In the wake of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade, Montana House majority leader Brad Tschida argued that a woman's womb “serves no specific purpose to her life or well-being” (Timothy Bella, “GOP Lawmaker: Womb Has ‘No Specific Purpose’ to a Woman's ‘Life or Well-being,’ Washington Post, 15 July 2022). Chelsea Phillips's meticulously researched study of six professional actresses on the London stage over the course of the long eighteenth century, Carrying All before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800, offers ample historical evidence that refutes Representative Tschida's attempt to divorce at least one of the uterus's functions—pregnancy—from the bodies and experiences of women. Phillips demonstrates, through deep archival research, not only the myriad ways in which pregnancy is integral to the lives and careers of her case studies—Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Maria Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan—but also how studying the pregnancies of these prominent celebrity actresses can give us a clearer understanding of the theatre industry during this period—and today.

Carrying All before Her examines the complex ways in which acting while visibly pregnant can generate public images of either maternal virtue or sexual vice, depending on a complex interaction between the dramatic character and the celebrity actress's biography, as accessed through public media. These images are not, however, overdetermined as virgin or whore; rather, they depend on variable circumstances in the actress's on- and offstage performances and, to a degree, on her manipulation of her image through the roles she was able to own and her interactions with audiences through the tradition of the actress speaking the play's epilogue. In the first chapter, Phillips pairs Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen with her successor Anne Oldfield to demonstrate how the former's highly publicized, married maternity ghosted her performances while she was visibly pregnant and helped to craft her reputation as a virtuous wife and mother. In contrast, Anne Oldfield's out-of-wedlock affair and pregnancies did not stop her from mitigating the image of whorish actress with performances of marital loyalty and self-sacrificing motherhood. There is no one-size-fits-all for how performing while pregnant may signify to theatre audiences.

Phillips then takes us ahead a few decades with a chapter comparing Susannah Maria Cibber with George Anne Bellamy, both celebrated actresses whose performances tapped into the market for performative emotion in an age that valued public displays of sensibility. Both women were star actresses who led unconventional sexual lives, had children out of wedlock, and, at times, performed during pregnancy, though at other times strategically retiring from public view before and after a child's birth. Cibber had economic and personal stability, grounded in a long-term, albeit out-of-wedlock, relationship. By contrast, Bellamy's unlucky couplings and chronic economic troubles made her performances of domestic femininity unconvincing, leaving her impoverished and out of work. But Phillips also shows us how the actress attempted to use the genre of theatrical memoir to craft a counterimage of herself as unfortunate wife and mother.

Chapter 3 on Sarah Siddons demonstrates how this celebrity performer consolidated and extended the strategies that her predecessors employed in managing their on- and offstage images through pregnancy. Siddons maintained a respectable domestic and maternal identity consistently in both fictional characters and her personal biography as faithful wife and doting mother. Moreover, her pregnant body “encoded both the maternal ideal” associated with British nationalism and “the potential failure of it at a time of upheaval, war, and uncertainty” (158) serving as a lightning rod for nationalist emotion. By tracking the differences between perceptions of Siddons's performances onstage and off while visibly pregnant during her first and last pregnancies, in 1785 and 1794, Phillips uses the voluminous archive of print and visual materials available in the media-rich late eighteenth century to indicate how personal, professional, and national narratives intertwine in audiences’ responses to the actress’ pregnant body—and in the actress's self-fashioning.

Chapter 4 examines the career of Dorothy Jordan, Siddons's fellow star actress at Drury Lane and the mother of thirteen living children, as well as the sufferer of multiple miscarriages. Although her specialty of comedy, particularly comedy involving hoyden roles, often led her to play transgressive femininity on the stage, she played wife and mother in two long-term relationships that approximated marriage, the longer one with the Duke of Clarence, with whom she had ten children. Phillips does justice to the dual fascination of her personal life and her long, dedicated work life in the theatre, telling us a great story without losing analytic acuity. It is a fitting final chapter, especially because Jordan's performances while pregnant echo—with differences—so many of the strategies deployed by the actresses Phillips examines in previous chapters.

A short Conclusion follows up with productive comparisons between past and present celebrity pregnancies. Phillips gives us more than the usual “learn from the past” history-teacher didactics, however; she reinforces the importance of taking seriously celebrity as a cultural indicator of what matters then and now. She also gives us a methodology for reading archival evidence of past celebrity performances alongside the ephemeral performances and archival data of the present. Anchoring our readings of both archive and performance in the functions and needs of the human body, Phillips claims that“[t]he essential needs of the reproducing body—space, access, rest—have not changed, and embodied experience today can inform our sense of its history” (216). This is not to say that Phillips essentializes the reproductive female body; rather, she reads it as a part of the complex workings we call culture. Phillips reveals an eighteenth-century theatre industry that assumed their female stars would be pregnant at times during their careers and adjusted to that fact, offering women paid time off, shorter hours, and generally what we might today call accommodations. These conditions make the present working conditions of women in theatre, as Phillips summarizes them, look pretty lousy. The body—including that troublesome body part, the uterus—is integral to what Tschida calls the “life or well-being” of women, not just as childbearers, but as workers. This book makes it clear that how we attend to the body and its needs is not just a matter of individual well-being. It is also integral to the health of the body politic.