The Barrison Sisters were a risqué Vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 act who performed in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 from about 1891 to 1900, advertised as The Wickedest Girls In the World.

Lona (Abelone Maria), Sophia, Inger, Olga and Gertrude Barrison were actual sisters (many "sister" acts in Vaudeville were not) of Danish-German descent. Along with their mother, the five sisters immigrated to America from Denmark in 1886, joining their father, who had taken the journey earlier. Lona Barrison, the oldest of the sisters had had 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 New York. Later on, she was joined by her siblings. Originally called Bareisen, they anglicized their surname, thus becoming the Barrison Sisters. The five blond and curlyhaired siblings were said to sing in high squeaky voices and dance with middling ability. They achieved notoriety, however, by ingenious use of double entendre

Double entendre

A double entendre or adianoeta is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Often the first meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is less so: often risqué or ironic....

s on stage.

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

Pussy

Pussy is an English word meaning:* Cat* The human female genitalia, for the slang term related to genital anatomy.* Pejoratively, cowardice or weakness as an insult in general- Etymology :The origins of the word are unknown...

?" 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

Kitten

A kitten is a juvenile domesticated cat.The young of big cats are called cubs rather than kittens. Either term may be used for the young of smaller wild felids such as ocelots, caracals, and lynx, but "kitten" is usually more common for these species....

 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

Machinson Sisters

The Machinson Sisters were an early 20th century Vaudeville act originating in England. Their most famous performance was heavily influenced by an early similar act by the notorious Barrison Sisters...

. The Barrison Sisters broke up around the turn of the century, 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. She was the last to die—in 1946 in Copenhagen.

External links

• The Old Spice Girls by Richard Smithson
• Text of one of their performances