The photographer is unknown. B aby Dolls are groups of women and men who costume in frilly bonnets and short skirts with bloomers on Mardi Gras day in New Orleans. Baby Dolls are thought to have emerged around among prostitutes in the segregated red-light district of New Orleans known as Uptown or Black Storyville.
The downtown district was solely reserved for white patrons, though the prostitutes were either white or of lighter-skinned mixed racial ethnicity. While the inhabitants of Black Storyville faced an existence fraught with police harassment, theft, violence, and poverty, their milieu was rich in the African American vernacular culture of music, dance, costuming, and parading. Groups of friends or work associates regularly formed social aid and pleasure clubs whereby members supported each other in hard times and planned recreational and leisure events to have a good time.
It was during these good times that they could show off their talents for dancing and dressing lavishly—most commonly in street parades accompanied by brass bands. It was also a social climate in which musicians, performers, and informal clubs enjoyed competing against each other in terms of costume, musical virtuosity, and dancing ability.
The Baby Doll masking tradition emerged from this cultural mix. The exact origins of the Baby Dolls are not known. One oral history attributes the start to a rivalry between a group of women who worked in Black Storyville and those who worked in Storyville. The rivalry stemmed from differences among black women in terms of their skin color, religion, and relative privilege of working in a legal district Storyville versus those who worked in the Black district, whose legality was held in abeyance, whose skin color may have been darker, and whose religion may not have been steeped in Creole Catholicism.
This group—led by Beatrice Hill, Leona Tate, and Althea Brown—decided that each masked woman should have fifty dollars in her garter and be ready to confront her rivals. After parading through the city as a walking group and entertaining Mardi Gras revelers with their bawdy dancing and ribald songs, the women met their opponents in Sam Bonart Park. They challenged their competitors in both costuming and display of such masculine-appropriated behavior as smoking cigars, boastful confrontations, and throwing money at male onlookers.
