Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show - Softcover

In her book Striptease, Rachel Shteir, a professor of theater at DePaul University, traces the history of striptease and poses serious feminist questions about its meanings. As one element of American popular entertainment, striptease combined "sexual display and parodic humor." It offended moralists because of its unashamed exploitation of the naked female body, but it was also playful, innovative and funny, spoofing sexuality and celebrating female independence. Shteir discovered the girlie show as an academic subject when she was a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, and she has continued intensive research in the Sally Rand Archives in Chicago, the Harold Minsky Collection in Las Vegas and the Gypsy Rose Lee papers in New York. Her book is packed with historical detail and contemporary feminist insights.

Shteir argues that American attitudes toward nudity were always different from European ones. The zaftig British Blondes, a burlesque troupe, shocked America with their display of legs when they toured in 1868, and the bigger the blonde, the more shocking and sexy the display. In 1899, Billy Watson, manager of another troupe called the Beef Trust, bragged that all his performers weighed more than 200 pounds. In France, women posing naked were a staple feature of entertainment, and the Lido Club and the Folies Bergères specialized in elaborate tableaux of showgirls; even a few years ago, the Lido offered a spectacular version of the wreck of the Hindenburg -- in the nude. With the public's fascination with the figure of Salome, whether in Strauss's opera, Wilde's play, Nazimova's silent film or Maud Allen's exotic dance, "Salomania" spread from Europe to America, where it even afflicted respectable New York matrons; everyone wanted to see the vengeful New Woman take off her seven veils. Fanny Brice did a Yiddish parody of the craze in Irving Berlin's "Sadie Salome Go Home."

But striptease -- women undressing on stage, with an element of withholding, coyness, seduction and advertising -- was, as Shteir notes, a "distinctly American diversion that flourished from the Jazz Age to the era of the Sexual Revolution." Impresario Florenz Ziegfeld first Americanized the French follies, with elaborate vaudeville production numbers starring dozens of identical-looking, scantily dressed chorus girls. Ziegfeld's motto -- "Glorifying the American Girl" -- was reinforced by his introduction of a male singer who serenaded the parading beauties with songs like "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody."

The Minsky family, in their Lower East Side Winter Garden theater, parodied and democratized Ziegfeld. Presenting themselves as "The Poor Man's Ziegfeld," they featured slapstick comedy and attracted Jewish and other immigrant audiences to taste the forbidden fruit of what one Yiddish poet called "living shikses" who "dance and prance." During World War I, a Ziegfeld girl added a touch of patriotism by posing naked as the Statue of Liberty, "doing her duty for the American troops."

Stripping and teasing, as well as dancing and prancing, began in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, when black performers became famous for doing the shimmy. Later Sally Rand pioneered a kind of naked ballet behind huge feathery fans, or opaque balloons representing soap bubbles; Fanny Brice parodied her as the Russian Countess Dubinsky, "now working for Minsky." Gypsy Rose Lee made stripping stylish, literary and sophisticated, with her witty song for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936: "Now a strip-teaser's education/ requires years of concentration," including studies in art history, classical ballet and anthropology. Making fun of herself helped Lee become the first striptease star and the "Dorothy Parker of burlesque." By the 1940s, she was writing short stories for the New Yorker.

By the 1950s, striptease had become a favorite subject of male intellectuals, especially in France. In Paris, the Crazy Horse Saloon sent up both American culture and striptease style, while French philosophers such as Roland Barthes considered its mythic significance. The combination of academic interest and relaxed sexual standards may have been the double whammy that finally killed off striptease and burlesque as subversive forms of entertainment. Today Victoria's Secret ads feature pole dancers, porn stars write how-to books, and the Chippendales male strippers perform at bridal showers.

Happily, Shteir's book provides a record of the golden age of American striptease, and she gives a persuasive account of its democratic verve and feminist appeal. Striptease, Shteir argues, "gave women a chance to realize the American dream" and a way to "overcome their working-class origins and make it." Both flaunting sexuality and making fun of it, the girlie show found an irreverent way to educate Americans about sex. Shteir's scholarly and very entertaining book is part of that great tradition.

Reviewed by Elaine Showalter
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