The Barrison Sisters were a risqué

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...

act which performed in the United States and Europe from about 1893 to 1897; in the United States they were advertised as ''The Wickedest Girls in the World''.

Origin

Lona (Abelone Maria, 1871–1939), Olga (Hansine Johanne, 1875–1908), Sophia (Sofie Kathrine Theodora, 1877–1906), Inger (Inger Marie, 1878–1918), and Gertrude (Gertrud Marie, 1881–1946) Barrison were actual sisters (many "sister" vaudeville acts were not) of Danish-German descent. The five sisters were all born in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

, Denmark. Along with their mother, the sisters emigrated to the United States in 1886, joining their father, who had earlier made the same journey. Lona Barrison, the oldest of the sisters, had a fleeting theatre experience in Copenhagen as a young girl, and it was she who initially gravitated towards the theatre scene after the family settled in Manhattan, New York City. Later on, she was joined by her siblings. Originally called Bareisen, they anglicized their surname, thus becoming the Barrison Sisters. The five blond and curly-haired siblings were said to sing in high squeaky voices and dance with middling ability. They achieved notoriety, however, by ingenious use of

double entendre A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially ...

s on stage. Actress

Pearl Eytinge Pearl Eytinge (''née'' Wyckoff; 1854–1914) was a New York-born actress, author, producer, playwright and activist who once said "There is no vice on earth of which I have not partaken". Her addiction to drink and drugs ended her stage career ...

initially produced them and wrote a comedietta for them called ''Mr Cupid''. Her manager, Danish-born William (Wilhelm Ludvig) Fleron (1858–1935), took over the management of the sisters and married Lona in 1893.

Most famous act

In their most famous act, the sisters would dance, raising their skirts slightly above their knees, and ask the audience, "Would you like to see my pussy?" When they had coaxed the audience into an enthusiastic response, they would raise up their skirts, revealing that each sister was wearing underwear of their own manufacture that had a live kitten secured over the crotch. After their success in Europe in the mid-1890s, scores of troupes purporting to be "sisters" followed in their footsteps, among them the British Machinson Sisters. The Barrison Sisters broke up in 1897, but both Gertrude and Lona went on to have successful solo careers on the stage. Gertrude, the youngest and perhaps most talented of them all, became a groundbreaking modern dancer in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, where she lived for two decades, married to Carl Hollitzer (separated in 1910), a renowned Austrian painter. She was the last to die—in 1946 in Copenhagen.

Renewed attention

The Barrison Sisters came to renewed public attention in the first decade of the 21st century when they were featured on the label of Five Wives Vodka, produced by Ogden's Own Distillery in Utah; the vodka was initially rejected for sale in the adjacent

control state Alcoholic beverage control states, generally called control states, less often ABC states, are 17 states in the United States that, as of 2016, have state monopoly over the wholesaling or retailing of some or all categories of alcoholic beverag ...

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyomi ...

, an action for which the Idaho State Liquor Division was later awarded a 2013 Muzzles Award by the

Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted solely to the defense of the First Amendment rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and of the press. The center was founded in 1989, un ...

. A Danish book about the phenomenon was published in 2020. It won the Danish annual history book award for 2020.

References

External links

{{commons category, Barrison Sisters
The Old Spice Girls
by Richard Smithson
Text of one of their performances
Vaudeville performers Danish emigrants to the United States People from Copenhagen Sibling performing groups