The creation by P.T. Barnum of the Circassian women archetype was the dime museum and sideshow’s earliest purely sexual performance piece.
Supposed to be from Circassia, a district now encompassing parts of The Republic of Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, the women wore frizzy afros, were said to have skin that was “rosy pale” or “translucent white” epitomizing the Western white ideal of feminine beauty.
Their sexuality was tied up in notions of white slavery, the exoticism of the Orient, and supposed scientific racial superiority.
Barnum first displayed a “Circassian Beauty” at his American Museum in 1864. Barnum’s first “Circassian” was Zalumma Agra
Barnum wrote to his agent in Europe, requesting he purchase a beautiful Circassian slave girl to exhibit, or find one that would look the part. That said, Zalumma Agra, followed by Zoe Meleke, were decided local women made exotic by costume and hairstyle and given a spurious history of sexual slavery.
Actual women from Circassian were captured for sexual slavery in the harems of the Islamic Middle East from the 5th Century until the 20th-century. In the Middle Ages Black Sea slave traders bought slaves from a number of different ethnic groups in the Caucasus, such as Abkhazians, Mingrelians and Circassians.
The Circassian Woman phenomenon, as an act and performance, continued in the sideshow up until the 1970s, at some point in the 1910s rebranding the genre as Moss-Haired Women. (to be continued)
