Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558613447
Publication date: 06-10-25

Jumping Through Hoops reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; and Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public at a time when “respectable” women were mostly confined to their homes.

Betsy Golden Kellem deftly explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy “mud shows” to a major international business, these extraordinary women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top.

“Jumping Through Hoops is the definitive history of women in the circus. Betsy Golden Kellem is the perfect guide to this fabulous, forgotten world of snake charmers, strongwomen, wire walkers, magicians, lion trainers, and beauty queens. A joy to read!” —Debby Applegate, author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age

“This landmark book carves out new possibilities for what words like circus and women could possibly signify. The death-defying act that Jumping Through Hoops performs is reaching back to rewrite our understanding of culture and gender in our own times. A must-read.” —Caroline Hagood, author of Weird Girls

“The history of the circus and its community is a powerful lens through which one can learn about shifting cultural values. By giving new recognition to these entertainment celebrities of the nineteenth century, Betsy Golden Kellem has also documented a period of social change in which women increasingly expanded their realms of experience beyond the home, to places as extreme as the top of a tent or the mouth of a cannon!” —Jennifer Lemmer Posey, Tibbals Curator of Circus at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art