The Showgirls from Eltham, the Windmill Theatre and the V2 Rocket: One family’s experience as a window on aspects of interwar cultural life

Abstract

The journey of the Cooper family from small town New Zealand in the early 1920s to Sydney, and then to London, where they arrived in May 1935, provides a frame to look at aspects of social change in the interwar period. Their story, which sees the two daughters of the family appearing in the risqué nude revues at London's Windmill Theatre in the early years of the Second World War, could be viewed as exotic and atypical but does provide a vehicle to look at aspects of cultural change and media influence during a time when “modern women understood self-display to be part of the quest for mobility, self-determination, and sexual identity"¹

^{1 Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman:Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.29. Conorargues that the importance of the association of feminine visibility with agency cannot be overestimated.}