| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals, and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915. By Andrew L. Erdman. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. x, 198 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-7864-1827-3.)

At the turn of the twentieth century, American vaudeville developed into the nation's first mass entertainment industry by virtue of its leading entrepreneurs successfully claiming for it a moral purity akin to the cleanliness associated with nationally branded products. But vaudeville's close link with mass consumer industries was also manifest in its sexual objectification of women as desirable commodities, a phenomenon that tended to undercut its vaunted purity. Such are the paradoxical main arguments in Andrew L. Erdman's provocative book. He acknowledges this paradox but misses many historiographical and historical contexts that would help make sense of vaudeville's cultural ambiguities.

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