Electric Girls | The Body Electric

The introduction of illuminated balletgirls has greatly added to the attractions of the spectacular stage. Girls with electric lights on their foreheads and batteries concealed in the recesses of their clothing first made their appearance a year ago… reads a New York Times article. It’s 26th of April 1884, Wednesday and on the fourth page of the newspaper is featured an article with the strange title [even for nowadays, exotic for these times] Electric Girls counting 719 words, describing some new elegant and apparently trendy, eccentric practice of hiring ‘illuminated girls’ dressed in filament lamps for everyday use from dusk till midnight - or as much later as may be desired, to luminate a dinner, to help the troubled by the flicker of his gas light student in his studies and so on. Marriage of techno-progress and male fantasy, a spectacular retro-futuristic vision, although probably strange to today’s social standards, bearing also the heavy symbolic meaning of female-as-divine-light.

Read the full original article here. Useful references/resources [a.k.a. further reading] here and here.

Check also citations [137] and [137-138] of the book
When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Marvin

[137] {tesla, electricity, tesla coil, performance} Tesla was well known for a visually spectacular trick of passing hundreds of thousands of volts through his body “while flames flashed from his limbs and fingertips” by means of a special induction coil named for him.

[137-138] {electric girl lighting company, female, gender, body, electricity, clothing, wearable, 1884, 1840s, tesla} In 1884 the Electric Girl Lighing Comapny offered to supply “illuminated girls” for indoor occasions. Young women hired to perform as hostesses and serving girls while decked with filament lamps were advertised to prospective customers as “girls of fifty-candle power each in quantities to suit householders.”

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