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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.
A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker
lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American
man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images
appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the
early twentieth century. In this provocative study, M. Alison
Kibler uncovers, for the first time, powerful and concurrent
campaigns by Irish, Jewish and African Americans against racial
ridicule in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Censoring Racial Ridicule explores how Irish, Jewish, and African
American groups of the era resisted harmful representations in
popular culture by lobbying behind the scenes, boycotting
particular acts, and staging theater riots. Kibler demonstrates
that these groups' tactics evolved and diverged over time, with
some continuing to pursue street protest while others sought
redress through new censorship laws. Exploring the relationship
between free expression, democracy, and equality in America, Kibler
shows that the Irish, Jewish, and African American campaigns
against racial ridicule are at the roots of contemporary debates
over hate speech.
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