The latest episode of FX’s “The New York Times Presents” tells the story of singer Britney Spears and the legal control her father, Jamie Spears, has had over her personal and professional decisions and finances. “Framing Britney Spears” shows how this conservatorship, initially a temporary measure set up in 2008 in the wake of a mental health crisis, has lasted over a decade. For the past two years, fans have increasingly joined a #FreeBritney movement galvanizing public opinion in support of the singer’s legal battle to end her father’s role in her conservatorship.
Spears, however, is not the first woman performer to confront such a situation. For centuries, women’s stage careers were their family’s business. Before modern reforms like child labor regulations, women’s property laws and no-fault divorce, the careers of women and girls were governed by parents and husbands. Some women fought back, seeking control over their livelihoods, celebrity and personal lives, with varying degrees of success. Their struggles show that an industry and legal culture that privileged parents’ and husbands’ conceptions of women’s and girls’ professional interests has long thrived in the United States.
In the early 1800s, children and women were the legal property of the family patriarch. Social norms about women’s domestic roles and social subordination further reinforced men’s authority in family decisions, as did limited wage-earning opportunities for women.
Actresses were in a unique position in America’s early labor market because they were some of the highest-earning women workers. In the early 19th century, tours by English and European stars helped to make stage performers some of the most visible and celebrated female public figures. Tours took them through northeastern cities, reaching west and south by mid-century. Some of their most popular roles were in melodramas featuring cautionary tales of good and evil, celebrating feminine virtue and sacrifice while punishing vice.
Still, popularity did not necessarily result in greater autonomy. Theater managers hired family groups — usually married couples and their children who performed in the stock company. They contracted with parents, usually fathers, or husbands to engage starring women.
A burgeoning celebrity culture also held women entertainers to narrow standards, especially when it came to respectability. Until mid-century, theaters were male-dominated spaces known for drinking, rowdy socializing and sexual solicitation. Though actresses were not viewed as sex workers, the theater was seen as morally compromising. As a result, actresses were expected to demonstrate hyper-respectability in their private lives. For most, this involved marriage to another performer if they planned to remain in the business. Before marriage, they worked and toured with a parent or older companion. This was a matter of safety as much as social propriety.
For example, English actress Amelia Holman was trained for the stage by her mother and began acting under her father’s direction in her early teens. In 1812, Holman traveled with her father to the United States, one of the early touring stars. She began earning the equivalent of $3,000 a night touring. However, under the principles of coverture, her father controlled her career and earnings. A contemporary recalled he was “severe” and “almost cruel” to Amelia in his manner and expectations. The pressure “wearied” her.
In 1815, Holman married musician Charles Gilfert. Recently 21 years old, she no longer needed parental consent. But when she married, Holman’s earnings became her husband’s property — and vulnerable to his debts.
Gilfert was a profligate gambler and alcoholic. A year into her marriage, Holman sought support from her father in a suit to secure “pecuniary provision” from the “income and profits of her profession as a Theatrical Actress.” The result was an indenture for which her father was trustee, which removed her income from her husband’s control and protected it from his debts.
Even as she sought to protect her earnings, her career trajectory remained tied to her father and husband and their professional decisions. Holman no longer toured as she did before her marriage — perhaps a welcome change — but instead headlined the stock company in her father’s theater, and later in theaters her husband managed.
When her father died in 1817, it was Charles Gilfert, not Amelia, who became the heir and executor of his estate. She obtained a new trustee to protect her earnings from her husband’s debts even as Gilfert moved into theater management. This protection extended as long as he lived. When he died in 1829, she inherited her husband’s debts. She died penniless of an unknown illness four years later.
Fanny Kemble’s career was also shaped by her family. Though Kemble came from an established family of actors, her parents did not intend her for the stage — until financial crisis struck. After becoming bankrupt from managing the Covent Garden Theatre, her father removed 20-year-old Fanny from boarding school to prepare her for a London debut.
In her published memoirs, she expressed the dream of becoming a writer. Instead, in 1832, she traveled with her father to “dreadful America,” where full houses restored her father’s fortunes. The “poet-actress” was especially popular with girls and women, who read her verses, purchased her portraits and followed accounts of her tour.
This scrutiny wore down Kemble, and she despaired of her lack of privacy. After two years of touring, she was anxious to retire and found an avenue through marriage to Georgia scion Pierce Butler. Unfortunately, her husband moved to control his wife’s daily life. After the scandalous publication of her journals from her American tour, he forbade her from continuing to publish. While he could limit her career, she could do nothing about his work, which horrified her: the enslavement of hundreds of African Americans in his Georgia labor camps.
Kemble was influenced by emerging companionate ideals of marriage and the burgeoning women’s rights movement, which attacked sexual double standards, lack of economic opportunities for women and the legal injustices of coverture. Under extreme duress she left her husband to live with friends. She sought evidence of his adultery, hoping to obtain a divorce. But it was Butler who filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, seeking full custody of their daughters.
In the proceedings, Butler viciously attacked his wife’s character, arguing that she had failed in her duties as a wife and blaming her career as an actress. In the end, he retained primary custody of their children — the norm in 19th-century divorce settlements — and she returned to her career as a performer to support herself.
Today men continue to serve as major gatekeepers in the entertainment industry, and Britney Spears’s circumstances expose the extremes to which this control still persists legally.
For the #FreeBritney movement, Jamie Spears’s actions violated expectations that women in entertainment should be able to make personal and professional decisions for themselves consonant with their stature as celebrities. In this way, #FreeBritney reveals the limits of women’s celebrity power — in courts, in production rooms and in media scrutiny.
While fathers and husbands no longer expect to direct women’s careers, women entertainers continue to navigate an industry that infantilizes them while subjecting them to narrow, and often contradictory, gendered standards.