Afterword

Abstract

When Olive Logan asked the public to consider the “nude woman question” in the mid-nineteenth century, it is doubtful even she could have predicted how culturally entrenched the issue would become. In July 2003, more than 100 years after Anthony Comstock’s rhetorical rant, “Why is it that every public play must have a naked woman?,”² the New York Times’ Jesse Green remarked: “These days, there’s always some excuse for nakedness onstage.”³ The institutionalization of fleshly display in American popular entertainment is an old story, yet what seems peculiar is that there remains, after 150 or so years of staged female nudity, a taut cultural tension between display and morality necessitating “some excuse.”

“I dont know what’ll come next, but there will be girls in it. There always is girls”

Boston Herald, 1919¹