Burlesque, Showgirls, and Hollywood Actresses Compiled Scrapbook of Women Entertainers before the Sexual Revolution, 1950s

Burlesque Women in Entertainment

Ephemera

Women in American entertainment scrapbook, primarily 1950s, documenting the public beauty, sexuality, celebrity, and performing identities of burlesque dancers, pinup models, actresses, and other women whose images circulated widely in postwar popular culture. The compiler places women from burlesque, Hollywood, modeling, nightclub performance, and glamour photography, emphasizing the female performer as both entertainer and object of fascination during a decade often associated with more restrictive ideals of domestic femininity. Striptease figures including Gypsy Rose Lee, Ann Corio, Margie Hart, Lush Thrush, and Earl Moran pinups, as well as more prominent Hollywood figures such as Jane Russell, Rita Hayworth, and Veronica Lake, connects the scrapbook to overlapping worlds of striptease, film, theatrical performance, publicity, and pinup culture. Its concentration on women displaying their bodies through costume, movement, pose, and theatrical persona places the album within the cultural prehistory of the sexual liberation associated with the 1960s, when changing attitudes toward contraception, obscenity, female desire, and women's autonomy increasingly challenged older limits on public expressions of sexuality.

Scrapbook containing over 75 printed photographic and illustrated clippings on 18 large pages, approximately 9 x 12 inches, primarily 1950s, in cord bound red board covers. The pages contain magazine and newspaper photographs of women in bathing suits, evening gowns, lingerie, theatrical costumes, dance attire, and elaborate burlesque dress, ranging from formal Hollywood to stage performances and photographs emphasizing dance, costume, legs, and the body in motion. Burlesque and nightclub imagery includes feathered costumes, revealing stage dress, comic and theatrical routines, and performers photographed in settings that present sexuality as part of professional entertainment rather than private life; other pages move into film publicity, glamour portraiture, fashion, and models posed for the mass market. Several leaves arrange multiple images of a single woman, creating small visual dossiers on individual performers, while full page clippings give others the scale of magazine features. A handwritten index at the front organizes the contents by performer and page, The index turns the scrapbook into an organized record of female entertainers, including famous Hollywodd stars but also many lesser know Burlesque and nightclub entertainers.

The scrapbook was created at a transitional point in American sexual culture. Striptease had become the defining element of twentieth century American burlesque, producing nationally recognizable performers such as Gypsy Rose Lee and Ann Corio, while Hollywood publicity departments, illustrated magazines, and pinup photography carried related forms of stylized female sexuality into a much larger audience. The women gathered here therefore occupy different positions within the entertainment economy, from actresses whose glamour images accompanied mainstream film careers to performers whose professional identities depended directly on bodily display, costume, teasing revelation, and control of an audience's gaze. Their proximity within one album records how thoroughly these forms had begun to overlap before the social transformations of the 1960s gave female sexual autonomy a more explicit political and cultural vocabulary. Some toning to the scrapbook leaves with scattered edge wear, small tears, and chipping; covers rubbed and worn at extremities, with binding cord retained. Overall good condition. A concentrated record of 1950s popular culture celebrating women as entertainers, glamour figures, and erotic performers at the threshold of the changes in female sexuality and public self presentation that would become increasingly visible during.

Item #23756

Price: $685.00