Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

Self-proclaimed “high-class stripper” Gypsy Rose Lee, one of the most famous burlesque entertainers of her day and a pioneer of the striptease, was also known to be a leftist and friend of labor. Often heard speaking at local union meetings, she was one of the only female members of the short-lived Burlesque Artists’ Association and helped orchestrate a three-day strike that shut down several New York City theaters in 1935. When the Minsky Brothers’ theater locked out its stagehands for asking for higher wages, Lee rallied two hundred burlesque dancers in a solidarity picket outside the theater. “Gypsy called out to the theater and asked for some pickets,” remembered former “burlesque striptease artist” Red Tova Halem. “All of us strippers put robes on over our G-strings” and “paraded outside the theater flashing passersby and shouting, ‘Don’t go in there, boys!” The strike was settled that night, and the stagehands got their raise. Halem, a Jewish woman whose high earnings as a stripper enabled her to help thirteen of her relatives escape Nazi Germany, later went on to work alongside legendary ILWU leader Harry Bridges and serve as a delegate for the Culinary Workers Local 923.