Striptease: The Untold History Of The Girlie Show

Rating:
Summary: The Whole History of an American Art Form
Review: It would be hard to think of a topic that was less likely for academic research than striptease. Full of fanciful characters, unlikely stories of origins, and tall tales, the world of the stripper has not been seriously documented, and yet the career of stripping is one full of questions about the place of women in society, exploitation of workers, and the old fascination of watching women take their clothes off. In _Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show_ (from the less-than-salacious Oxford University Press), Rachel Shteir, a professor of theater, has produced a big, thorough book for which she has dug into newspaper and legal records all over the country, and also into such resources as the Sally Rand Archives in Chicago and the Gypsy Rose Lee papers in New York. There are illustrations here, some of them pretty, none of them scandalous, and Shteir's tone throughout is a serious one, although there is plenty of bounce in the subject and much good humor quoted from many of the people profiled here. It is an authoritative tome on what many would consider a frivolous or even offensive topic, and has much to tell us about the relationships between the sexes.

Much of this history has to do with the Minsky family in their Lower East Side theater, who parodied Ziegfeld and brought the girls to working class audiences. The Minskys were responsible for many innovations in burlesque. They introduced many comic and slapstick acts, and boosted ticket prices. They didn't mind offending the censorious, and they were willing to break the law for publicity purposes. They introduced the runway, the extension of the stage that enabled a performer to remain onstage but to penetrate into the eager and enthusiastic audience; the runway was named by an appreciative wit the "Bridge of Thighs". The Minskys enjoyed titling their productions in jubilantly obscene ways, as they brought out _The Sway of All Flesh_, _Panties Inferno_, and _Dress Takes a Holiday_. debuted Gypsy Rose Lee in 1931, and she graduated into Ziegfeld a few years later. She was the most famous stripper in history, and gets a full and fascinating chapter here. Because she had more than just her looks going for her, she stretched her career into a third decade and wrote best-selling mysteries and stories for _The New Yorker_. Her memoirs were turned into the Broadway musical _Gypsy_ in 1959. Shteir works on the premise that stripping enabled women to work in a particular field, to develop themselves artistically, and to harness a sexuality that men would pay for. Maybe stripping was a blow for feminine power, but sometimes it was just survival. Carrie Finnell, whose "Educated Bosom" premiered the twirling of tassels, said, "I ain't in it for glory, I want to eat."

Stripping is not dead, but it has well passed its heyday. Among the many reasons which Shteir cites for its decline is urban renewal, which took away many of even the most famous burlesque houses. Others became adult film venues, first showing films of famous strippers in their routines, to go along with the on-stage acts, and then just showing regular adult fare. The visibility of broader expanses of skin in routine situations has made a difference; the Frenchman who invented the bikini had to hire a stripper to model his invention, since no professional model would do so, but of course bikinis (and less) can be seen on beaches the world over now. Most importantly, performances featuring nudity became just women without clothes, simply appearing topless in go-go bars. The fun, parody, and eroticism of the tease was gone. Striptease was an influential movement, and Shteir quotes such authors as Jean Cocteau and e. e. cummings who had much to say on the stripper's art. (At one point, however, she muses, "Perhaps it is absurd to bring Samuel Beckett into a discussion of striptease at all. And yet.... ) Shteir's book is therefore a memorial, a fine documentation of a way of entertainment that has had its day.