ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN women began or soon became joint managers with male partners— notably Mary Moore and Charles Wyndham at Wyndham’s, then the New Theatre, and Marie Wilton and Charles J.James at the Prince of Wales’s (1869–71, superseded by Squire Bancroft as sole lessee) Other long serving manageresses were exceptional in one way or another: Lillie Langtry was only briefly a lessee at the St James’s (1890) and Imperial (1901–3), preferring to make her fortune in America; Sarah Lane succeeded her husband at the Britannia, running the theatre from 1871 to 1899, but like Sarah Thorne at the Theatre Royal Margate she maintained a stock company decades after it ceased to be fashionable or viable elsewhere; Kate Santley failed to make the tiny Royalty Theatre pay, though she was lessee for a quarter of a century; and Emma Cons ran an extremely unorthodox theatrical venture at the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern from 1880 to 1913 Jennie Hill’s intermittent brief stints in management have been explained by her inability to match the model of male fellowship and camaraderie integral to music hall sociability,24 but the reasons why Fanny Josephs, Marie Litton, Matilda Wood, and Violet Melnotte repeatedly but only briefly took theatres has not been fully discovered The successes of Lena Ashwell, Agnes Littler, Gertrude Kingston, and Annie Hornimann belong to the twentieth century THE FEMALE LIFE The fact remains that the vast majority of women could not aspire to management for even the briefest term Demographic data from the manuscript censuses suggests that among actresses neither marriage nor childbirth were the decisive factors in determining when they retired from the stage The termination of an actress’s career seemed to have more to with her age than her family life Employment was markedly restricted to glamourous functions demanding young recruits In other words, the development of a woman’s career was largely decided by factors beyond her control and unresponsive to her talents or determination She could not decide what proportion of jobs she would qualify for, or how the industry would capitalize to effect her, but she could exercise some choice over whether to try to integrate reproduction and family life with a career Yet there were consequences The adjunct of a family made a woman an awkward employee, and the system was not kind to encumbered persons whether they sought eminence or just 52