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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
On the night of 7 June 1861, at a playhouse in Albany, New York, actress Adah Isaacs Menken, on horseback, wearing nothing but a fleshcolored bodystocking, galloped up a stage mountain into theatrical history. The combination of danger and nudity shocked and excited her Victorian audience. In an age when women swathed themselves in yards of crinoline, her performance proved scandalous; critics agreed that, though she wore “pink fleshings,” she so explicitly revealed the female form that she might as well have been naked. One reviewer warned that “no pure youth could witness her performance and come away untainted. Naturally, such cautions increased curiosity; soon Menken became the most notorious, highest paid actress of her day. She toured with her show Mazeppa through the northeast, the American west, and the capitals of Europe before succumbing to cancer a short seven years later in Paris.
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14 Two orthographic curiosities deserve mention. First, at the end of the name “McCord” in die Census, there appears what might be taken for the letter e. Indeed, the Index for the 1850 U. S. Federal Census for Louisiana notes that McCorde is an alternate spelling of McCord. However, in the present instance, most other names on the page also possess a terminal flourish, indicating that this apparent e is no more than a recorder's decorative curlicue. Second, the index, compiled as an aid to genealogical research in the present century, contains the names only of the head of each household and that of the first child whose last name is different from that of the head. Ada appears in the index, but incorrectly listed as Adam C. McCorde. The actual census records reveal that the compiler of the index mistook a flourish at the end of the final a in Ada for an m. The column in the census denoting sex identifies the child as female. This indexing oversight may in part account for the failure of the other researchers to discover Menken's identity.
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16 Ibid.
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