Madame Rentz's Female Minstrels was a

blackface Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by non-Black people to portray a caricature of a Black person. In the United States, the practice became common during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of racial stereo ...

minstrel A minstrel was an entertainer, initially in medieval Europe. It originally described any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool; later, from the sixteenth century, it came to mean a specialist entertainer who ...

troupe composed completely of women. M. B. Leavitt founded the company in 1870. Unlike mainstream minstrelsy at the time, Leavitt's cast was entirely made up of women, whose primary role was to showcase their scantily clad bodies and tights, not the traditional role of comedy routines or song and dance numbers. The women still performed a basic minstrel show, but they added new pieces that titillated the audience. John E. Henshaw, who began his career as a stage hand with Madame Rentz's Female Minstrels, recalled,

"In
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, we had advertised that we were going to put on the can-can. Mabel Santley did this number and when the music came to the dum-de-dum, she raised her foot just about twelve inches; whereupon the entire audience hollored 'Whooooo!' It set them crazy." Sobel, Bernard (1956). ''A Pictorial History of Burlesque'', 45-6. Quoted in Toll 138.

The company was a success, and by 1871, at least eleven rival troupes of female minstrels had sprung up, one of which did away with blackface altogether. This movement eventually gave rise to the "girlie show".

Notes

References

*Toll, Robert C. (1974). ''Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-century America''. New York: Oxford University Press. {{authority control Organizations established in 1870 Blackface minstrel troupes American comedy troupes