“The ‘Perfect Delight’ of Dramatic Reading: Gertrude Kellogg and the Post–Civil War Lyceum”

—Sara E. Lampert

“Sara E. Lampert moves into the post–Civil War era to investigate the work of Gertrude Kellogg, a successful performer of dramatic prose who modeled a way for middle-class white women to shape a national conversation about their public identity. Kellogg drew from, adapted, and recombined different platform practices to distinguish herself from scores of other dramatic readers. As Lampert shows, Kellogg managed not only to find professional success in a male-dominated field but also to use her own voice, through the words of others, to connect emotionally with audiences across the country. Kellogg’s words may not have been her own, but the people, scenes, and roles she inhabited demonstrated that middle-class white women could extend the norms of Victorian womanhood into professional public culture” (pp. 17).

Selected Bibliography on Girlhood, Womanhood, and Public Culture

Cogan, Frances B. All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Hunter, Jane. How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Gordon, Ann D., ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Vol. 6, An Awful Hush, 1895 to 1906. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151-74.

Relevant People 

Gertrude Kellogg was a “successful performer of dramatic prose who modeled a way for middle-class white women to shape a national conversation about their public identity. Kellogg drew from, adapted, and recombined different platform practices to distinguish herself from scores of other dramatic readers. As Lampert shows, Kellogg managed not only to find professional success in a male-dominated field but also to use her own voice, through the words of others, to connect emotionally with audiences across the country. Kellogg’s words may not have been her own, but the people, scenes, and roles she inhabited demonstrated that middle-class white women could extend the norms of Victorian womanhood into professional public culture” (p. 17). 

Anna Cora Mowatt

Elizabeth Cady Stanton