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Article Excerpt
IN THE DECADES AFTER WORLD WAR II, the port city of Vancouver, British Columbia, emerged as a top-drawer commercial hotbed of "bump and grind" for locals and tourists alike. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, independently owned and operated nightclubs created an abundance of jobs for female striptease dancers and staff. However, business outsiders commonly held that striptease lured and hooked uneducated, unemployable, unskilled home wreckers, drug addicts, and prostitutes. In effect, moral and legal regulation by state and extra-state agents administered the "second oldest profession" (1) as a deviant, abnormal occupation for women, with significant material and discursive effects (see Corrigan and Sayer, 1985; Valverde and Weir, 1988; Brock, 2003). Applying Erving Goffman's insights (1963: 3-4), striptease dancers were attributed "undesired differentness," discounted, and accorded discreditable status. Absent from Canada Census employment figures, disqualified as "real" workers, and stigmatized as immoral and subversive, professional erotic dancers have largely escaped the focus of feminist sociologists and labour historians (for exceptions, see Scott, 1996; Jarrett, 1997; Lewis, 2000; Liepe-Levinson, 2002; Bruckert, 2002; Shteir, 2004). (2)
In this paper, I examine attempts made by Vancouver-based striptease dancers to agitate for union representation during the industry's "golden era"--a period of considerable growth and stability in the business after the demise of classical burlesque in the 1950s and prior to the advent of table dancing, lap dancing, stage fees, and the shift from stripping as entertainment to stripping as deskilled service work in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing from archival data and in-depth interviews conducted between 1999 and 2004, (3) I am inspired by Dorothy E. Smith (1987) to foreground the narratives of striptease dancers as the expert practitioners of their own lives. In the context of stepped-up public sector union activism by women across Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, some Vancouver-based dancers instigated spirited, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to organize. Interviews with retired dancers, club owners and booking agents reveal sizeable stumbling blocks to dancers' union formation.
Women Make Waves in Unions Countrywide
While 29.5% of women were employed in the Canadian labour force in 1961, this figure jumped to 50% in 1981. And while only 16% of women were unionized in 1961, 30% had achieved union representation by 1981 (Department of Labour Canada, 1965; Statistics Canada, 1971). As Linda Briskin discovered, between 1965 and 1980 the number of women unionists across Canada increased by 219% (1983: 34). Female employees gained union leadership as municipal, provincial and federal government workers (CUPE) in 1963, public service workers (PSAC) in 1966, postal workers (CUPW) in 1967, and B.C. government employees (BCGEU) in 1973 (see White, 1980; 1993a; 1993b; Briskin, 1983; Briskin and McDermott, 1993). Other female-dominated, public sector unions formed in Vancouver, including, in 1972, the Association of University and College Employees and the Service, Office, and Retail Workers Union of Canada (Griffin and Lockhart, 2002: 155). In addition, emboldened by second-wave women's liberation, women workers won the right to form caucuses within unions, for example, the Status of Women Committee in the B.C. Federation of Teachers in 1973, and the B.C. Government Employees' Union in 1975 (Griffin and Lockhart, 2002: 157). However, femme workers were concentrated in the largely private sectors of sales, service and clerical--61.4% in 1981, with a lowly 11% rate of unionization in personal/business services (White, 1993a: 48). Striptease dancers were part of the expanding service sector, but on the periphery, uncounted, and in the shadows.
Professional Stripteasers in a Small, Transient Labour Force
Striptease dancers across Canada and the U.S.A. belonged to a feisty tradition of showgirls in a business more notorious for the glamour of becoming a star than for cutting-edge health and safety standards (Mizejewski, 1999; Sochen, 1999). In 1967, according to an anonymous report in the Vancouver Sun, "three fully clothed topless dancers" staged a two-night-long picket at the Shanghai Junk in the city's East End, near Chinatown (Anonymous, 1967a: 17). Pearl Johnson, Betty Franklin, and Grace Jones demanded higher wages, staff privileges, discounts on food, and a dressing room heater. They had plans to organize dancers at six other nightclubs, but a day later they settled for cheaper meals, a heater, and the same wages (Anonymous, 1967b: 19). A central difficulty facing all dancers was participation in a small, transient and mobile work force. From top-drawer headliners to "B-level" second-stringers to "novelties," dancers toured for a living and regularly crossed the (permeable) U.S.A./Canada border on a transnational West Coast circuit. Throughout the 1960s, Vancouver's small, downscale East End nightclubs specialized in line-ups of imported "exotics," often women of colour, while the city's large, deluxe West End supper clubs became a favourite Canadian destination for White American striptease queens, including Tempest Storm, Evelyn West, Gypsy Rose Lee and Ricki Covette.
When Vancouver-based dancers joined the industry in the 1960s, they became self-supporting, migrant labourers whose travel and performance schedules meant they were on the move for weeks and months at a time. Dancers joined a diverse coterie of entertainers--musicians, comedians, actors, figure skaters, circus performers, golfers, tennis and hockey players--contracted to perform in towns and cities far from home (Ross, 2006). Touring schedules were both flexible and gruelling. While many dancers enjoyed the adventure of travel, the grind was not easily sustained, especially for those ambivalent about committing to career development. As Foxy Lady put it, "Some dancers were just waiting to meet Mr. Right and get married to a guy with lots of money" (Foxy Lady: Interview, 2000).
Typically, five to eight dancers shared a daily/nightly workplace: they performed on stage, one at a time, and they were spread out across nightclubs in the lower mainland and hotels throughout B.C. Similar to garment workers doing piecework at home (Tate, 1994; Johnson, 1982), seasonal farmworkers, and live-in domestic workers isolated from one another (Epstein, 1983; Macklin, 1994), dancers not only moved in and out of the business, they were physically separated from one another. Unlike waitresses who leveraged a tight-knit work culture and occupational pride into unionization for a quarter of the trade in the U.S. during the 1950s (Cobble, 1991: 60), dancers' lack of daily contact at a shared worksite--what Julie White terms "job fragmentation" (1980: 46)--forestalled pro-union consciousness. In fact, the overall rate of unionization in Canadian workplaces...
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