Happy Birthday to comedian and actor Jackie “Moms” Mabley (b. March 19, 1897, in Brevard, NC), whose cutting-edge comedic work critiqued the unfair expectations placed on women in American society. For example, one of her recurring bits showcased her fictional marriage as a teenager to an elderly man. Her professional rise from early-twentieth century vaudeville to selling out the Apollo Theater in the 1960s shows the breadth and spectacular rise of Black women’s twentieth-century professional success. While Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and others awed audiences with their vocals, Mabley brought joy and laughter to eager crowds. Historian Katelyn Hale Wood argues that by adopting the persona of “Moms,” which she based on her maternal grandmother, Mabley burse through both racial and gender barriers. Indeed, “The persona of Moms allowed Mabley to perform alone and outside the confines of sexually exploitative expectations placed upon many other Black female performers of her time.”
Citations: H. Alexander Welcome, “Our Bodies for Ourselves: Lithe Phenomenal Bodies in the Stand-up of Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley,” Black Women, Gender + Families 4, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 87-88, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.4.1.0087; Katelyn Hale Wood, “Laughter in the Archives: Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley and the Haunted Diva,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 85, 89, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.1.3.0085; “Advertisement for Jackie Mabley, Funniest Woman in America, in playbill for the Apollo Theater,” playbill advertisement (New York, N.Y., c. 1940s), https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e3378680-836c-0130-01a5-58d385a7b928.
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