30. Women Performers
Women Lecturers Take on Men
Five-to-ten percent of professional lantern performers were women lecturers. In addition to Katherine Bowden, discussed earlier, one of the most outstanding was Annie Peck, seen in a 1908 advertisement for her lecture at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn.
Peck was a classics professor at Smith College, and the first to climb several major mountains in South America. At one point she climbed with a wooden face mask to protect herself, on which she drew an outlandish mustache to poke fun at her male competitors. See her show here.
A 1906 ad in Talent, tells us that Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard presents, “her thrilling story in an exceedingly vivid and dramatic manner, illustrating it with many stereopticon views of the grand Labrador scenery. . . Her youth, her slender and graceful figure, and the delicacy of her features are in striking contrast to the arduous and daring nature of [her] great undertaking.”
Archival Notes
Breed Wields a Single-Hair Brush