Who Wasn't in the Audience JAMES COOK: There's still a strong
anti-theatrical prejudice that carries over from older
suspicions about the theater from the Puritans and from Quakers,
and so the people who go to the theater in the 1830s-1840s in
places like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, tended to be men.
Women were allowed in the theater, but usually only with male
escorts. Children are largely excluded from the theater, it's
not as much of a family kind of entertainment. And so, you would
get young apprentices and journeymen, these teenage boys who
work in artisan workshops, showing up in the cheap seats in the
upper galleries of the theater, but not fully respectable
middle-class families. When women go to the theater in the
1830s-1840s, it's usually only accompanied by respectable men,
and when women show up on their own, they're viewed with a great
deal of suspicion, as if they're probably prostitutes. And
prostitution was really an accepted part of theater in urban
settings in the 1830s-1840s, confined u