Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show

by Rachel Shteir

Book Overview

The fascinating, untold story of the history of undressing: over fifty years of taking it off. Striptease combined sexual display and parody, cool eros and wisecracking Bacchanalian humor. Striptease could be savage, patriotic, irreverent, vulgar, sophisticated, sentimental, and subversive--sometimes, all at once. In this vital cultural history, Rachel Shteir traces the ribald art from its nineteenth century vaudeville roots, through its long and...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195127501
• ISBN13: 9780195127508
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 9.2" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A "Highbrow" look at a "Lowbrow" art form.

This book really started my serious fascination with Burlesque Striptease. It truly deserves status as an art form. Shteir has broken it down and explained the history of the style from its inception, in a studied and reverant way. If you really seek a firm understanding of the history of this art form (perhaps to better appreciate the burlesque revival we are currently experiencing) this is a wonderful book for you. Ladies will enjoy the astute feminist take on the topic, as well as the empowered women of the Burlesque world. Gentlemen with likely appreciate the eye-candy, as well as the vintage element of the tease--buy a copy, and tell prospective girlfriends that you are "...so tired of explicit internet images..."

dazzling work of non-fiction

i have to say i totally disagree with some of the reviews on this site. this is a really interesting, ambitious book on for the most part previously unwritten about subject. it's not a reported book, but rather an old-fashioned work of history written by an enthusiast. it synthesizes and enormous amount of information and writes about the performers in a tender and engaging way. unlike some of the schlocky, sentimental books that have appeared on the subject from the 1930's on forward--some of them written by strippers, others by burlesque impresarios--this book is up to something else. it tries to put striptease into historical context, comparing it to other genres of american popular entertainment, talking about the women's lives and careers, their choices and performances. it covers the most important period in burlesque. if the book is sometimes uneven in its writing and documentation, it makes up for that with its clear observations. i reccommend it highly. fiona cointreau, pittsburgh, pa

the pleasures of looking

Shteir's book is a masterpiece of the art of description. She's terrific at taking you to bygone places. She relishes surfaces, and there's something to be said for that (as her own philosophy of the "tease" would indicate). She belongs to a great tradition of women essayists writing about pop culture-Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, even Virginia Woolf, whose essay "Street Haunting," with its shopping pleasures, comes to mind. This book should be enticing to anyone interested in the art of the essay-as well as the art of striptease.

A Tribute in Loving Detail

Rachel Shteir's "Striptease: the Untold History of the Girlie Show" is an avuncular, entertaining chronicle of the Golden and Silver Ages of burlesque, mostly in America, with a little European voyage thrown in. Shteir writes about this world with a good deal of knowledge and sensitivity to the female performers and male impresarios who lived in it. Her range is impressive and the colloquial, yet witty writing style keeps you interested. If it sometimes seems like there is too much detail to take in all at once, well, that should just be credited to Shteir's ambition to tell the whole story. All of the other extant histories are not really deserving of their name, but are partial memoirs, soggy retellings of the same myths that everyone knows from musicals like "Gypsy" or films like "The Night They Raided Minskys."

The Whole History of an American Art Form

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 beca