ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN women in the nineteenth century The following conditions were unique to women’s employment in the theatre: In the context of career opportunities, female performers were not pioneers: the first professional English actresses emerged in 1660 These professionals and their successors held exclusive rights to their occupations—men could not be actresses, ballet girls, chantresses, etc.—and competed only against other women These women neither encroached on a male labour market nor did they affect the scale of wages for men in the same trade, and so they were immune from pressures to give over their jobs to principal (male) breadwinners Public demonstration of education in the liberal arts was sanctioned and applauded in many branches of theatrical performing, and enhanced women’s social and professional credibility Women and men in the theatre generally received equal pay for work of equal value (as assessed by box office appeal) and both had ingress to the highest ranks of management In the co-sexual work place, female performers enjoyed freedoms unknown to women in other socially sanctioned occupations The stage could be used as a springboard into marriage; this could either serve to eclipse women’s original class and provide an exit to the leisured classes, or it could enhance women’s stability within the trade The theatre’s reputation for immorality reduced the necessity for social hypocrisy; female performers had to be worldly-wise, selfsufficient, self-determining, and hard-working and it was useless to pretend otherwise Rosy-eyed recruits from every class also realized that though an actress could experience as much drudgery as any domestic servant, as much insecurity and abuse as any teacher or governess, as much menial labour as any agricultural worker, the same sorts of sexual and age discrimination as women in retail trades, as much exposure to disease and depravity as nurses, and although she could know the exploitation, tedium, and physical strain of women in manufacturing and mining, the actress alone enjoyed an element of excitement and an unequalled degree of personal and sexual freedom in the practice of her trade As Simone De Beauvoir observed: actresses might be independent and spend a lot of time with men, 18