Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville

Abstract

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. She 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' labour union. Alison Kibler demonstrates that respectable women were key to vaudeville's success, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But, although theatre 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 behaviour. 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.