Introduction - Maggie B. Gale and Kate Dorney
Part I: Female theatre workers in the social and theatrical realm
1 ‘Believe me or not’: actresses, female performers, autobiography and the scripting of professional practice - Maggie B. Gale
2 Female networks: collecting contacts with Gabrielle Enthoven - Kate Dorney
3 Past the memoir: Winifred Dolan beyond the West End - Lucie Sutherland
4 Off-stage labour: actresses, charity work and the early twentieth-century theatre profession - Catherine Hindson
5 ‘Very much alive and kicking’: the Actresses’ Franchise League from 1914–28 - Naomi Paxton
6 Defending the body, defending the self: women performers and the law in the ‘long’ Edwardian period - Viv Gardner
Part II: Women and popular performance
7 Emotional and natural: the Australian and New Zealand repertoires and fortunes of north American performers Margaret Anglin, Katherine Grey and Muriel Starr - Veronica Kelly
8 Lily Brayton: a theatre maker in every sense - Brian Singleton
9 Aerial star: Lillian Leitzel’s celebrity, agency and her performed femininity - Kate Holmes
10 Ellen Terry: the art of performance and her work in film - Katharine Cockin
11 Mabel Constanduros: different voices, voicing difference - Gilli Bush-Bailey
12 The odd woman: Margaret Rutherford - John Stokes
Index

This book explores the many ways women conceptualised, constructed and participated in networks of professional practice in the theatre and performance industries between 1900 and 1950. The volume examines women’s complex negotiations of their agency over both their labour and public representation. It also examines the variety of ways they used their personal and professional connections to sustain theatrical activity and their careers, in the public eye and in private.

The volume opens with an introduction contextualising the historical period and its existing representation in theatre histories, outlining the intended interventions the editors and authors make in feminist theatre historiography. The book includes a series of case studies that explore a range of well-known and lesser-known women working in theatre, film and popular performance of the period. These are divided into two connected sections. ‘Female Theatre Workers in the Social and Theatrical Realm’ looks at the relationship between women’s work – on and off stage – and autobiography, activism, technique, touring, education and the law. Section two, ‘Women and Popular Performance’, focuses on the careers of individual artists, once household names, including Lily Brayton, Ellen Terry, radio star Mabel Constanduros, and Oscar winning film star Margaret Rutherford.

Stage women is a timely collection bringing together established and new generation researchers and accessible, cutting-edge historical and cultural research in the field of women, theatre and performance. It will appeal to students and researchers in feminist performance and cultural history.