Carrying All Before Her recovers the stories of six eighteenth-century celebrity actresses who performed during pregnancy, melding public and private, persona and person, domestic and professional labor and helping to shape wider social, medical, and political conversations about gender, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. Their stories deepen our understanding of celebrity, repertory, and theatre's connection to a wider social world, and challenge notions of women's agency and power in and beyond the professional theatre.

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

My dissertation seeks to recover seven eighteenth-century celebrity actresses' professional experiences while pregnant. I examine the repertoires and reputations of Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen (1666-1703); Anne Oldfield (1683-1730); Susannah Cibber (1714-1766); Hannah Pritchard (1711-1768); George Anne Bellamy (c.1727-1788); Sarah Siddons (1755-1831); and Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816). Using archival material and more recent scholarship, it investigates how the pregnant body influenced public perception of these women, the onstage roles they performed, and the economics of the commercial theatre. Unlike earlier studies, which, if aware of these pregnancies, argue that they were hidden and/or detrimental to actresses' stage careers, I argue that pregnancy enhanced the demand for these women, and their economic viability, by placing their private lives on public display and winning them popular sympathy and support. Actresses, adept at managing their public personas, used motherhood and pregnancy to distance themselves from Restoration-era associations of acting with prostitution, and to justify their lucrative stage careers at a time when domesticity was still considered the feminine ideal.

"Exquisite . . . A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them." --WASHINGTON POST