Staging Family

Nan Mullenneaux

Published by University of Nebraska Press

Mullenneaux, Nan.
Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Actresses.
University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/62925.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/62925

[ Access provided at 30 Aug 2021 00:27 GMT from UW-Madison Libraries ]

 CHAPTER 9

Managing Motherhood

“Children are a great joy to me. I should have been almost too happy
if God had sent me one of my own. But he did not think it well for
me . . . There is something to me so mysteriously beautiful in mater-
nity . . . I feel as though I comprehend the thrilling sensation of one
who clasps an infant to her breast with the jubilant cry, It is mine.”1
Anna Cora Mowatt’s sentiments equating motherhood with a kind of
spiritual ownership would have earned her enthusiastic approval by
nineteenth-century readers. Motherhood could prove an extremely
effective domesticator in an actress’s public discourse, as long as none
of the actual challenges involved in balancing a career with parenting
were disclosed. Actresses’ depiction of motherhood in their memoirs,
letters, and interviews appears far more idealistic than when referring
to (or neglecting to mention) the role of wife. The deep grief at the
loss of her daughter, which Mrs. Drew mentions in the closing pages
of her memoir, contrasts with the critical and caustic remarks about
her late husband a page later. Mrs. Gilbert likewise refers to her son’s
death—“when I lost my boy”—in the hushed tones of the unspeakable
tragedy and never mentions her husband’s death at all. Only Mowatt,
however, uses her memoir to create a maternal narrative. Mowatt
never gave birth to progeny, but she and James did eventually adopt
three children, and her rendition of that event in her autobiography
allowed her to act the sainted mother, with all the agony and ecstasy
of the melodrama’s maternal role.
Cloaked in the costume of savior to suffering orphans, Mowatt jus-
tifies her narrative by explaining that she has been too highly praised
by other biographers and wants “to set the record straight” as to her
good deeds. Mowatt begins with a vivid description of little Esther,
the freezing, sobbing beggar girl, whose dying mother allows Mowatt

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to care for her child. However, when Esther’s abusive father demands
payment for his daughter, Mowatt hands the child back over to what she
calls “one of the coarsest specimens of an Irishman.” Ironically, Mowatt
depicts herself as the victim of this tale and claims, “I was deeply pitied.”
She includes no word on the fate of little Esther. Mowatt’s neighbors
reportedly are now convinced of the actress’s maternal capacity and
tell her of three starving children in the care of a blind father. Mowatt
paints blind Mr. Grey as a “ruined man of refinement,” and when he
dies, the actress adopts his three children. There her tale of parenthood
ends abruptly. With her fabricated happy ending, Mowatt sidesteps
the question of how a full-time actress cares for three newly adopted
children. The actress does quickly mention that her sisters cared for
the children while she performed and toured, but she omits the fact
that she soon sent all three to boarding schools. By denying the reader
any details of their upbringing, the act of motherhood stays romantic
and the writer unsullied by unpleasant particulars. The middle-class
belief in the privacy of the domestic sanctuary allowed Mowatt to draw
a curtain over the fact that managing motherhood may have been a
struggle for the successful star.2
Most memoirists draw the curtain completely and make little or no
mention of motherhood. Morris, childless through her long troubled
marriage to Harriott, completely avoids the topic. So does Eytinge,
although she did have one daughter in her first marriage, whom she
named after herself, and two more children with her second husband,
George Butler. Mrs. Gilbert quietly mentions motherhood only at the
birth and death of her sons, while Mrs. Calvert makes the parenthood
of eight children while acting full-time sound effortless and hardly
worth mentioning. Logan makes absolutely no mention of her son in
her reminiscences. Except for the brief but affecting sentence referring
to daughter Georgie’s death, Mrs. Drew mentions her children only
professionally as each progressed in their theatrical careers.3
Actresses were a bit more forthcoming about their offspring in
interviews with journalists, and the press sometimes accompanied
an article with photographs of mother and child or children. Arts
journals like the Wilkes’ New-York Spirit of the Times seemed especially

Managing Motherhood | 263 |
supportive of portraying actresses in domestic roles and frequently
ran images like the one of Kitty Blanchard looking adoringly at the
two young, flaxen-haired daughters in her arms. All three females
are dressed in starched white, looking angelic and upper-class. The
article, entitled “Mrs. Rankin and Her Two Children,” juxtaposed a
photograph of young Blanchard in her most famous role with the one
of Blanchard, now Mrs. Rankin, in her present domestic role: “This is
how Kitty Blanchard looked in the 2 Orphans . . . now matronly Mrs.
McKee Rankin.” At the time Blanchard was starring and touring with
her husband in the popular drama “The Danites.” Although the article
mentions Blanchard both as actress and mother, the journalist never
reported anything about the Rankins’ childcare.4
The press could even use motherhood to justify an actress’s return
to the stage, as when one journalist intimated that Eytinge had been
abandoned by her first husband and “was left to resume her career . . .
with a daughter to provide for.” There was no indication of who cared
for her daughter when Eytinge sallied forth onstage for eight to ten
performances a week. An article published decades later in the New
Jersey Telegraph promoted a benefit for Eytinge by focusing on a “deep
and irreparable loss,” the recent death of her son: “Miss Eytinge bore
this sorrow as she bears other slings and arrows of fortune—bravely
and without complaint.” Over the midcentury references to actresses’
children seem sporadic and were used primarily by the press to evoke
sympathy and publicity.5
Many actresses’ children went on to follow in their parents’ profes-
sional footsteps, and the press noted the multigenerational theatrical
careers. The two youngsters in Kitty Blanchard’s photograph grew up
to be successful actresses themselves. Mrs. Drew’s offspring all became
leading players, her son John a star in his own right. Journalists painted
the theatrical world as a community of extended kin, pointing out when
the various celebrities’ offspring acted together. When Eytinge’s son,
Ben, roomed with young John Barrymore, it earned notice in several
newspapers. The press grew especially enthusiastic when the children
of two acting families married, as when Georgie Drew married Mau-
rice Barrymore or Kitty Blanchard’s three daughters married a Drew,

| 264 | Managing Motherhood
a Davenport, and a Barrymore, respectively. Wedding announcements
commonly referred to the bride or groom as the son or daughter of the
star; one nuptial proclamation identified newly engaged Georgie as
“Mrs. John Drew’s actress daughter.” From the Jeffersons and Booths
to the Barrymores and Drews, the press promoted the celebration of
American theatrical royal families.6
Growing up in the shadow of your mother’s fame may have had
its disadvantages, but many acting mothers did all they could to help
bring their children professional and public recognition. Whether still
acting or retired, several actresses served as agents for their grown
children. Emma Reignholds helped her daughters, sons, and sons-
in-law negotiate their first salaries with manager J. M. Field from her
retirement in Yorkville, New York: “I beg to apologize for not replying
earlier but your letter was forwarded on to them, and today I received
a reply, they wish me to say my daughter Emma will take $20 per week
and benefits, George $18 and one benefit, Mr. N. R. Goodwin, $18 and
one or two benefits.” Reignholds also weighed in on proper casting
for her children, opining that Goodwin was ready for walking gen-
tleman parts “but not first low comedy . . . he would be very nervous
and totally incapable.”7
Stars promoted their children’s careers by taking small roles along-
side their progeny, and as with the Howards, the press often advertised
the familial casting as part of the theatrical spectacle. Kitty Blanchard/
Rankin continued to take supporting roles when her daughter Phyllis
became a leading ingénue, just to bring more press attention to the
production. Positive reviews of the Blanchard/Rankin girls always
mentioned their parentage and credited the actresses with sustain-
ing the Rankin legacy. Matilda Heron cast her daughter, Bijou, in any
available child’s role in each of her own productions until reviews like
“the child’s astonishing exhibit of dramatic aptitude” earned the young-
ster a reputation strong enough to launch her own individual career.
Although the children of legitimate actresses most often continued in
that genre, some branched out into other entertainments. Charlotte
Crampton’s son went into minstrelsy, and biographies referred to him
as “a negro comedian.”8

Managing Motherhood | 265 |
 It Is Mine
Although workingwomen had to create alternative methods to manage
motherhood, pregnancy and childbirth could be much like any middle-
class woman’s experience at that time because of the state of medicine
at midcentury. Mary Devlin Booth kept a brave face during her preg-
nancy (as she would later when she was seriously ill), but repeated
references to “the most trying period my life has ever known” make
clear the trepidation and stress that Devlin felt during her confine-
ment. In January 1862 Mary Devlin Booth wrote to her friend Emma
Cushman of her daughter’s birth a month earlier: “You have heard . . .
of my safe delivery and the dear treasure given me—in the form of
a darling daughter, not a boy as I so wished and hoped for. Shall I say
that I suffered disappointment? No Cherie, I have forgotten that I ever
felt such a pang—or ever desired aught beside what I now possess.”
In centering her life around her baby daughter, Devlin deviated
from the pattern formed by most mid-nineteenth-century actresses,
who either chose not to have children or managed motherhood in
far less traditional ways than did “little Mollie Booth.” In the letters
Devlin Booth wrote to her women friends in the months before and
after Edwina’s birth, she describes her pregnancy and childbirth expe-
riences in vague yet positive terms: “I have . . . no unusual suffering,
nor unnatural pain to recount; all has gone thus far well with me—and
my former strength is rapidly returning.” She complained of a breast
infection that limited her ability to breastfeed but otherwise “minis-
ter[ed] to the wants of the little helpless one” with complete devotion.9
Never one to mince words, Fanny Kemble Butler’s correspondence
speaks a more dramatic resistance and sense of dread in anticipation of
her first child’s birth. The forced dependence of pregnancy and child-
birth rankled and almost shocked Kemble: “I cannot believe that women
were intended to suffer as much as they do and be as helpless as they
are, in childbearing . . . I am sorry to find that my physical courage has
been very much shaken by my confinement.” Any nineteenth-century
woman knew the risks posed by childbirth. Although the survival sta-
tistics of birthing mother and baby were slowly but surely improving

| 266 | Managing Motherhood
for middle-class white women in the antebellum period, attending
physicians still could do more harm than good. At midcentury the
practical applications and widespread knowledge of germ theory was
decades away. Most middle-class women no longer used midwives,
and attending doctors, or “regulars,” as they were called, could offer
little to help a problematic pregnancy. The eighteenth-century inno-
vation of curved forceps hardly guaranteed a safer parturition for
either mother or baby, as Edwin Booth discovered with his second
wife, Mary McVicker Booth. Booth had remarried actress McVicker
six years after Mary Devlin Booth’s death. Booth and McVicker lost
their first and only child in 1869, when the forceps used to complete
the difficult delivery crushed the baby’s head.10
The first Mrs. Booth had come through childbirth, or “that short
period of indescribable suffering,” with her baby’s health intact. Her
elation over her good fortune expressed itself in long letters describ-
ing the details of her experiences as a new mother. She advised an
expectant friend to get “plenty of exercise—even up to the last hour—if
possible . . . never mind what people say . . .—walk, walk, walk—the
result of outdoor exercise with me was a natural birth—and the most
healthy little babe a fond mother could wish for.” Devlin’s correspon-
dence traced the details of Edwina’s growth and Mary’s own devel-
opment as a mother: “My precious babe is now within two days of
being ten weeks old, and though I do not pretend to have yet felt the
full depth of maternal love I experience already joy enough to assure
me that a priceless treasure has been added to my store.” Subsequent
missives include countless rapturous references to Edwina’s appear-
ance and antics: “She continues to improve every day—& every day,
aye, every hour we discover some new beauty; to descant upon, or
some trifling movement, that produces wonder and astonishment from
her papa and myself.”11
Devlin hid any marital shifts caused by her new role and assured her
friends that the demands of motherhood had not lessened the inti-
macy of her marriage: “Often now I am called from Edwin’s side . . . and
he bears it which he should. I once thought it would do harm—but I
find the contrary—leisure hours when we find ourselves alone—are

Managing Motherhood | 267 |
more precious than ever.” “The romance” between husband and wife,
claimed Devlin, was not ended with motherhood but “just begun”:
“A wife does not really appreciate the holy tie—until she is a mother;
and I speak from what my own heart has convinced me.” For the first
year and a half of Edwina’s life, mother and child traveled with Edwin
on tour. They returned at the end of August 1862 and lived at first in
New York, then Boston, again in conjunction with Booth’s theatrical
engagements. By the year’s end, when she settled in Dorchester to
receive treatment for an unnamed “female problem,” Mary’s diaries
and letters continue to analyze Booth’s performances and discuss his
financial and artistic success, but her correspondence increasingly
reflects a devotion to home, friends, and Edwina.12
Photographs from Devlin Booth’s preserved cabinet album show
visual evidence of her developing maternal affection as well as the
progression of her illness, most likely gonorrhea, contracted from
Edwin and “made worse with pregnancy and childbirth.” Photographic
techniques were just beginning to replace daguerreotypes, which had
grown popular in the United States since the early 1840s, especially as a
way for families to capture simple and personal images of themselves.
These early photographic records, which usually grouped subjects as
individuals or couples, offered a “unique private view of the sitter.”
Unadorned with advanced lighting or development techniques, they
produced startlingly honest and direct likenesses. The first portraits
in Mary Devlin Booth’s album, taken in 1862, capture a beaming and
seemingly healthy mother, hair long and loose, holding an equally
plump three-month-old Edwina. Several family portraits of the three
Booths, looking contented and relaxed, follow. A later portrait, taken
on Edwina’s first birthday, labeled “my mother and myself ” years later
by Edwina, shows Mary, looking blissful but thinner and tired. She is
cradling her toddler tenderly. On the facing page, however, stands a
gaunt and grim-faced Mary, without her daughter. Devlin Booth is
clearly ill in this photograph, taken just two months before her death.
Booth biographer Nora Tritone details the agonizing pain and unsuc-
cessful treatments Mary endured. But even in the weeks before she
died, Mary attended the theater to see her brother-in-law and critique

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the performance deftly, opining that he, John Wilkes Booth, had “a
great deal to learn and unlearn.”13
The final portraits in Devlin’s album, completed decades later by her
daughter, are of Edwin Booth and Edwina alone. Taken a year after
Mary’s death, Booth, hollow eyed and unsmiling, sits, balancing his
daughter on his knee. She in turn looks sadly up at him and then out
at the camera. The sense of loss is palpable. Family friends feared for
Edwin’s sanity after Devlin’s passing. Some so credited Mary with his
ability to work, as well as abstain from drink and depression, that they
predicted an end to his career. Booth did retire for several months,
but his career survived, and Booth remarried. His second marriage
proved equally tragic, as Mary McVicker Booth succumbed to mental
illness. Biographers theorize that McVicker’s mental strain was due
in part to her constant efforts to live up to the image of the first Mrs.
Mary Booth as well as the death of her son and subsequent inability
to bear children.14
Throughout his life Booth’s letters to his daughter, and hers to him,
show a deep intimacy and interdependence. Edwina, who would even-
tually marry and raise children of her own, published recollections of
her father in 1894. Her memories confirm the effect of Mary Devlin’s
death reflected in the portraits: “I think his own sorrows made him
cling more closely to the child who had been left so suddenly in his
care.” Edwina intimates in her memoirs that it was the shared loss and
memory of her mother that drew the two together so closely. Perhaps
the greatest testimony to Mary Devlin’s success as a wife and mother
was this evidence that she was irreplaceable.15
Mary Devlin Booth’s ability to happily transfer her energies from
career to marriage and motherhood offers the exception, not the rule,
among the mid-nineteenth-century American actresses studied here.
Just as the greater marital options available to working actresses com-
plicated both their personal and professional lives, placing them at the
center of the maelstrom of social and legal change, the same choices
complicated their experiences of motherhood. Some simply did not
have children. Besides Morris and Mowatt, former child stars Ellen
and Kate Bateman bore no children, and neither did Cordelia Howard

Managing Motherhood | 269 |
MacDonald. Of the fourteen marriages among the Denin and Western
Sisters, only Susan Denin’s second union produced a child. Mr. and
Mrs. Gilbert had only two sons, both of whom died before the age of
thirty. Working actresses were uniformly silent about the reasons for
their small families or childlessness. Most letters and diaries avoid the
subject. Birthrates in general lowered among the white middle class
in the nineteenth century. In 1850 a white woman would reach meno-
pause after an average of 5.43 births, far more than the average among
actresses. According to historian Pricilla Clement, the sharp decline in
births over the century reflected middle-class families’ choice to have
fewer children, not because birth control methods had improved but
due to social and economic pressures. Fewer children allowed parents
to focus funds and fondness more effectively. Actresses, whose careers
were temporarily sidelined with each birth, may have been among the
first wives to choose to have smaller families. Actresses who traveled
extensively may have also had access to birth control such as condoms,
at this time produced primarily in Europe.16
Those acting ladies who did have children relied heavily on extended
family to help with childcare while they toured. When not accompany-
ing their parents, Mrs. Calvert left her younger brood with her mother,
and sent older children to boarding school. Edwina Booth was cared
for by extended kin from both her mother’s and father’s families until
she, too, attended a private academy for girls. Mary Ann Crabtree’s
twin sister, Charlotte (Lotta’s namesake), cared for Jack and George
while Mary Ann traveled with the family breadwinner. Actresses who
could not afford boarding schools for their children had to choose
between the profession and motherhood, and that choice depended
on financial viability. Caroline Howard could raise her children within
a family troupe while continuing her own career. Sidney Bateman also
managed to weave her personal ambitions into those of her family’s
activities. Although she did not perform as often once she became a
mother of eight children, Sidney wrote plays and assisted her husband
in managing various theaters.17
Actresses less enchanted with theatrical life than Mrs. Bateman
used motherhood as their excuse to bow out of their profession as

| 270 | Managing Motherhood
soon as it was financially feasible. After the birth of her eighth child,
actor Noah Ludlow’s wife insisted that they could afford to have her
retire. Ludlow explained that “my wife, who never liked the profession
of the stage, earnestly importuned me to consent to her withdrawal
from it, urging that her duty to her children, now numerous, required
her undivided attention.” Ludlow reportedly accepted this transition
to more traditional gender roles and spheres with regret. His wife had
helped make his company one of the “most efficient” and successful.
His memoir describes her last performance by his side in detail, end-
ing with the line “This was the last time my wife appeared upon the
stage, although she lived as my wife of twenty-six years after, and took
care of my home and her children’s welfare.”18
If some husbands regretted their working spouses’ choice to retire
to full-time motherhood, others expected, even counted on, such a
choice. When within months of their wedding discord arose between
Pierce and Fanny Kemble Butler, Pierce hoped motherhood would
ease the tension. Butler’s letters and divorce defense show that he
assumed Fanny’s marital dissatisfaction would lift with the arrival of
their first child: “During the period that Mrs. Butler was in expectation
of becoming a mother, she manifested habitual discontent, frequently
expressing regret at having married me, and a desire for release from
a union which appeared already to have become distasteful and irk-
some to her . . . I looked upon these expressions as merely perverse
fancies, to be dispelled by the birth of her child.”19 Unlike Mary Devlin,
who embraced motherhood as her new profession, however, Kemble
saw her children as distractions, writing: “Every chink and cranny of
the day . . . is filled up with ‘the baby’ and study of every sort seems
further from me than ever.” Fanny asked Pierce for a trial separation,
just months after the birth of their first child. Letters indicate a level
of postpartum depression and restlessness: “I am weary of my use-
less existence . . . if you procure a health nurse for the baby she will
not fret after me . . . I must beg you will take measures for my going
away.” Pierce Butler refused to take measures, however and demanded
that Fanny stay home to “nurture her child.” In 1838 a second daugh-
ter, Frances, was born, nine months after the Butlers had reconciled

Managing Motherhood | 271 |
in London. Just months after Frances’s birth, the entire family went
south to St. Simon’s Island. The ensuing marital estrangement from
Pierce prompted renewed requests from Fanny for release from their
union, which would have included separation from her daughters.20
By the 1840s Kemble’s letters make clear that only financial depen-
dence kept her tied to Butler. What is less clear was the nature of her
ties to her children. In her many thwarted attempts to escape Butler,
Kemble never took her children with her. Once estranged from her
husband, Fanny’s visits with her daughters were sporadic and often
undermined by Butler’s interference. Finally, Kemble asked Butler if
there was a way they might coparent their children under the same
roof without actually living as man and wife. Butler considered this
and in 1839 issued her a list of conditions under which Fanny could
rejoin the household. Kemble agreed and reentered the household.
Butler, however, was not about to relinquish his authority as the pri-
mary parent, and constant conflicts ensued.
In time the living situation and Butler’s conditions proved intolera-
ble, and Fanny sailed for England, leaving her daughters behind. Her
correspondence during this time indicate a professed concern for her
girls: “Do very dear friend see my poor little girls, and send me every
detail about them. This is the only service that my friends can render
me—it is the only alleviation of my sad separation from my children.”
Still, friends questioned why Fanny did not return sooner to fight
for visitation rights or even full custody. Every week she stayed away
benefited Pierce’s desertion claim. In her own defense Fanny claimed
financial desperation. Her letters mention not returning to the United
States immediately because she must “give some readings” and return
to the stage “for a short season.” As her readings career blossomed, it
may have occurred to the actress that two young children would be
difficult to manage on the lecture circuit. Fanny, even when she did
return to the United States to fight the desertion accusation, never
requested custody, something Charlotte Cushman considered “an
appalling unconcern for family solidarity.”21
Kemble’s attitudes toward divorce and custody should not be
attributed solely to the demands of her career or personal narcis-

| 272 | Managing Motherhood
sism, for they exist within the context of antebellum legal precedents
and practices that were in the midst of a transformation. Kemble’s
assumption that her daughters would remain in Butler’s custody may
have been based on her knowledge of her home country’s common
law or the advice of her Massachusetts-based support system. England
provided the basis for the legal precedents in child custody decisions,
and British common law considered a father the legal parent of a child.
Eighteenth-century English courts, except in rare cases of extreme
abuse, awarded absolute custody to the patriarch. Butler expressed this
patriarchal confidence as he wrote, “I knew that no law could invade
my house and deprive me of my children, while I continued to protect
them as a faithful and affectionate guardian.”22
Although by 1835 courts had begun to award the custody of infants
and young children to mothers, the decisions based on “the best inter-
est of the child” varied from state to state. Courts haphazardly applied
the “tender years doctrine,” which advised that infants and young chil-
dren be placed with a mother. In the 1830s and 1840s Pennsylvania’s
more progressive courts favored “egalitarian individualism” and often
sympathized with mothers. Despite the fact that their divorce would
be fought in Philadelphia, Kemble’s two-year separation from her chil-
dren gave Butler what he considered “a clear-cut case.”
In the same decade that Kemble separated from Butler, other divorce
suits tossed custody issues from court to court, state to state, and within
the pages of the penny presses. In the d’Hauteville case a wife accused
her husband of “marital tyranny” and rejected his “ideas of the necessity
of female subjugation.” Like Fanny Kemble, Ellen d’Hauteville initially
hoped for an informal separation, rather than bring private discord
before lawyers, judges, and ultimately, the public. Also like Kemble,
Ellen had fled her marital abode and traveled to her girlhood home, an
ocean away from her husband. Unlike Kemble, however, Ellen actively
sought custody of her child. Realizing that her chances for evading
criminal abandonment charges and retaining possession of her son
depended on the liberality of the jurisdiction in which she lived, Ellen
settled in Pennsylvania—the very courts in which Fanny would defend
herself against Butler’s accusations of marital desertion.23

Managing Motherhood | 273 |
 The d’Hauteville case paralleled the Butler divorce case in that
both wives were cast in the defensive position of respondent, painted
by the prosecutions as “jezebel[s] flaunting their marital vow[s].”
Both women parried these attacks by presenting themselves as good
mothers. Both disputes became “he said, she said” narrative com-
petitions, with Kemble and Butler even publishing their sides of the
story outside as well as inside the courtroom. Both wives also had
strong arguments against what Michael Grossberg calls “the eco-
nomic reality of feminine dependence.” A wife could be considered
“unfit” to be the custodial parent if she could not support her child.
Ellen d’Hauteville, daughter of millionaire David Sears, overcame
that obstacle by being independently wealthy. Fanny Kemble had
recently reestablished the career that had the potential to, at least
partially, support her children. But would a working mother merit
the esteem of a working father?24
Ellen d’Hauteville faced arguments that, having voluntarily sepa-
rated from her husband, she was an unfit moral guide for children. Like
Kemble, she argued that desertion was a justified escape from “mar-
ital despotism” delineated in testimony as “systematic ill-treatment
and oppression.” Ellen d’Hauteville won a favorable custody decision
before Kemble went to trial. Despite this evidence of judges sympa-
thetic to her cause and despite the liberal Pennsylvania venue, Kemble
refused to countersue for divorce and custody. Instead, the actress
tried to improve her chances indirectly, behind the scenes. Hoping
to replace her public identity of actress with that of mother, Kemble
turned down multiple offers to perform while the legal action was
still pending. Her comments to a friend in the winter of 1848 recog-
nize Butler’s disapproval of her reentry into her former profession: “I
am not without hope that . . . by giving up my plan of reading . . . my
children may be allowed to finish the winter.” Sure that appearing in
public would antagonize Butler, Kemble may have also worried that
professional success would tarnish her public image as a victimized
wife and mother. Perhaps despite all the similarities between her case
and previous suits, Kemble was aware of the obvious difference. Unlike
other mothers, Kemble was a working actress.25

| 274 | Managing Motherhood
 Kemble’s correspondence does not clearly explain why she never
sought custody, except to indicate that she wanted to avoid any kind
of public battle. Her letters mask the reasons for her passivity with
the rhetoric of a victim. Calling the separation from her children “a
misery,” she again begged a friend to “furnish me with every parti-
cle of information of my girls which can be gleaned for me by those
who more fortunate than their mother having opportunities of seeing
them.” Not everyone believed the depth of her misery, however. Her
sister Adelaide criticized Fanny’s abandonment, declaring, “Sooner
than lose my children there is nothing I would not do.” Clearly, there
were certain things that Fanny would not do to keep her children. In
the end Kemble agreed to a divorce settlement that allowed her vis-
itation with her daughters only two months a year. She toured as a
“reader” the other ten months every year for decades. Kemble’s rela-
tionship with her daughters would always prove contentious, a result,
in the actress’s opinion, of her limited influence on her daughters in
their formative years. Her decision to forgo custody left her powerless
to raise her girls. She may have used her career to save herself from a
“disastrous marriage,” but she had to some degree sacrificed her rela-
tionships with her children in the process.26
The mid-nineteenth-century play Divorce, which opened over a
decade after the Butler’s custody battle finally settled in 1854, side-
stepped divorce’s darker consequences, packaging the child custody
issue more positively for its mostly female audience members. When
the fictional Fanny Ten Eyck leaves her husband’s home, she does some-
thing the flesh-and-blood Fanny Kemble never attempted—she takes
her child with her. Alfred Ten Eyck, in a fury, plots to steal his son back
rather than issue a writ of habeas corpus, which would mean having
to “crawl through the dirty byways of the law to get my own flesh and
blood.” When his cohort questions the legality of such an abduction,
Alfred retorts, “I’m no lawyer but I understand this: Wherever I can
lay my hand on my child, I can take him.” Alfred does take the child
and hides with him in a run-down shack. Fearing for the child’s health
and safety, as well as for the father’s mental health, his cohort alerts
the police as to their whereabouts, and Alfred is arrested on charges

Managing Motherhood | 275 |
of insanity. Her husband, on his release from the asylum, “renounces
his authority over her” and grants her custody of their child. The play
ends with the couple’s reconciliation, Alfred finally conceding Fanny’s
right to a coparent with the line “You have my . . . our child.”27
Divorce reflected the muddy legal waters into which mid-nineteenth-
century parents waded when fighting for custody. Twenty years after
the contentious d’Hauteville and Butler divorce cases, the saga of an
oppressed wife fleeing her home with her child proved profitable enter-
tainment. The playwright’s willingness to brand the controlling hus-
band a villain reflected the extent to which these changes in custody
law had been absorbed into public consciousness. The melodrama,
however, stopped short of actually awarding the fictional Fanny a
divorce and custody. It is offered but not taken, as the humbled cou-
ple reconcile. Like most midcentury dramatic fare, Divorce delivers a
simplistic and conservative answer to a complex contemporary prob-
lem. Although much was changing on medical and legal fronts, for any
woman in mid-nineteenth-century-America bearing children meant
risking loss: loss of her own life, loss of the child’s life, and loss of
possession and power over their upbringing through separation and
divorce. For actresses, however, bearing children could also risk the
loss of work, of public regard, and of earning power. This risk meant
actresses often had to manage motherhood in unusual ways.28

Casting Family
A mother’s right to her children formed a recurring theme in the melo-
dramas that became the backbone of mid-nineteenth-century popular
entertainment in the United States and thus any female star’s bread
and butter. But unlike Divorce, most popular plays warned women that
motherhood was a gift, rather than a right, a gift that could be denied
a mother found guilty of any gender or moral indiscretion. Long-
running plays like East Lynne and Camille portrayed women roman-
tically involved with men outside of marriage as undeserving of the
domestic blessings of husband and children—these heroines actually
died as punishment for their nontraditional choices. East Lynne’s Lady
Isabel Vane, for instance, is lured away from husband and child by an

| 276 | Managing Motherhood
unscrupulous admirer who abandons her, “penniless and alone . . .
scorned by all decent mankind.” She returns home to discover that her
husband has divorced her, and she can only see her dying child in the
guise of a governess. The climactic scene reveals her identity as she
expresses her regret over abandoning her family. The mutual demise
of mother and son earns her husband’s forgiveness, and in death Lady
Isabel regains her parental status. As hackneyed as East Lynne seems
today, it sold out theaters for decades, which lends historical signifi-
cance to its message. Isabel’s last words summed up the message: “My
folly was great, but my punishment has been far greater.”29
For women working in the theater, stardom could in some cases lift
them above such gendered punishments and in other cases subject
them to even greater scrutiny. Actresses were aware that by working in
such a public sphere, wielding power and accruing wealth, they tam-
pered greatly with the delicate balance of parental power and famil-
ial gender roles. Some stars even attempted the unthinkable, having
a career and children outside of a traditional marriage. Those who
attempted such “folly” managed motherhood in radically unconven-
tional ways. The choice to defy yet another layer of social convention
threatened to undermine both their careers and their relationships
with their children Two of the most powerful personalities in the
theater at midcentury, not only leading ladies and stars but managers
as well, Charlotte Cushman and Laura Keene, risked mothering out-
side of traditional marriage. Unmarried Charlotte Cushman’s wealth
and status allowed her to adopt her sister’s child and direct his life to
suit her own agenda. Cushman created motherhood for herself and
believed that her stardom made her impervious to social approbation.
In contrast, single mother Laura Keene forfeited public parental status
for that of leading lady, hiding her children in shadow for fear of the
very retribution she enacted onstage in plays like East Lynne.
Like other memoirists, Cushman’s longtime partner and biographer
portrayed the actress as respectable by emphasizing “her passionate
love for children. It was one of the most marked traits of her character.”
In a letter to a friend, Cushman calls motherhood “God’s sacred trust,”
writing, “No artist work is so high, so noble, so grand, so enduring, so

Managing Motherhood | 277 |
important for all time, as the making of character in a child.” For the
never-married actress, whose romantic relationships were exclusively
with women, the only available avenue to that experience was adop-
tion.30 Assumptions regarding nineteenth-century women’s sexuality
can be misleading as mid-nineteenth-century romantic and sensual
avowals of love and even passion between women did not necessar-
ily mean they shared sexual intimacy. There is ample proof, however,
that in Cushman’s case constant references to her female partners as
“ladie wife,” “little lover,” and “jolly bachelors” expressed romantic
and most likely sexual relationships. Comments such as “You wish I
was your sister . . . but I shall tell you things when I see you which will
make you believe that a stranger love is often dearer than a sister”
suggest homosexual attachments. During her lifetime some of Cush-
man’s friends and family considered her onstage breeches roles, her
offstage cross-dressing, and her circle of close women friends fuel
for “‘speculations’ . . . too ‘indecorous to repeat.’” Others, like Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning, lauded Cushman’s unconventional choices: “I
understand that she and Miss Hayes have made vows of celibacy and
of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike . . .
it is a female marriage.”31
Lisa Merrill, in her well-researched biography of Cushman, When
Romeo Was a Woman, argues forcefully that what former scholars
regarded as Cushman’s close women friends were indeed her lovers
and romantic/sexual partners. The exact nature of Cushman’s partner-
ships becomes significant to an exploration of the intersection of her
work and family as those partnerships influenced Cushman’s choice
not to marry, the necessity of adoption, and the particular parenting
challenges her lifestyle might have presented. The debate over Cush-
man’s sexuality began decades after her death, however; such questions
were scrupulously avoided in mid-nineteenth-century America. What
were termed “Boston marriages” earned little critical attention in the
country at that time because the idea of a sexual relationship between
women simply could not be contemplated seriously in the imagina-
tions of most middle-class Americans. The “cult of true womanhood”
defined women’s essential nature as passionless. Even in heterosex-

| 278 | Managing Motherhood
ual marriage, a wife supposedly submitted to sexual intercourse only
to have children, not for pleasure. Mid-nineteenth-century purity or
anti-prostitution campaigns admitted that some women were forced
to be sexually active, but that activity, they claimed, was out of eco-
nomic necessity.
The press during her lifetime avoided any mention of Cushman’s
unusual attachments. Like Lotta Crabtree, journalists touted Cush-
man as a paragon of virtue, as evidenced by the fact that she was an
unmarried woman with no illicit attachments to the opposite sex.
When in 1853 Cushman literally moved out from under from the critical
eye of her family and the possible approbation of her public, Amer-
ican journalists were no longer as privy to the details of her living
arrangements. The same year that thirty-seven-year-old Cushman
chose to retire from the stage and settle in Rome, Italy, with her part-
ner, Matilda Hayes, and several other female artists, she also decided
to adopt a child.32
Edwin Merriman had been born on March 4, 1838, to Susan Cush-
man Merriman, who was then only fifteen years old. Charlotte would
support both her sister and her nephew until Susan’s remarriage
ten years later to Sheridan Muspratt, a wealthy Liverpool scientist.
Charlotte continued to contribute to Ned’s schooling even after he
moved in with his stepfather. Her letters also reveal her constant
interest and involvement in Ned’s life. When, four years after her
remarriage, Susan reported increasing tensions between her second
husband and Ned, Charlotte proposed legal adoption of her now
fourteen-year-old nephew. Despite Susan’s formerly caustic opin-
ions regarding Cushman’s relationships and lifestyle, she agreed to
the arrangement, and Charlotte filed papers in Boston to formally
and legally adopt her nephew, known from that point on as “Ned
Cushman.”33
For the same reasons actresses, as workingwomen with indepen-
dent incomes, were some of the first American women to grapple
with divorce and child custody statutes, so, too, they took advantage
of changes that allowed for legal adoption of minor children. Adop-
tion in mid-nineteenth-century America was considered a new and

Managing Motherhood | 279 |
unwieldy legal option. English common law had limited transfers of
parenthood due to the complexity of inheritance issues. Other available
forms of orphan care such as apprenticeship, church, and community
placement had allowed local governments to avoid establishing adop-
tion policies. With the development of child welfare philosophies and
best interest–based custody decisions, however, adoption began to be
considered a practical option. Just such a climate allowed upper- and
middle-class American couples like the Mowatts to adopt children
from broken or “less fortunate” homes. But as popular as adoption
became by the late nineteenth century, it was rare that an unmar-
ried woman was allowed to establish herself as the head of her own
family. Of course, when that unmarried woman was none other than
the internationally known, wealthy, and revered superstar Charlotte
Cushman, precedents were set.34
Cushman’s decision to adopt her nephew differed somewhat from the
“child-saving” impulse that supposedly prompted Mowatt to support
and eventually adopt the Grey orphans. Cushman, as Ned’s aunt, could
have provided her sister’s son with all the advantages later bestowed on
him without formal adoption. Her objective lay in fashioning herself a
mother. In keeping with Mowatt’s regret that she had had no occasion
to exclaim, “It is mine,” Cushman seemed to desire to possess a child
and, consequently, motherhood. Teenaged Ned did not immediately
come to live with Cushman but enrolled in the United States Naval
Academy. However, the jolly bachelors who created Cushman’s com-
munity of independent women provided Ned’s home on holidays, first
from the academy and then from his years at sea. How cognizant Ned
became of his adopted mother’s sexual preferences is unclear from his
surviving correspondence. As Cushman’s female community experi-
enced romantic attachments and detachments, the teenaged boy tried
to be less judgmental of his Aunt Charlotte’s lifestyle than his mother
had been. “I don’t like to say anything about Aunty’s friendships for she
has been very kind to me and I suppose it is none of my business.”35
Despite a change of surname, Ned still called Cushman “aunty”
and Susan “mother.” Charlotte claimed that she had never expected
to replace her sister in Ned’s affections. It was an extended family

| 280 | Managing Motherhood
arrangement, not a usurpation of parenthood, she asserted on the eve
of the adoption. Cushman’s letters over the next ten years, however,
trace an evolution of growing affection toward and control over Ned.
In that time Cushman’s references to Ned in her correspondence move
from “my nephew” to “my adopted son” to “my boy” to “my son,” and
finally, in letters that fail to separate his identity from hers at all, she
refers to Ned as “we.” By his young adulthood Cushman so identified
with her nephew that she actually arranged his marriage to one of her
current lovers, Emma Crow.36
Cushman had met eighteen-year-old Emma Crow in 1858, when the
then forty-two-year-old actress consulted Crow’s father for financial
advice. The hundreds of letters from Cushman to Crow follow the
course of their romantic affair over the next several years. They reveal
the tensions between Cushman’s commitment to her second partner,
Emma Stebbins (who would remain her “wife” until Cushman’s death
at age fifty-nine), and the star’s attraction to Crow. A letter to Crow
that declared, “You must never doubt my love for you . . . I love you! I
love you! . . . I kiss your soft loving eyes and hands,” was followed by
one that reminded her, “Do you not know that I am already married
and wear the badge upon the third finger of my left hand.” Merrill
notes that “Charlotte—who, as we have seen, frequently maintained
relationships with more than one woman at a time—would attempt
to protect the prior relationship she had forged with Stebbins even
while she nurtured the connection with Crow that threatened to upset
it.” Cushman’s correspondence with her “little lover” also reveals the
development of a plan that would allow Cushman to keep both women
close to her without inviting overt conflict or jealousy. She began to
arrange Crow’s engagement and marriage to Ned.37
When Crow came to stay with Cushman in Rome, Charlotte sug-
gested that her nephew escort Crow sightseeing and hoped “he may be
of some use” to her. Cushman continued to encourage the young peo-
ple’s contact and engagement. During Ned and Emma Crow’s courtship,
however, Cushman wrote passionate letters to her future “daughter-in-
law”: “I long for you—want you—as perhaps you do not dream—that
no human being exercises so peculiar a power as you do over me and

Managing Motherhood | 281 |
that I am not whole without you.” When Ned proposed to Crow, Cush-
man continued to mesh her identity so tightly to Ned’s that she could
write to Crow, “Are you engaged to me now?” Once “her children,” as
she called Ned and Crow, were married, Charlotte retreated to some
extent. Her letters now advised the newlyweds that she would leave
them alone to establish their own family. Settling them in Boston, she
returned to Europe, writing Crow, “I love you better than anything in
the world, and my heart is broken at the idea of leaving you . . . but it
is better for you, better for Ned, better in every way that you should
be left to yourselves for a season.”38
In time Cushman would see Ned and Crow as a means for carrying
on the family name. “Remember my name can only live through a man
child,” she wrote to her niece. Emma Crow Cushman would bear four
sons with Ned. Aunt Charlotte attended every birth. Emma Stebbins
recalled that Charlotte “would travel any distance to be present at their
birth, even on one occasion crossing the ocean for that purpose. It was
her great joy to be the first to receive them in her arms, and she had
the feeling this ceremony made them even more her own.” Cushman
admitted, “The one wish of life has been for some child to love me
dearly and tenderly . . . now God . . . had blessed me with such a dar-
ling.” Cushman’s legacy, begun when she took over her father’s role
as head of household at eighteen, was ensured now with the birth of
the grandchildren Cushman would always refer to as “her boys.” In
the ensuing years Cushman referred to herself as “Big Mama” and
when on tour implored Crow not to “let the children lose me from
their minds.” The mixture of talent, ambition, charisma, and energy
that propelled Charlotte Cushman to the top of her profession and
kept her “at work” until months before her death also inspired her to
design and build a family of her own making.39
If Cushman’s stardom gave her license, in her mind, to control her
“children’s” lives without scruples or worry of public approbation,
other actresses’ successful stage careers could affect their parent-child
relationships in the opposite way. Laura Keene, actress and theater
manager, hid her status as a wife and mother her entire life, fearing
her family background would hurt her position as a leading lady on

| 282 | Managing Motherhood
the American stage and erode her authority as a theater manager. She
also hid the fact that having been unable to secure a divorce from her
husband, she and her children cohabited with her business manager
and romantic partner, John Lutz, outside the confines of legal marriage.
Keene created and maintained the fictional persona of the single and
single-minded actress, married to her art and her public—a woman
whose talent allowed her to transcend domestic responsibilities. Keep-
ing her motherhood a secret may have secured the acceptance of man-
agers and the mid-nineteenth-century theatergoing public, but the
deception would cost her much, both professionally and personally.
Mary Frances Moss Taylor had used emigration and the transnational
nature of the profession to transform into Laura Keene. Keene’s mother
and daughters similarly took advantage of the change of domestic
venue when Keene beckoned them to join her in the United States.
At some point between the Keene family’s departure from Britain and
their arrival in the United States, Keene’s mother metamorphosed from
Jane Moss to Jane Keene, and Keene’s daughters Emma, aged six, and
Clara, aged two, became Laura’s nieces. To avoid notice, Keene advised
them to disembark in Philadelphia rather than New York, where she
was already gaining fame as an unwed leading lady. The girls were
instructed to call their mother “Aunt Laura.” It was a ruse that they
upheld to the end of their lives, even after Keene’s death, which reflected
the gravity of the subterfuge. With the press the girls grew even more
formal, referring to their mother as “Miss Keene.”40
If not for only two documented references to “mother” later in their
lives, it could be conjectured that the girls were unaware of their actual
relationship to Keene. Even those remarks seem more like slips made
under stress than direct admissions of their kinship. The day after
Laura’s mother died, daughter Clara wrote to a close family friend,
referring to Keene once as aunt and once as mother: “I have not the
courage to tell aunt of grandma’s death. Mr. Booth, our lawyer, is to
meet us and will then break the news to my mother.” Willing to forgo
public mother-daughter relationships, Keene’s children memorized
their roles well. The opportunity that Keene’s theatrical career held
for their collective future, and the fact that the truth of their family

Managing Motherhood | 283 |
situation could threaten that opportunity, must have been impressed
upon her daughters early on.41
Keene could not publicly act her maternal role because she could
not clearly categorize herself as wife, widow, or divorcée. Her husband,
Henry Wellington Taylor, had either fled or been exiled to Australia
years earlier. Keene’s identity as an apparently single mother could
have raised more than eyebrows, especially as she crafted an on- and
offstage persona of elegant gentility. That was a persona Charlotte
Cushman—as a character actress specializing in male, or breeches,
roles—never needed to foster. Whereas Cushman’s lesbianism was
unimaginable to New York’s middle class in 1860, abandonment, adul-
tery, separation, and divorce were very much on their minds. As Cath-
erine Beecher wrote at the time, “The Law of marriage demanding
that in no case a man shall seek another wife while his first one lives
is always imperative.” Keene’s real-life situation was not one to garner
sympathy with middle-class matrons, nor would it fill the theater with
“stage-door Romeos.”42
In her guise as available actress, Keene attracted many Romeos, and
with one she formed a lifelong romantic and professional partnership.
John Lutz shared Laura’s background and familial circumstances.
He was the child of well-educated parents and was separated (but
not divorced) from his spouse as well. It was Lutz who encouraged
Keene to attempt management, and by December 1853 she had left
New York to manage the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore. Lutz
acted as her agent and legal representative, signing the lease on the
Baltimore theater, as Maryland statutes still forbade women from
direct business dealings. Lutz became a vital professional as well as
personal key to Laura’s success. He provided friendship in a highly
competitive field and helped the “manager-star” handle the mul-
titude of responsibilities inherent in running as well as acting in a
theater company. Not only did Keene add fifteen more leading roles
to her own memorized repertoire (her company presented thirty-
four plays that first season), she had to oversee casting, costuming,
payroll, publicity, and production of the entire company. A trusted
assistant was indispensable to Keene, as was a male counterpart to

| 284 | Managing Motherhood
handle the solo travel required of an advance agent, publicist, and
legal representative.43
Lutz proved especially helpful in the spring of 1854, when Keene
was offered her first star turn in San Francisco. Lutz traveled ahead
of Keene and her mother and daughters to negotiate contracts and
book accommodations. At this point Lutz and Keene may have shared
only a professional attachment, for among the other actors Keene met
as she furthered her career in California was a young Edwin Booth,
with whom she would become romantically entangled. Both Booth
and Keene failed to impress the critics in their California debuts, and
both ventured even farther west, to Australia, but for very different
reasons. While Booth had succumbed to tales of even greater theatri-
cal opportunities, Keene had finally heard from Taylor, her estranged
husband. The tour to Australia allowed Keene the chance to secure a
long-awaited divorce. Evidence suggests that Keene and Booth fell in
love on the two and a half–month voyage to Australia but broke up over
Booth’s alcoholism. Booth reported to a newspaper correspondent that
“Keene . . . left Sydney . . . the day she arrived there. The cause of this
was an unexpected meeting . . . with a near relation.” Most likely, the
near relation was Taylor, who refused to grant his wife a legal separa-
tion and divorce. Unbeknownst to Keene, a thread of communication
had traveled through the small world that was the mid-nineteenth-
century American theatrical community, and word of her marital
status reached the ears of Edwin Booth’s future brother-in-law, John
Sleeper Clarke—the same John Sleeper Clarke whom Keene would sue
five years later to secure the rights to a precious theatrical property.
When Keene traveled back to the United States from Australia without
her divorce, she was unaware that she would someday have to choose
between winning that lawsuit and revealing her family secrets.44
On her return to San Francisco, Keene took over the management
of the American Theatre, assembled a strong company, and acted the
leading roles in a mainly Shakespearean repertoire. Her elegant style
and refined approach to production were not lost on the city’s grow-
ing audiences. San Francisco journalists wrote: “She was the most
graceful woman who has ever appeared on our stage”; “In truth it

Managing Motherhood | 285 |
was a pleasure to see Miss Keene merely walk across the stage”; “she
excelled in dashing and brilliant parts”; “the community . . . has been
enlivened by her art.” Just when her future in California was assured,
Keene received news that inspired her return to New York. Lutz’s wife
had died. Keene traveled back east, deciding to bury any evidence
of her own spouse’s existence. She and Lutz would live as man and
wife, with her children acting as her nieces and her mother abetting
the deception. Keene continued to manage motherhood the best she
could, given the demands of her public persona and the gender pre-
scriptions of her day.45
In the next decade Keene suffered the headaches, as well as the tri-
umphs, of any successful mid-nineteenth-century theater manager.
Running Laura Keene’s Varieties, she earned a reputation as an inno-
vative and demanding director and producer. Her supporters praised
Keene for showing “a larger amount of self-abnegation than most lady
manageresses . . . She did not absorb all the best parts for herself.” Her
critics thought her imperious, tyrannical; some of her company actors
dubbed her the “Duchess.” Yet Keene took risks, hiring actors like
Joseph Jefferson, who had yet to earn a solid reputation in his line of
business. She was responsible for innovations such as the “road trip,”
trying out fledgling productions and keeping her company employed
in the off-season. She developed the role of theatrical director and
used rehearsals to improve the casts’ acting technique and character
interpretation.46
Predicated on her ability to exude “first-class” refinement and
respectability, by the 1858 season Laura Keene had built (literally
and figuratively) Laura Keene’s Varieties, a premiere theater with an
acting company of high repute and financial solvency. The New York
Times advised, “All strangers should pay a visit to Laura Keene’s to
see how pieces can be produced in a first class New York theatre.”
Keene’s constant search for new material led her to Tom Taylor’s script
about a New England Yankee visiting Great Britain, the raw material
that she and her company would shape into Our American Cousin.
Best known now as the comedy Lincoln was attending when he was
assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, Cousin was to become the first of

| 286 | Managing Motherhood
the long-running comedies that Keene parlayed into success. Keene’s
production not only made overnight stars of its leading players but
wrought major changes in the operation of American theater itself.
Cousin was so popular that a constantly changing repertoire of plays
was no longer necessary to support Keene’s theater. When a diverse
company of actors was no longer needed, productions began to be
cast per each individual play. Keene’s Cousin ushered in the modern
era of theatrical production. Touring companies traveled offering only
one play. Box office sales had to adapt to the onslaught of hit-hungry
customers, and highly profitable hits meant that copyright laws had
to be passed.47
Mrs. Gilbert, in her reminiscences, recalls that in the 1850s “there
were no laws protecting a Book . . . no laws against memorizing a
script, just obtaining it ‘under the rose.’” Cordelia Howard reports
the same problems, as myriad producers attempted to replicate her
father’s success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The lack of clear, enforceable
domestic and international copyright statutes became a problem with
which managers grappled constantly at midcentury. Augustin Daly,
whose many successful adaptations were prey to borrowers, reportedly
turned a blind eye to a manager who stole his famous railroad track
scene from Under the Gaslight in 1867. Daly became litigious, however,
after discovering that the thief was also selling the rights to the scene.
Daly “tolerated the theft but not the sale.” He sued and won. Actresses
such as Eytinge and Logan made certain to “secure the rights” of any
play they saw on their trips abroad to find “novelties” in which they
could star. Logan reminded a manager in 1867, “I have the sole right
(from the author) to dramatize the novel called ‘Neighbors Lives’ by J. F.
Trowbridge.” Eytinge wrote a letter to the Boston Herald defending her
right to make changes to the popular melodrama Miss Multon, assert-
ing that since she had the original in her “possession,” she resented
any attempt to “fetter my liberty” to make changes.48
Laura Keene’s attempts to defend her sole rights to produce her
version of Our American Cousin led to a decade-long battle with com-
peting managers. It was only a week after the play had opened, in
October 1858 that William Wheatley and John Sleeper Clarke, man-

Managing Motherhood | 287 |
agers of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, approached Lutz
expressing interest in buying the rights to Keene’s version of Cousin.
Lutz had noticed them in the audience taking notes several times that
first week. As Keene’s legal representative and the theater’s business
manager, Lutz offered the managers a bottom line price of one thou-
sand dollars. Wheatley and Clarke demurred. Keene and Lutz heard
nothing more until a month later, when Our American Cousin opened
at the Arch Street Theatre, boasting on the playbill that it was the same
play “now in the sixth week of its brilliant and triumphant career in
New York.” Keene hurried to sue and protect her property, “claiming
an exclusive right through her purchase of the manuscript from Tom
Taylor and under the 1856 statute for the protection of general and
dramatic literary property.”49
Thus began a nine-year legal battle that Keene fought on many
fronts as theater after theater in cities across America replicated her
successful production of Our American Cousin. Some imitators, such
as the National Theatre in New York, were closed down; others, like
the Kimballs’ Boston Museum theatre, were allowed to continue
without even paying Keene a license fee. Hosts of slightly changed
versions of the script, such as Our American Cousin at Home, were
produced in those years with few or no legal consequences. The
variety of court rulings reflected the ambiguity of mid-nineteenth-
century copyright laws. The New-York Spirit of the Times frequently
railed against the dearth of clear domestic or international copy-
right laws. Keene’s Philadelphia suit looked like the most promising
for instituting change, as evidence revealed that her leading man,
Joseph Jefferson, had leaked script changes, comic business, and
costume and set design to Wheatley and Clarke. Whether Jeffer-
son had done this purposely to revenge himself on Keene (she had
recently refused him the rights to tour with Cousin as a star) or in
offhand communication, this revelation destroyed the Philadelphia
managers’ defense that they had independently purchased a similar
manuscript from another source. To further facilitate a sympathetic
decision regarding her property rights, Keene became an American
citizen. Still, the Philadelphia trial dragged on.50

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 As the years and theatrical seasons passed, Keene’s ardor for man-
agement was dampened not only by the Wheatley-Clarke trial but by
a myriad of small contract disputes that sapped her time and energy.
Nora Tritone argues that her presence at Lincoln’s assassination also
“tarnished” her effectiveness as an engaging star and theatrical leader.
Her daughters stepped in to assist their mother in her managerial duties
and offer moral support. Clara put her singing career on hold to assist
backstage, while Emma worked the box office and kept accounts. After
Lutz’s death in 1869, Emma became her mother’s business manager.
The success that increased the demands on Keene’s family had broader
implications as well. The changes wrought by the long-running single-
play format transformed actor-manager relations. Actresses given
small roles in a current play could no longer count on a better role in
the next production. Actress Ada Clifton actually sued Keene when
assigned a role that did not suit her “line of business.”51
Managers like Keene now had to find one hit to support an entire
season. Rather than present a season of twenty to thirty plays, some
of which might be more successful than others, Keene now relied
on just two or three productions that could bring in audience mem-
bers repeatedly. Keene, ever the savvy businesswoman, adapted to
the changing circumstances. She produced larger and larger crowd-
pleasing spectacles that invented all manner of technical and scenic
marvels. As she continued to innovate as manager-director, Keene’s
productions garnered both positive and negative reviews, criticism and
admiration. But whereas any attention to her onstage efforts promoted
ticket sales, Keene feared scrutiny of her offstage life. At midcentury
living with one man while still being legally married to another might
destroy an actress-manager’s rapport with her public.
As reporters covering the trial in Philadelphia became aware of
Lutz’s pivotal role in Keene’s professional dealings, they began to look
deeper into his role in Keene’s personal life. In March 1859 the New
York Clipper broke the story that “Laura Keene . . . lives, as everyone, I
suppose, knows, with a Mr. Lutz, a gambler. They say she is his wife.
I hope so. Her two or three children by other parties live with her
mother, whom she supports creditably.” But contrary to this journal-

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ist’s opinion, everyone did not know these personal details. Outside
of the theater community Keene had kept her private life, first mar-
riage, children, and personal relationship with Lutz a secret for years.
Her attempt to protect her dramatic property was about to pull back
the curtain that hid her past. Thus, when the Philadelphia judge who
oversaw the ongoing Wheatley and Clarke litigation gave Keene the
opportunity to bring the case before what most likely would have been
a sympathetic jury, the star abruptly declined.52
Keene’s reluctance to face a jury was likely influenced by the increas-
ingly personal turn the court case had taken. A recent deposition
consisted of Lutz’s responses to questions asked by Clarke’s attorney,
questions that focused on Keene’s first marriage, the status of her
daughters, and her living arrangements with Lutz. These questions pre-
supposed certain knowledge that was most likely passed from Edwin
Booth to his brother-in-law and theatrical partner, John Sleeper Clarke
(perhaps directly or through Booth’s sister Asia to her husband). First,
Clarke’s lawyer interrogated Lutz about the identities of “the two Miss
Taylors,” establishing their ages as approximately ten and fifteen and
their status as orphaned nieces of Keene. Then the lawyer asked Lutz
bluntly, “Are you not living with her as though you were married as
husband and wife?” Lutz sidestepped the pointed query, saying, “No
sir, I never passed as her husband.” The questions then returned to
“the connection or relationship between Miss Keene and the Misses
Taylors.” Lutz pleaded ignorance, mentioned they called Keene “Aunt,”
and replied he had no knowledge of Keene’s marital status. However,
after repeated badgering, Lutz broke down and admitted Keene had
told him about her marriage to Taylor. Lutz stopped short of admitting
the girls were a product of that marriage, but it hung over the end of
the deposition like a theater curtain refusing to close over an unhappy
scene. The deposition must have indicated to Keene that any further
action would unmask her domestic deception.53
The pertinent question neither Lutz, Keene, nor the presiding judge
asked throughout the course of this clever interrogation was what all
these domestic questions had to do with dramatic property rights.
The fact that the Clarke-Wheatley defense could use Keene’s personal

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family life against her suggests the court’s ambivalent feelings about
Keene’s power and status as a highly successful actress, manager, and
businesswoman. The lack of clarity in mid-nineteenth-century statutes
regarding a woman’s right to draw up contracts, own property, amass
profits, and represent herself in litigation forced Keene to depend
on Lutz for legal representation in many areas of her business and to
testify at this most important trial. Keene sued Wheatley and Clarke,
but as a woman, she was not allowed to plead her case and could not
be interrogated. In order to take on a powerful role in the working
world and to appear as a romantically available star, Keene, with all
her professional prestige, still had to conform to the legal and social
gender restrictions of the time. The irony was that Keene, by marry-
ing and having two children, had not lived an immoral life even by
nineteenth-century standards. She had gone to great lengths in her
attempts to secure a divorce from her absconding husband and had only
stepped into morally muddy waters when deciding to share her home
with Lutz without actually obtaining that divorce. Keene’s attempts
to protect her creative property were derailed by the family situation
she had originally hidden out of fear that it might derail her career.54
Barely two years after the Keene v. Clarke case settled (in favor of
Wheatley and Clarke), a New York Judge wrote a landmark decision
regarding dramatic copyright law, ruling, “An idea was the essence of
a play or dramatic entertainment and should be as protected as the
expression of that idea.” Ten years later the creators of the 1879 copy-
right laws, which protected the entirety of a production, admitted
they owed much to the Keene cases. Laura Keene did not live to gloat
or profit, for she had suffered a massive hemorrhage onstage in July
1873 and died several months later. Managing motherhood to the end,
Keene sold her rights to Our American Cousin to actor E. A. Sothern in
order to provide her daughter Emma with a dowry.55
As frustrating as it must have been for Keene to end litigation in
order to keep Lutz’s deposition quiet, equally tragic must have been
the ways her career abrogated her ability to publicly recognize her rela-
tionship to her daughters and live freely with her partner. Privately,
Keene may have had a close and loving relationship to her daughters,

Managing Motherhood | 291 |
but their ability to act the part of nieces was so complete that at times
it seemed they had forgone any other identity. Whether to continue
to protect the actress-manager’s reputation or simply out of habit,
the daughters referred to Keene as “Aunt” or “Mrs. Lutz” for as long as
they both lived. As late as 1897, when reminiscing over a low point in
Keene’s career, Clara wrote: “You know that ill fated Chestnut Theatre
was a terrible failure. Aunt lost heavily on that . . . It makes me sad to
think of all those things. She really killed herself—and for what?”56
This epistle and other letters written by Keene’s daughters reveal an
undercurrent of hostility toward their mother’s work. Although Clara
achieved a modest singing career and Emma ran the business end of
her mother’s theater and publishing companies after Lutz’s death,
both girls complained of the exhausting demands of their mother’s
profession and disparaged her treatment by the theatrical community.
Emma admitted, “I would give ten years of my life for the health I lost
through the hard work and mental care our business entailed.” The
work that provided challenge and fulfillment to Keene proved a burden
to her children. Although neither daughter rebelled or rejected their
mother, as Fanny Kemble’s daughters did at various times, between
the lines of the Taylor girls’ correspondence and their reminiscences
lies the tension behind the masquerade, the constant demands of their
public personae, and their implied question “And for what?”57
Cushman’s professional acclaim allowed her the personal freedom
to forgo heterosexual marriage, live somewhat openly with women
partners, and purchase motherhood. Her freedom was based partly on
her superstar status, partly on her powerful but nonromantic persona,
and partly on the fact that her audiences could not imagine a woman
loving women sexually and certainly could not visualize a mother
choosing her son’s bride from her own roster of lovers.
Keene’s family situation, on the other hand, fell right in the center of
her audience’s fears regarding the mid-nineteenth-century American
marriage and family. As a successful single, but not widowed, working
mother, Laura Keene threatened the very economic purpose behind
the prescriptive gender roles of her day. Keene not only worked in the
theater as a romantic leading lady, but the Duchess ran the theater itself.

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Add the fact that her business partner was also her romantic partner,
and it becomes clear why her personal life collided with her chances
of professional acceptance and popularity. It is not surprising that a
clever lawyer played on the prejudices Keene knew her middle-class
audiences must hold against any woman who made unconventional
domestic choices.
Onstage morally conservative scripts determined how mid-
nineteenth-century actresses played mothers. The melodramatic gen-
dered equation read: feminine misbehavior divided by proportionate
anguish equals moral redemption. The actresses themselves, however,
were just as, if not more, concerned with the moral suppositions in
their audiences’ imagination. Despite the socioeconomic cocktail of
wealth, celebrity, and social status that permitted actresses to oper-
ate with an authority and control few women experienced in this era,
there were limits to their power. However wide the field of opportu-
nity within the profession, outside of it gendered legalities could still
shackle even the most successful professional woman.

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