This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.

By Mabel Rowland's public accounting, the Institute of the Woman's Theatre helped hundreds of so-called stagestruck girls realize their ambitions by providing a safety net for the pitfalls of the commercial theatre. The organization, officially established in 1926 and in operation until roughly 1930, was said to have begun years earlier, “the outgrowth of a group which was formed in 1910 and used to meet in the Fitzgerald Building.” As president, Rowland—a press agent, well-known comedic monologist, and all-around theatre factotum—was supported by society women and a cadre of famous female writers and performers, including Florence Reed, who served as Vice President, and charter members Julia Arthur, Irene Castle, Rachel Crothers, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, Elsie Janis, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Mary Shaw, plus about a dozen more. At the time of its official founding, the institute announced that it would undertake three activities. First, it sought to establish a professional Broadway theatre as exclusively a women's operation, employing female playwrights, designers, directors, managers, producers, box-office staff, and so forth: “The only men who will be connected with the enterprise … are the actors and stagehands.” Second and third, the institute would give “aid and advice to girls from out of town who think they have something to offer the theater, read scripts and give opinions thereon, and in other ways labor in behalf of the feminine side of the stage.” The institute's goal of a theatre in tandem with discovering talented women looked to create a meaningful shift in women's inclusion and power within commercial theatre.

On 22 August 1897, the American Woman's Home Journal published seven photographs of “The Cake Walk as It Is Done by Genuine Negroes” in which “Williams and Walker Show How the Real Thing Is Done before the Journal Camera.” In this series, the African American stars Bert Williams, George Walker, Belle Davis, and Stella Wiley perform their popular cake walk act with situational humor in medias res before an unknown photographer in a nondescript space. Among the seven selected poses, one intriguing photograph in the lower right-hand corner depicts the encircled dancers gazing down upon an empty space in the center. The subject of their gaze becomes apparent when comparing the magazine images with the seven “Post Cards” Franz Huld published as part of his “Cake Walk/Negro Dance” series around 1901. Although the performers’ poses are the same, the postcard includes extra space between Wiley and Walker to feature a young girl of mixed racial heritage bending forward while hiking the back of her dress with her smiling face proudly held high (Fig. 1). If standing upright, she appears to be less than four feet tall and perhaps five to nine years of age. Given the obscure date and location of her photo shoot, her birth year could range anywhere from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s. Like Thomas F. DeFrantz, an African American dance theorist who gazes upon two 1920s photographs of other dancing girls, my gaze leads me to wonder about her identity, how she met and socialized with these four dancers, and whether she pursued a theatrical career.

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was edited and introduced to its antebellum reading public in 1861 by the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child. Nearly a century and a half later, another Lydia once again brings Jacobs's story to the public attention as Harriet Jacobs, a stage play by critically acclaimed African American playwright Lydia R. Diamond. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre commissioned and debuted the play in 2008 as part of its youth program. Regarded as Diamond's best work, the play ends with Jacobs, recently liberated from her hiding space of seven years, declaring to the audience, “But it was above Grandmother's shed, in the cold and dark, in the heat and solitude, that I found my voice.” This aspirational claim to an unshackled black girl voice reverberates a twenty-first-century renewal of black women artists, scholars, and activists committed to recovering, proclaiming, and celebrating black girls. With subsequent back-to-back productions in 2010 by the Underground Railway Theater and Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCRep), the play heralds the millennial energy of both the 2013 #blackgirlmagic social-media campaign and the 2014 formation of black girlhood studies (BGS), an academic field that prioritizes “a rigorous commitment to locating the voices of black girls,” and elucidating the “local” intersections of race, gender, and other areas in which “black girls’ agency comes into view.” It is precisely this energetic recovery of a black girl voice on the contemporary stage—a Harriet for the new millennial—that makes Harriet Jacobs so attractive. Describing her vision for the KCRep production, director Jessica Thebus stated: “Our task as I see it, today, is to tell the story with the clarity and energy of Harriet Jacobs's voice with her humor, with her intellect, and consciousness.” And promoting Wayne State's 2017 production, Dale Dorlin writes:

It starts with a dress, or dresses. Among a menagerie of rainbow variations, certain features are standard: lace and ruffle-decked blouses under jumpers, aprons, or high-waisted belled and crinolined knee-length skirts; more skin covered than bare; headwear including bonnets, miniature hats, or massive bows over ringlets and long tresses. So many ruffles; so much lace (Fig. 1). Beginning in the late 1990s, gothic lolitas—overwhelmingly young women in their teens and twenties, and overwhelmingly girly in their outsized bows, platform Mary Jane shoes, and petticoated skirts—stood out as defiantly, bizarrely out of place and time on the Tokyo street scene, all bright white and concrete in Harajuku, a built-up postwar neighborhood of Tokyo known as a youth haven since the 1960s. More than twenty years later, although most Harajuku fashions have died out in keeping with a fad's typically short life cycle, the gothic lolitas have persisted and even multiplied, thanks in large part to the Internet, which has helped muster an army of misfit girl aristocrats not just in Japan but around the globe.