Jumping Through Hoops

The fascinating story of how nineteenth-century circus women performed impossible feats and changed American culture.

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 circus women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top.

Author Biography

Betsy Golden Kellem is a scholar of the unusual. Her writing on circus and entertainment history has appeared in venues including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Public Domain Review, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, and Slate. A board member of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, Betsy is an Emmy winner for her Showman’s Shorts video series on P. T. Barnum. She is a columnist for JSTOR Daily and regularly teaches and speaks for academia and industry. If you ask nicely, she will juggle knives for you. She lives in North Haven, Connecticut.