This lively, engaging book explores how women were depicted in the antebellum American theatre during the period when the entertainment industry was taking shape and the first women's rights movement emerged. Through a series of vivid biographical sketches of female performers and managers, Faye Dudden provides new insights into the way that women became products in the entertainment marketplace even as they sought increasing freedom in their everyday world.

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this?

Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.