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The Eyes of Anna Held: Sex and Sight in the Progressive Era1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2011

David Monod
David Monod*
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 289 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2011

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Footnotes

1

Thanks to Darryl Dee, Susan Glenn, Alison Kibler, Darren Mulloy, and the journal's reviewers for their comments on this paper.

References

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15 Boston Daily Globe, Oct. 11 and Nov. 10, 1896. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that “pussy” was used to describe female genitalia in the seventeenth century. In France, the word chatte was a vulgar synonym for vagina. In 1893, the Barrison Sisters began singing “Do You Want To See My Pussy?” in small-time theaters in New York. During the song the sisters slowly raised their skirts until they displayed furry black cat faces sown into the crotch areas of their petticoats. The sisters next toured Europe, appeared at the Folies Bergères in Paris, and were banned from performing in Berlin. Held and her audience certainly understood the reference in the song. On the Barrison sisters: Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 2 and 5, 1896; New York Times, Apr. 3, 1898.

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64 It is unclear what killed Anna Held. Her doctor, her daughter, and most subsequent chroniclers assert that she died of multiple myeloma. At the time, some doctors she consulted insisted she was suffering from pernicious anemia. New York Times, Aug. 13, 1918.

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