Tightropes and High Hopes: Managing Celebrity Identity Then (1900s) and Now (2000s)

Recent Super Bowl performer Beyonce seems to be running the world, not because she is a girl, but also because she's (almost) mastered the ability to carefully manage her public identity.   Hailed in the scholarly media sphere as both genius and successful at fending off celebrity magazines taking photos of her cellulite or spinning stories about her marriage, Beyonce has carefully created tools that reveal her “true” self before the threatening hands of celebrity gossip creators get a hold of her. 

In April 2012, for example, she released her own tumblr (her first major involvement with social media) on which she posted pictures taken by herself and Jay-Z (her husband)—intimate shots on vacation and small, yet seemingly profound, moments in B’s life.  Fans went crazy for the tumblr.  (Really, check it out!)  Even more strategically, Beyonce recently released a self-created, directed, and written documentary about herself for HBO, “revealing” the “true” story of her life.  Although the documentary was criticized for being a bit boring and surely self-abosorbed (but, really, what do people expect from an autobiographical documentary?), both it and the tumblr attest to Beyonce’s ability to carefully manage and strategically mobilizes a particular kind of image of her self, one that we surely know isn’t necessarily “real,” but we still, nonetheless, take as more real than her on-stage alter-ego Sasha Fierce. 

Beyonce managing her celebrity identity in an interview with Oprah.

Beyonce is time and time again hailed for her revolutionary way of publicly presenting herself.  It’s not hard to see her genius if we compare her to, say, Britney Spears and the head-shaving incident that was not carefully managed.  BUT maybe B isn’t that revolutionary if we compare her to the leading women of the Jewish immigrant worker activists (1900-1965), given celebrity status because of their leadership during the working-class women’s labor movement. 

Rose Schneiderman,  Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman, unlike Beyonce, didn’t have a hired publicity team.  They carefully managed their identities solely on their own, stepping on soap boxes, eschewing solely homelife in favor of an activist-motherhood lifestyle, and relentlessly maneuvering themselves in a patriarchal, capitalist, racist system that continually rendered them powerless. 

In Common Sense and a Little Fire, Annelise Orleck digs deep into both the public and private lives of Schneiderman, Cohn, Shavelson, and Newman, telling us stories about their lives instead of an historical account of the movement.  Constantly having to represent their causes and be heard in an environment that muted women’s voices, the women were scrutinized in the public eye, and they knew this.  As a result, they regulated themselves accordingly, always thinking about how they presented themselves would affect the movement’s potential for success and their leadership within that movement. 

Orleck, in two particular occasions, describes the women as walking an identity tightrope: “Schneiderman was…walking the tightrope between class and gender politics…militancy and respectability” (265); “Newman walked an identity tightrope.  By day she had to mold herself to the gruff, emotional Jewish workingman’s world…At night she had to blend into the more polished upper-class feminine style” (311).  Here, I take identity tightrope to mean a thin, intensely wobbly line, that these women had to unrelentingly try to carry themselves on, for with one wrong move, they could fall off of it, symbolically negating all the hard work they had done to revolutionize gender politics and working women’s lives. 

Pauline Newman managing her identity in the spotlight of the press.

While Beyonce is applauded time and time again for having a paid entourage help her to navigate the modern-day celebrity identity tightrope, these 1900s activist women are surely not given enough credit for walking an even more unstable (and longer) tightrope in their day, by themselves.  They had no private life to protect, like B does, because their private life was political and automatically public. 

While we’re busy flipping our hand back and forth singing about being a single lady, these four intelligent and courageous women were actually being single ladies, sacrificing a more self-fulfilling, selfish identity for one that would move a greater cause. And the fact that we can even dance to Beyonce's music is in part due to these 1900s celebrity activist women. If we hail B, we must infinitely more so hail these women for their ability to manage their celebrity, and their selves, in such an intricate and careful way so as never to fall off their tightropes (which Common Sense and a Little Fire should more explicitly state and devote more time to). It's not just our social movements that have an inherited history, it's also our (female) celebrity culture that has one too, and not necessarily from the places we would commonly think.

Beyonce has a net under her tightrope that’s made of millions of dollar bills—these women didn’t.