Archiving the "Sweet" Candy-Loving Matinee Girl: Fashion, Confectionaries, and Fan Scrapbooking in Urban American Culture, 1880-1915

A product of Broadway theatre and celebrity culture in New York City, the matinee girla fashionable city dweller and a theatre-loving girlfirst emerged in popular media at the end of the nineteenth century. She was both a fictional figure in the popular media as well as a young female fan that reflected the tensions of a changing society. In contextualizing the matinee girl within girlhood studies, theatre history, performance studies and fandom, I examine how this modern girlfrom a wage-earning immigrant to a middle-class college studentco-existed in public spaces and disrupted power structures and class lines. Chapter one questions how gender was performed and negotiated by the matinee girl through exploring the ways she used temporal and urban spaces to revise and reproduce identities for modern girls between 1880-1915. In using fashion as a tool, she destabilized notions of class and gender. In addition, chapter two explores newspaper articles, postcards, playbills and advertisements to understand the relationship between matinee girls and the consumption of sweets, including chocolate bonbons and ice-cream soda. My research pays particular attention to the ways in which girls destabilized and challenged the categories to which they were assigned, from chewing loudly in public to purchasing their own boxes of chocolates, a symbol of romantic heteronormative relationships. In examining the witty and provocative The Matinee Girl columns, two decade-long columns that were published in Winnipegs Town Topics by Harriet Walker and the New York Dramatic Mirror by an anonymous author, chapter three explores how these texts were used to fight against gender stereotypes. In doing so, these columns provided autonomy for girls and highlighted the labour and housing issues affecting single, wage-earning women during the period. Chapter four questions how female fandom was conceptualized and performed by matinee girls by exploring scrapbooks and fan art created by fans of matinee idol sensation, Maude Adams. Finally, I draw on the idea of place to understand how girls have been, both then and now, active producers of culture. From making noise to being actively present in public, the matinee girl, in particular, has helped to cultivate a culture of female fandom and shaped modern girlhood.