour. Shaw is particularly critical of law enforcement, who afford the actress no protection because of actresses’ reputations, in “The Actress on the Road,” McClure's Magazine 37.3 (1911): 263–72Google Scholar.

98. “For Stage-Struck Girls.” MacDonald's case offers another example of the theatre industry's violation of labor laws with its employment of female minors; see Cavenaugh and Jones.

99. Canning.

100. Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,” 16.

101. Ibid., 15.

102. Ibid.

103. “For Stage-Struck Girls,” and Canning.

104. Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,” 16.

105. Ibid. My emphasis.

106. “Mabel Rowland Entertains,” Women's Wear, 12 November 1923.

107. Rowland, Mabel, Life with Laughter (New York: A. R. Tearle, 1941), 31Google Scholar.

108. Ibid., 32.

109. Ibid., 33.

110. See Blanchard, esp. 618–19.

111. Joseph Fahey, “Quiet Victory: The Professional Identity Women Forged through Delsartism,” special issue, “Essays on François Delsarte,” Mime Journal 23 (2005): 42–83, at 56Google Scholar. Fahey notes that, in the parodic plays The Seldarte Craze (1887) and The Grecian Bend (1893), playwright George Melville Baker “relies upon patriarchal assumptions and misogynist stereotypes to resist the theatrical and professional ambitions of women” (59). Rowland's monologue is similar to Baker's plays both in the characters’ apparent lack of talent and looks, and in the reference to the titular classical costuming of The Grecian Bend. Fahey documents that the mockery continued into the 1960s (50). Thanks to Marlis Schweitzer for reminding me about the well-known example “One Grecian Urn” from The Music Man (1957). For more on gendered criticism of female acting instructors see Chansky, 149–85 (chap. 5, “Textbook Cases: Learning to See and Be Little Theatre Women”).

112. Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,”15.

113. Canning.

114. Rowland, “Saving the Stage-Struck,”15.

115. Ibid., 16.

116. “Women Invited,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 August 1929.

117. “Theatrical Notes,” New York Times, 2 June 1931; “Theatrical Notes,” New York Times, 25 July 1931.

118. “Mrs. J. Strong, a Founder of Metropolitan Players,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 February 1943. Rowland's obituary in the New York Times gives 1925 as the date the Metropolitan Players was founded. “Mabel Rowland, 61, Actress, Writer, Dies,” New York Times, 23 February 1943. After a run at the Heckscher Theatre, the Metropolitan Players produced Le Roy Bailey's play Thanks for Tomorrow at the Bayes Theatre on Broadway in 1938. Brooks Atkinson gave the production a horrible review: “Thanks for tomorrow, thanks for last week, thanks for next Friday—in fact, thanks for everything except last night”; in “The Play: Thanks for Tomorrow,” New York Times, 28 September 1938.

119. J. K. H., “The Play: A Third Edition,” New York Times, 8 July 1936.

120. “Mabel Rowland, 61, Actress, Writer, Dies.”

121. New York State Department of State Division of Corporations, email message to author, 29 December 2017.

122. Hindson, Catherine, London's West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

123. Time's Up, “Our Letter of Solidarity,” 1 January 2018, www.timesupnow.com/, accessed 28 July 2018. Time's Up composed this statement in response to a letter of solidarity received from Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, an organization advocating for farmworker women, the majority of whom are migrant, immigrant, and Latina women. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas offered categorical support in stressing the shared concerns and experiences of famous women who “work under bright stage lights” and women in agriculture who work in the “shadows of society.” The exchange between Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Time's Up highlights a contemporary principle of allyship consciously attuned to other inequities that intersect with gender bias in workplaces. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas letter to Time's Up, in “7,000 Female Farmworks Say They Stand with Hollywood Actors against Sexual Assault,” Time, 10 November 2017, at http://time.com/5018813/farmworkers-solidarity-hollywood-sexual-assault/, accessed 28 July 2018.