Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Gender and American Culture) - Softcover

Kibler, M. Alison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807848123 ISBN 13: 9780807848128

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999

Synopsis

A disrobing acrobat, a female Hamlet, and a tuba-playing labor activist--all these women come to life in Rank Ladies. In this comprehensive study of women in vaudeville, Alison Kibler reveals how female performers, patrons, and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century.
Kibler focuses on the role of gender in struggles over whether high or low culture would reign in vaudeville, examining women's performances and careers in vaudeville, their status in the expanding vaudeville audience, and their activity in the vaudevillians' labor union. Respectable women were a key to vaudeville's success, she says, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But although theater managers publicly celebrated the cultural uplift of vaudeville and its popularity among women, in reality their houses were often hostile both to female performers and to female patrons and home to women who challenged conventional understandings of respectable behavior. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville and were implicated in broader attacks on mass culture as well.

About this title

Book Description

"By addressing issues of gender, class, and ethnicity, Rank Ladies reveals an interesting interpretation of vaudeville's role in the development of mass entertainment, and highlights the centrality of gender to social changes around the turn of the century."-- American Studies

From the Inside Flap

An illuminating study of vaudeville, this book shows how women?as performers, patrons, and workers?influenced its rise and fall as America·s favorite form of live entertainment.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0807848123
• ISBN 13: 9780807848128
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288