Editing Isadora Duncan (section)

== Early life ==
Angela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, [[mining engineering|mining engineer]] and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922). Her brothers were [[Augustin Duncan]] and [[Raymond Duncan (dancer)|Raymond Duncan]];<ref name="Jowitt1989" /> her sister, [[Elizabeth Duncan (dancer)|Elizabeth Duncan]], was also a [[dance]]r.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/agc1996000096/PP/|title=Elizabeth Duncan dancer|last=Genthe|first=Arnold (photographer)|website=Library of Congress|access-date=2017-10-07}}</ref><ref name="KarinaKant2004">{{cite book|author1=Lilian Karina|author2=Marion Kant|title=Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=N8f_bKK2fnEC&pg=PA11|date=January 2004|publisher=Berghahn Books|isbn=978-1-57181-688-7|pages=11}}</ref> Soon after Isadora's birth, her father was investigated and charged following the collapse of the family’s bank, which coincided with a larger reorganization of San Francisco’s finances, a period of crushing reversals and closing of silver mines.<ref name=":4">{{Cite book |last=Kurth |first=Peter |title=Isadora: A Sensational Life |publisher=Little Brown |year=2001 |isbn=978-0316057134 |pages=11-13}}</ref> Although the jury voted for his acquittal,<ref name=":4" /> Isadora's mother (angered over his infidelities as well as the financial scandal) divorced him, and from then on the family struggled with poverty.<ref name="Jowitt1989">{{cite book|author=Deborah Jowitt|title=Time and the Dancing Image|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uaECpiO__W8C&pg=PA75|year=1989|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-06627-4|pages=75}}</ref> Joseph Duncan, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in 1898 when the British passenger steamer [[SS Mohegan|SS ''Mohegan'']] ran aground off the coast of [[Cornwall]].<ref>Ean Wood, ''Headlong Through Life: The Story of Isadora Duncan'' (2006), p. 27: "They...would all be drowned, along with 104 others, when the S.S. Mohegan, en route from London to New York, ran aground on the Manacle Rocks off Falmouth, in Cornwall."</ref>

After her parents' divorce,<ref name=":3">Duncan (1927), p. 17<!-- Sources disagree, but her autobiography states "my mother had divorced my father when I was a babe in arms". --></ref> Isadora's mother moved with her family to [[Oakland, California]], where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher. Isadora attended school from the ages of six to ten, but she dropped out, having found it constricting. She and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children.<ref name="Jowitt1989" />

In 1896, Duncan became part of [[Augustin Daly]]'s theater company in New York, but she soon became disillusioned with the form and craved a different environment with less of a hierarchy.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/internationalenc0000unse_q4s8|title=International encyclopedia of dance : a project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc.|date=2004|publisher=Oxford University Press|others=Cohen, Selma Jeanne, 1920–2005., Dance Perspectives Foundation.|isbn=978-0-19-517369-7|edition=1st paperback|location=New York|oclc=57374499|url-access=registration}}</ref>