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Dr. Christina Gessler
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Betsy Golden Kellam
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Betsy Golden Kellam
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Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler, and today I'm so pleased to be joined by Betsy Golden Kellam, who is the author of Jumping Through Performing gender in the 19th century circus. Welcome to the show, Betsy.
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Betsy Golden Kellam
Thank you for having me.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and you're going to teach us a bit about women's circus performers from your book. Before we dive into that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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Betsy Golden Kellam
Sure. I am an attorney by training. I tell people that my secret superhero life is that of a historian. But I have always been in love with history and in love with the circus, which I'm sure we will get into much more conversation about. But I'm a practicing attorney, but I'm also a working historian as an independent scholar. And for me that takes the form not only of writing things like jumping through hoops, but also I'm very committed to public history. So I write and host a video series called Showman Shorts for the Barnum Museum, and I have a monthly column for JSTOR Daily, among some other things. So I enjoy interpreting history, especially pop culture and media history, for both academic and public audiences.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
At the Academic Life we're curious about how people found their path through higher ed. Did you know that you wanted to be a lawyer? And what was your path through higher ed like?
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Betsy Golden Kellam
It was convoluted, as I'm sure most people's are. I went to undergrad actually thinking that I wanted to be pre med, in part because I grew up in a household where my father was a biology teacher and science was very much valued, especially in, you know, 80s 90s women in science push. But I majored in history, and it was this stark difference where I saw on the one side in the sciences, it was a struggle, it was difficult. And in the history side of things, that flow state was there. And I came back to history after a number of years in my legal career, when I took a little bit of time off both to be a family caregiver and support my husband through graduate school. And I needed something to do with my brain. And I went, you know what? I'd love to start writing and researching again. And I just started to build a writing process. I had a blog that I worked on for many years and that built bylines one at a time. And from there I got involved with the Varnum Museum, among some other nonprofits, and that turned into a very serious research practice that eventually led to writing this book. It's been very interesting, to say the least, juggling perceptions in each of my careers, because I'm proud of both of them and I'm comfortable that I'm achieving at a pretty high level in both of them. But, you know, there is a way in which the lawyers don't understand why I have what they think of as this strange hobby. And the academics kind of don't understand why I have a day job that doesn't involve a PhD so that can be a very interesting needle to thread. And I'm always interested in talking to people about that because I do think there's not necessarily one right way to be a historian, even though kind of traditional tenure track academia might make you think that.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And you tell us in the book about your own personal connection to this topic, we get some surprising glimpses into younger you, including a scene in college where you were juggling and you had an offer to, you know, set your equipment on fire. Can you take us through your own personal connection with Circus Loop?
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Betsy Golden Kellam
Yeah, and as I said, that was another thing that goes back, you know, to my youngest days. I think I mentioned in the book that there's a photo of me as a toddler where I'm wearing a clown costume at Halloween. But I taught myself to juggle when I was a kid, and I loved doing it then. I still love it now. And when I was in college, I was fortunate that my university had a circus arts club where people met on weekends and shared knowledge. And it was this very open and experimental space for trying new apparatus and new things. So I really loved that. I love learning things. Circus arts, I think, demand a unique focus, but there's also the satisfaction of if you put in a certain amount of work, you will learn a trick or you will learn a skill. And that exchange is actually very gratifying. You know, I put performance aside, obviously, once I got into more of my career, but I still do enjoy a little bit of juggling now and again. And it's been a delight to get involved in circus from a different perspective as a researcher, as a community member. I'm involved with a couple of different organizations that are. That touch both the fan and historian community as well as the performance community.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And you take us into that. In the acknowledgments, we learn other scholars, that you're in community with, other people who have expertise in circus history that you're in community with. You're also on the board of organization that's devoted to preserving the history and legacy of the circus. And so we get a deeper dive into that at the back of the book and the acknowledgments. Early on in the book, though, you start doing the foundational work of things like what is a circus? It's a term that we all think that we know, but you take us deep through the origins of the history of where the circus in America came from. And it has roots in England, and it has roots in the. What we think of as sort of the medieval fairs of Europe. Is that right?
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Betsy Golden Kellam
Absolutely. And I think I noticed this, or I note this in the book, but I'd like to kind of say it again here, too. Circus is ancient. By no means in this book or otherwise am I saying that circus is a new creation. You know, there are beautiful records from antiquity and beyond of people undertaking unusual feats and entertaining others. The idea that it comes together in kind of a packaged commercial form as a business and a cultural exemplar is what I'm looking at. And, yeah, that has roots in England, where things like equestrian society and writing academies kind of uniquely gave rise to this idea of performance writing. And you know what? If people are coming to see some trick riding, maybe we should throw in a couple other ancillary acts and we could Have a clown or a rope walker. And as you mentioned, this comes also from fairground culture, because if we as humans reliably like anything, it's going out on a nice day and having a snack and seeing something cool. But I explore in the book the idea that circus as we understand it, like you said, as that kind of cultural archetype, kind of pulls from a lot of different entertainment traditions. You know, menageries, fairs, traveling entertainers, comedian dell', arte, equestrian entertainment, and pulls all these together and then kind of in the cauldron of American mass media society in the 1800s, becomes this very uniquely American thing.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And you invite us into a definition of the circus and your working definition for the book, because there's the circus proper and then there's sort of these other entertainments that. That we think of as attached to. To the circus. When you're talking about the circus in the book, what definition are you using?
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Betsy Golden Kellam
And that's a good point, especially here as well as in the book. I think it's important to level set so, you know, not to make assumptions and to welcome everybody in as the big Top does. The. The idea that circus includes conventional entertainments like aerials and equestrian work and that sort of thing. But then if you cast a slightly wider net, there's a lot of entertainments that make sense in that universe and very often are coming along for the ride. Things like menageries, things like sideshow. And in the kind of niche community of people that study and talk about this, they're very often referred to as allied art. The idea that they have a natural home in the circus, even if they're not part of that traditional core.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And to understand the sort of circus traditions that you're building out of, as you said, it goes way back. And if we look across place and time, we see people reveling in spectacle and in human feats that sort of defy the imagination. But for you, there's a couple of key people that we need to know who are foundational for what the type of circus is that you're presenting here in the book. And one is the athletes, but specifically Patti in her writing school, which you alluded to a moment ago, but I hope you'll unpack a bit more. And then we get to meet the person of P.T. barnum and his sort of talent for hoax and the humbuggery of the time and bringing it all into a spectacle that people can't take their eyes off.
- [10:31]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Sure. And yeah, the Astleys are come from the English tradition and Philip Astley is usually considered the father of the circus, and he was one of those former British soldiers who ran a riding school. This was conventional employment for soldiers because obviously they had built strong horsemanship skills. And in a society that very much depended on horses, people appreciated and understood horsemanship. So you could almost think of it as like a driver's end for riding skills. But the idea was also, when he wasn't giving lessons, he might blow off some steam by riding around the ring and doing some tricks. And this is the impetus. This is what starts to build the idea of what we now consider modern circus entertainment. Astley came up with the idea of a ring of a particular circumference, the idea being that your centrifugal forces will work in favor of the horse and rider doing trick. And his wife Patti, who I go into in the book and who I highly recommend, the work of a scholar named Vanessa Toulmin, who really has kind of been at the front of digging up information on Patti. It's remarkable because based on, admittedly, a limited historical record, we can see that she was absolutely part of this entertainment. She was a headline name. Crowds came to see her and that she had a role in the early circus that for the first time, coming from a lot of traditions like commedia or fairgrounds that maybe didn't prioritize women, that circus women were starting to kind of crack open a door a little bit. And then moving to Barnum, who obviously is my special focus, it's been fortunate that the Greatest Showman movie kind of had the unexpected popularity it did, because it's been such a nice way to open that conversation with people. Where before he might not have been a widely known name, now there's not only knowledge but interest. And the movie's been a great opportunity to talk to people about what was Ed Muzzer portrayed accurately? I happen to think my 32nd hot take on the movie is. It is a ton of fun. It's colorful, I love the music, it's entertaining. It has no bearing on historical reality. And if you can separate those two things in your mind, you're gonna have a great time. The thing that I do think is amusing, though, is the fact that it is divorced from historical reality is actually itself very Barnumesque. Because one of the things you learn about P.T. barnum, if you follow his life story, both before and into his queer circus, is he was all about branding. He wanted to keep his name in front of the public. He loved spectacle. And as you mentioned, he was not above using hoax or humbug to get people's attention. So I think, you know, in many ways the movie is very Bart Masque. But you point out, you know, most people think of him as this kind of almost quasi swindler, which is not the case. You know, Barnum is a very complicated and occasionally problematic figure. You know, we could do. We could do a whole podcast just about talking about him. But this idea of hoax and humbug and trickery and truth was very much part of the 19th century Cultural dialogue in America at the time, because mass media is growing and reaching for the first time. There are changes in literacy rates, people have disposable income, there are entertainment options. This is just a stew where someone like Barnum, who's eager to capitalize on it, it's, you know, it's a kiddie pool for him. He was in his 60s. He became famous originally for his American museum, which was, I mean, let's face it, very much kith and kin to the eventual circus entertainments. But it was kind of a quintessential American dime museum. And he became a millionaire. There are one of his biographers figured out that the attendance data was comparable, if not better than Disneyland if you kind of line things up appropriately. And he had been in semi retirement after his second museum burned. And some circus promoters, Coop and Castell Costello were their names, came to him because he had brand recognition. And they said, hey, we've got this circus. Would you want to join us in a partnership? That's where the greatest show on earth came from. It was this later in life thing where it was an opportunity for a second career or third or fourth, depending on kind of how you parse his lifetime. But the circus was something that he took this opportunity to kind of take a second bite at the apple career wise. And in the later 19th century, everything was primed for scale and explosion in a way that it hadn't been earlier there. So that's where you see this kind of grand, colorful American institution that most of us probably have in our head as a stereotype.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And you tell us that, you know, early in the 19th century, what we would have seen was this sort of scrappy, small scale outfits that there were circuses, and they do rest on a long history of that type of entertainment. But what he does is he really makes this giant business out of it. And one thing that I think most people who have familiarity with Barnum know is that he had a real sense of business.
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Betsy Golden Kellam
Oh, tremendous, tremendous. And I will say let's not put the circus Solely on his shoulders. He was obviously a major player. But the, the so called golden age of the American circus, which I would, you know, say probably runs from the 1870s to the early 20th century. You got a number of genuine businessmen and they are all men at this point. But there are a number of large scale shows, railroad shows at this point. And there was a very healthy competition. I mean this was big business as much as anything else. Circuses dealt with tremendous revenues. They were transporting people, livestock, animals, costumes, trains across state lines on a regular basis, employing a wide variety of people. These were massive, massive businesses. And somebody like Barnum, someone like Adam Forepaugh, folks like the Ringling Brothers were very well situated to take advantage of this and they styled themselves as businessmen.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
And in the book, you take us into the big top and we start meeting some of the performers. You also take us outside the big top, we go to Niagara Falls. Speaking of people who have a second career, that surprises you, we meet a schoolteacher in her 60s who decides to do a feat that pretty much nobody has done. So the sentence ties into where we are. Do you want to talk about the lady who went over in the barrel? Yeah.
- [19:25]
Betsy Golden Kellam
And I'll kind of cue this up a little bit by saying where I wanted to go with the book was kind of taking all of this circus history as kind of a bedrock and saying, okay, the circus eventually in yours and my memory, became something where women will were full partners in the entertainment. But obviously that had to start somewhere. And so this book is looking at that kind of first generation of women and women presenting performers who kind of by hook or by crook, made a way for themselves and at least established some precedent. And that doesn't mean it was always easy or clean or palatable. So. But what I wanted to do was pick out examples of these women who used their bodies as tools, who demonstrated that femininity comes in many shapes and forms. And one of these was Annie Edson Taylor, who you mentioned, who partly out of a desire for fame and maybe to make some quick money, decided she was going to try to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. And at that point, no one had. People had tried to go over the falls, but no one had done so successfully. And it was genuinely dangerous. And she pulled it off. She had an oak barrel of her own specification made kind of, I mean, willy nilly strapped herself in there and came out with a little bit of a scrape, but was otherwise fine. And I mean, just to think about that is a fantastic feat and also more than a little bit insane.
- [21:00]
Dr. Christina Gessler
She did tell reporters she was not doing it again.
- [21:03]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Yes. Yeah, it was not. And she didn't do this because she wanted to have a career as a daredevil or as a performer. In contrast to many of the other women in the book. It really was something where she kind of thought she could have her moment of fame and maybe some make a quick buck. You know, there are other women I talk about in the book, like you mentioned, also Niagara Falls. Maria Spelterini, who was an acrobat and who routinely walked a tight wire rope across the falls, like that was somebody who was a professional acrobat. But you have this interesting idea of people who are just kind of looking for their 15 minutes.
- [21:39]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And there are pictures of Maria spelturini on page 213. I flagged those because those are really something to look at and sit with for a moment. She's in one of the pictures. She's on the tightrope, and she has her feet in these, like, peach basket. She had the cupping, the hardness.
- [21:59]
Betsy Golden Kellam
If I recall, that photo is. You can see it online for anybody who's listening, by the New York Public Library. And that's one of the things I loved about this generation of performers, is that we do have photographs. They're beautiful, beautiful images, but it gives us a real sense of what these performers look like. But there are many things I love about that photo. You can see looking behind her, that the bridges are packed with people who are trying to get a look at what she's doing, and just the calm with which she's walking. She's got her bar for ballast and has her feet in these buckets. It's astounding.
- [22:37]
Dr. Christina Gessler
All the women that we meet are astounding for a variety of reasons. And as you mentioned, some had a sort of quick rise to the media's attention, and some had more longevity. We meet so many different women, and there you've got the archival pictures of them. You talk in the acknowledgments about the variety of different archives that you went to, from Wisconsin to libraries at Yale to the museums in Florida. There was a lot of travel involved in finding the research. And in different parts of the book, you talk to us about interrogating the sources that the press had a very certain bent that they had. And so you had to interrogate what that was. The photos were meant to be sensational. Even digging into the letters, the personal letters that people wrote. You know, they're writing in, in some ways, in a closed community, and they have an image to uphold. And so you weren't really able to, you know, necessarily take at face value these primary sources. And another primary source that you found was these souvenirs that these women sold, that their revenue was not solely their income from being performers, but as we think of as, like, Comic Con, for example, they had fans, they autographed things, they. They sold memorabilia, and some of it was these very small photos that they could. They could sell to their fans.
- [24:01]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Yes. And, you know, at the same time as we're talking about this being such a kind of important period for the growth of media technology, industrialization, photography is newly available. And, of course, entertainers are quick to jump on this. We are lucky that Many performers got small carte de visite photographs done, or later, you know, cabinet cards, things like that. And in some cases to do exactly what you said, to sell those merchandise. For many everyday individuals, collecting various photographs cards was kind of a like, it was a personal curation effort. It was something you might keep in an album in your parlor, you know, like a very slow social media wall. If you think about it, in the case of Barnum and some of his early performers, we are fortunate that his American Museum was very close in lower Manhattan to the photography studio of Matthew Grady, who would become famous for his Civil War photographs, obviously. But what that means is everyone would walk across the street to have their portraits done. So we have these beautiful images of unusual individuals, marginalized people, performers who were disabled and might not otherwise be represented in media. So it's wonderful that we have all of these images. And I will also mention that a lot of these, you talked about interrogating the sources. Another common souvenir was a pamphlet biography, like a little, kind of little short booklet, not necessarily a large page count, but maybe it was a biography of a particular performer or an origin story, that sort of thing. And the idea was kind of to extend the experience that you would take this home and read it and could kind of marinate in some of the experience of having been to the circus. But as you say, because these are fundamentally promotional items, you have to kind of just keep that in the back of your mind as a researcher. And as you said, I, I, this is this, the researching this book take a long time over many locations. And I mean, I love nothing more than digging into a circus archive or any archive, but you have to have a little bit of skepticism just to ask yourself, with any circus source, who wrote this and why and to what end? What can you believe and why and how understanding that there was a massive PR machine, especially in that golden age of the circus, that was really trying to cultivate particular images, particular stories in the minds of the audience.
- [26:39]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You mentioned a moment ago about the circus being a place for representation of disabled performers. And in the book, you let us know that you worked with some disability scholars in this part of your work. Can you talk about, as a scholar writing about disability with proper representation, even if in the time they didn't have it?
- [27:00]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting, you know, to look at some of particularly the images and pamphlets about performers who were, who were working because of their disability. You know, it's a way to see and understand these people in a way that we Didn't. But it was tempting for promoters to kind of reduce a lot of these performers to their disability. And it's a, it's a tough topic in circus because there are a lot of people who are very eager to kind of dismiss the whole endeavor as exploitative to say, you know what, the circus put people with disabilities essentially on display, sometimes against their will or with what we might consider dubious consent, you know, and that therefore the whole thing is off the table. But there's also the more complicated idea that for many performers with disabilities this was good, steady employment, it was economic independence, access to a community of respectful and or like minded people. So it's. The disability in the circus is a really nice way to kind of nuzzle into the idea that nothing is just one thing. And as someone with an invisible disability, I'm very interested in exploring disability rights and performance and kind of how this was treated in the circus and what we can learn from that. There's been some really interesting work done. One of the former staff members at the Barnum Museum wrote a wonderful paper about how we classify archives for a lot of these Barnum and a lot of circus performers. And historically, let's say some of the examples she used was with Charles Stratton who performed as General Tom Thumb. Well, if you categorize his archives only with metadata that refers to disability, dwarfism, that sort of thing, you're missing out on essential personhood. What if Tom Thumb and Charles Stratton were categorized in archives with reference to the fact that he, he was an accomplished yachtsman or a freemason? So it was kind of looking at the idea that historically many performers were kind of reduced in their identity or in their portrayal and that as scholars we can try to open that back up a little bit.
- [29:26]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You mentioned a few moments ago about aerialists and listeners can learn more about that in chapter five, Women Take Flight. We'll meet Amy and Rose Austin. We'll see Lulu on the trapeze. We'll learn about the human cannonball. There are so many women that we meet and we learn about the complexity of their stories, how they used public space to expand and contest rules of femininity and to build their own careers and to walk away from them. As we see with one of the aerialists, the conclusion is called Taming Savage Beasts. And while there are a lot of questions I would like to ask you, being mindful of the time, I'd like to talk about Madam Claire and some of the findings you have about the women animal trainers and some of the techniques that they were using, sure.
- [30:08]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Do you mean actually their. Their training?
- [30:11]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Will you talk at the book about some of the techniques that they pioneered, that they were using positive reinforcement, that they were using profitability of danger, the. The risks that they took. You have a scene where the entire tent falls on a woman known as Ms. Adelina, and what. Where how the press wanted to portray her, and yet the pushback of who she really was. So if we could take some of the time we have left to talk about these women and their work with the animals.
- [30:37]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Yeah, I mean, I think that's fascinating. And lion taming particularly, I focused on, because it's so kind of iconic to the circus. And that also goes back to England and British fair culture originally, and women are surprisingly prominent. And some of that is because of the cultural thrill of people wanting to see women in danger and the kind of will they, won't they? But a lot of the kind of prevailing techniques at that time, to the extent people knew anything about animal care and training, was very blustery and occasionally violent. And it was. We have documentation, particularly Claire Heliot. And there's a woman I talk about in the book briefly, who went by the alias Countess X. These women were using positive reinforcement techniques, as you mentioned that. And some of that was their personal ethos on animal care. And some of that was also reflecting the idea that this was a profitable performance business. And these women understood that treating their animals well was an investment in the success of their act and their continued career. People who maltreated animals were not going to have a successful act. But these women were fascinating because at a time when, especially in the media, there was this effort to focus on the sentimentality of womanhood, the femininity, and the idea that if a woman could tame a lion, it was purely because of her pure heart and her innocence that would captivate the animals. And the truth was, these women were engaging in dangerous work with tremendous skill and patience, but somehow that just didn't make as good a public relations story.
- [32:24]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And there's pictures of Madame Clare with her lion. And you also describe in detail some of the costuming that Countess X did. And there's a lot of interrogation of how their costuming and their presentation also did in many ways the same dance with winking at the audience that Barnum did, pulling back and forth on tensions of what society accepted and who the women really were, and pressing the boundaries of. Of what was possible. You talk about the circus as being a place of independence, mobility, the chance to make the Impossible, possible. You talk about subversive examples of strength, about bravery. You also interrogate racism. We meet someone named Olga Brown who went by Ms. Lala, and you talk about how she was exotic, exoticized, and that the women were at once dealing with literal and cultural beasts as they broaden gender expansion. We're coming to the end of our time together and I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [33:33]
Betsy Golden Kellam
I hope it sparks one of the circus's favorite things, which is curiosity. That's one of the things I love most about circus, is that it opens the mind and the senses to the idea of more expansive things. And, you know, I am in love with all of these women and I hope this might encourage some other people to learn more about them, about circus and about whatever, whatever spark this might awaken in an individual listener.
- [34:03]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And finally, what do you hope listeners take away?
- [34:07]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Oh, go see a circus. There are many particularly small shows touring right now and they're doing wonderful work and it's still a fabulous day out. So if there's a circus near you, go see it.
- [34:20]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today. Betsy Golden Kellum, and taking us inside your book, Jumping Through Performing gender in the 19th century circus. You've been listening to the academic life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us.
- [34:41]
Betsy Golden Kellam
Foreign.
- [34:49]
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